Utterly perplexed

I heard the Chief Minister's summing up speech in the States of the debate on the committee of inquiry report and I have to say I am totally perplexed.


After decades of abuse of children in care as evidenced in the report the  proposal is to have a  a new Children's Commissioner, set up yet more panels and boards of States members and produce a new strategy document.  That's it.  More talking shops, more bits of paper, one person - a  Children's Commissioner - to change everything!




According to some this is the most damning report from an inquiry they have seen.  With the exception of the Connetable of St John who argued against one item, no one contested the Chief Minister's prescription of signing up to all the recommendations.  Yet many of those same recommendations are exactly the opposite of the States policy and the programme of the Council of Ministers since ministerial government started.  Overnight they collectively volte face and start being the best to implement policies that last month they collectively opposed?


We now have ministers in the CoM who opposed the very set up of the committee of enquiry, ministers who opposed the creation of a Children's Minister in 2009. We have ministers who have derailed or opposed every significant move to reform the States who are now it seems going to support the exhortation in the report to adopt Clothier and Carswell.  Ministers who have spent a decade or more in the Assembly gleefully pushing every opportunity to adopt laws facilitating the finance industry are overnight going to now prioritise social justice measures as the report indicates. 

To quote Jim Royle ,  My Arse!



Where else in the world would you receive such a damning report and wake up the day after a debate on it to find exactly the same ministers and assistant ministers in office. No one accountable, no one taking responsibility in any way that matters.


The Chief Minister quoted Deputy Bree in saying something like nothing can be the same again.  To me it looks like if you are in the magic circle everything is still exactly the same.


Plus ça change.....

Don't talk to me about....

Today I had one of those uncommon confluences of seemingly disparate items that spurred me into writing this piece. Oddly it started with me wanting to post something in agreement with a short paragraph in the speech CM Gorst gave to the IoD on the 8^th December. You can read the entire item at http://www.gov.je/News/Speeches/ChiefMinisters/Pages/InstituteofDirectors2015.aspx

The excerpt that caught me eye was paragraph/sentence 7 “Globally,  the population is increasing, economic power is shifting and concerns are growing over climate change and future food, energy and water security “. I concur. I said so repeatedly on the senatorial election hustings in 2008 and especially in 2011. In politics as in investing there is a world of difference between being right and being right on time. Nevertheless it has to be said the CM has grasped something very important. The question is what we do about it? But that is not where I want to go today.

Annually we have a social survey in the Island. It one of our few good sources of opinion in that it takes a relatively large sample, meaning the results should be pretty reliable. The latest one is out now at http://www.gov.je/Government/JerseyWorld/StatisticsUnit/PeopleCommunities/Pages/Socialstatistics.aspx Dismay hardly describes my feelings on seeing the chart at figure 6.4 :

If 60% do not think they have much if any influence over Jersey, who does have influence? Is it any wonder our election turnouts are so embarrassingly low? I do not propose to go into any detail about solutions here, but I will give a couple of exemplars as to the nature of the problem.

Recently the JEP have been running pieces on what various States members have achieved in their year since the elections. Again I'll eschew the opportunity for some humour at their expense. I want to go back the senatorial hustings at the RJAHS. Everyone of the successful candidates said they supported local organic growing when pressed, except arguably the now Chief Minister. So what have they done, these independent candidates? Has any of them bought a proposition, or even questions on the organic sector and its obvious decline locally?? Has any of them written to organic farmers to find out what is needed? Have they been in contact with the Jersey Organic Association about the problems? I can be pretty confident the answer is no, they have not actually done anything conspicuous. So what was the value of those repeated pledges at the hustings?

It was in trying to post a response (positively!) on twitter about the Chief Minister's speech I mentioned above that I discovered the Assistant Minister for digital etc had blocked me. I was somewhat surprised – I have been following him on twitter a number of years, and yes I do challenge some things he posts, but equally I often retweet his occasional blog posts too. For those who don't know twitter, it allows one to post short items and to choose who to follow ie whose postings you get to see. You can block someone from seeing your posts. The only reason I can see for doing that rather than simply unfollowing is to stop them being able to respond to your posts.

If I had to guess I would say the issue arose from a comment I made on another site about the senators recent posting on innovation see https://blog.gov.je/2015/11/20/action-on-innovation/ .  He had my hackles up before the end of the first sentence “Innovation is about dreaming up great ideas that change the world “ Simply not so, on so many counts. The piece is written from a very narrow and partial view of what innovation is and what it delivers. 

Perhaps the assistant minister knows more about it than I having spent less than a year in office, but it seems unlikely. I was there at the first AI blossoming, I worked for commercial research groups and centres for several years as the programme coordinator of the postgraduate training partnership with Cranfield University. I've been involved in patent battles (proving prior art), two trade sales of tech businesses I part owned, I was even an external supervisor for a couple of PhD students (one on multidimensional project management representation, the other on the application of AI to water asset management). While writing up my own thesis I was engaged as one of two people to set up and run what was them the largest medial trial database in Europe (100,000 cohort colorectal cancer study). My mate Dave and I set up one of the first commercial web sites in the UK, to support our SF and book trading business, before E-bay existed and EPOS software was available to us. Oh yes and I managed and co-owned a software house that grew in 5 years from a 4 person team to being bought out by one of our customers for several million pounds. That's just the software side for starters.

Really I am not bothered that the assistant minister blocks me. There are plenty of people about who will willingly tell him want he wants to hear. What scientists learn early on is that it is your critics and detractors that are your best friends in getting to the truth, the best explanation/model/solution.  Sycophants are of no assistance

Software projects can fail on the misplacement of a single punctuation mark in hundreds of lines of code. (It makes writing for people such a delight, thye being much more forgiving of my typing !) Miss-stated requirements and unacknowledged assumptions are usually catastrophic to projects. Opinion and theory count for little against delivering something that works. My best advice to anyone dealing with innovation and digital work is that practitioners are well accustomed to hearing & ignoring B/S and bluster. If you don't know your stuff, you'd be best to say nothing at all.

The Chief Minister designate and the environment.

Sometimes it is what isn't said that tells you most about what is happening.  Read the Chief Minister designate's piece from the order paper for tomorrow's States  sitting at http://www.statesassembly.gov.je/AssemblyOrderPapers/2014/2014.11.03%20Order%20Paper.pdf.

If you want the key highlight, or is that lowlight?, I have written a short letter as Chair of the Jersey Climate Action Network to send to all the new Ststes members.  The second paragraph reads
 

In the Chief Minister designate's statement on the order paper for 

tomorrow's States meeting the word environment does not appear 

once in ten pages. Neither does climate. Sustainable does appear 

twice :

page 3 sustainable job opportunities 

 

page 5 for sustainable growth.   

That's it folks.  The environment, ecology, sustainability (in the real meaning - 'sustainble growth' is a contradiction) have no significant place in the next 3.5 years in policy in Jersey.

The only question we need ask is whether we take that lying down, or to paraphrase  Shakespear, in Hamlet

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?  To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks.