Manx democracy, a contradictatorship interned

If you owe your Manx political appointment to an unelected cabal in another country, shouldn't you have the common decency to butt out of the democratic process?
I only ask because of this pseudo-political slide back to the Middle Ages (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/time-limit-experiment-approved-1-6512103 ), which I could not point out here at the time because I was too busy elsewhere to go into it.
The key point is that:
“At the July sitting, statements and moving a report will be limited to 20 minutes while moving any other motion will be limited to 15 minutes.

Speaking to a motion or amendment will be restricted to 10 minutes while contributions at Question Time should be no longer than five minutes. Tynwald president Clare Christian will have discretion to allocate additional time on request.”

Media presentation and discussion of the matter nicely avoids the problem: which is that the real work in the movement of any parliamentary bill is done in the committees.

Membership of both those committees and the various government departments is not determined by merit, suitable professional or other background or other common-sensical principles. It is, in reality, determined by a vague and shadowy system of patronage.

If your face fits – with both senior political and civil service figures – you might just be allowed a place. If you are totally unsuitable (semi-literate, disinterested, too wrapped up in your day job to turn up except when needed to vote) you are even more likely to get in, because you won't be in the way when special interest groups want something that is definitely not in the general public's interest.

This leaves short spaces in the discussion of clauses (providing this hasn't already been delegated to a committee) and third and final reading of bills where any MHK (if fortunate enough to be forewarned and even luckier enough to catch the Speaker's eye) can jump up, ask questions or point out anomalies. That few minutes is the last precious remains of democracy in the Manx political process, and this nasty little move almost strangles it.

If I was in a mood to joke, it would be tempting to ask, could sermons be limited by law in the same way?

But far more importantly – who put the freeloading carbuncle up to it? Because it certainly was not his initiative, which suggests that somewhere in the murky depths of Legislative Council or the Council of Ministers a deal was done to nod through public funds the Church wants but should not be getting, in return for something that a loathsome floater in one of those bodies needs so that the Manx business community is not inconvenienced by democracy or common decency and that community, in return, finds a nice non-executive board place for a soon-to-retire politician or civil service executive.

Watch the Manx business pages after the next election, or the next round of civil service retirements, and you will find the answer. Those pages are just a joke, read by nobody outside the business community that provides acres of dull (and free) copy, so those that do feel so far above public scrutiny to bother hiding the connection.

No sense, no taste

We were at the Isle of Man Festival of Food and Drink yesterday. 

I have to say, it’s good to see the Manx government do something right. In this case, assemble some of the worst things about the island in one place, fence it off, and then make the public pay to go in. At £5 a pop that puts off all but the hardened masochists.

Seriously though, much of the food was, frankly, a bit naff, though as I had to drive the family home afterwards to shop for real food I never visited the beer tent. For no charge (if you really wanted to) you could find the same vendors at any local event with stalls, or for a quid or so towards fixing the church roof or providing wells to African kids find a better selection of homemade produce at any charity fayre.

Yes, seriously, I would rather pay a token amount to a church whose beliefs I don’t share than hand over yet more money to the government for them to try and interest us yet again in publicly subsidised local produce that few of us really like and many of us cannot afford. As someone who is, of necessity, on a healthy diet I also have to point out that even moderate regular amounts of most of the food on offer would, far from improving your health, kill you quicker than smoking,  most of the illegal substances government health workers tell us to avoid and any of the currently legal ones they would like to be illegal in future.

Funny old world, isn't it?

Another thing that worries me – why did Living Hell seem to get a free pass to abuse small kids under the pretence of providing a crèche? When organisations like the Children’s Centre are also getting heavy public subsidies why weren’t they there instead? 
Another case of parents who can (and must) do, non-parents who can’t (or just shouldn’t) get paid by government to preach? 

Half-baked

For all the guff put out by the Department of Economic Development’s PR merchants, sometimes a genuine picture of Manx understanding of the business world emerges.

For example when you read at

http://www.isleofman.com/news/details/57803/minister-blasts-tesco-for-not-supporting-manx-food that ‘The environment, food and agriculture minister has blasted the store Tesco for only supporting Manx food, "when they can make money out of it".’

But isn’t the basic idea of a business to make money? If a business does not make a profit from goods supplied to carry out the business, how long can it stay in business?

Unlike the Manx government, Tesco cannot obtain their funds from money the public has no choice but to stump up. Also unlike the Manx government, Tesco cannot pay farmers not to grow stuff, or businesses to produce stuff that nobody wants or can afford.

So what next?

Well, I guess that will be the inevitable sneering and finger-pointing from middle-income public sector workers (with jobs for life, however inefficient  they are at doing them) at the unemployed and low paid who buy the food they can afford, rather than whatever Sunday supplement foodie airheads say is healthy or right-on this week.

Because, yes, there’s a serious point (and serious political decisions) to be made about sustainable food production, but it certainly is not made here, and Manx politicians who are busily blaming the dispossessed for failing to stand on their own feet (when those politicians were the ones who whipped away the rug in the first place) show no inclination towards solving real problems, rather than whipping up fantasy ones to complain about.

Those real problems are (1) how do we ensure that what is rapidly becoming a Manx underclass (too young or old to work or semi-unemployable if they are of reasonable working age) can be healthily fed in the long term (as opposed to eating pure stodge now) and (2) how do we ensure a locally produced food supply which will get us through in the unlikely but still possible case that all outside supplies fail? 

Neither are being seriously addressed, and even if the Manx government ever consider question 2 seriously I would take bets they dare not consider the more important first question.

Meanwhile (and until they are ready to do the same) maybe they could have the decency to stop knocking efficient businesses for doing what it says on the tin.

It's a myth story

I see from the local pseudo-media (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/57597/heritage-centre-explores-history-of-the-north ) that the Ramsey Heritage Centre is now “officially” open.

Apart from being untrue (it has hardly ever been open to the public since the first time a local dignitary opened it, and hardly ever will be) this begs a question. Why bother taking away a perfectly good contemporary community facility in order to build a mausoleum based on some ageing Rotarian’s Prozac-addled vision of what it used to be?

The excuse is that it will be a tourist attraction and an educational facility. Totally untrue on both counts.

If there was ever a market for this (and current thinking is that it vanished in the mid 1990’s) it was the Woopy (‘well off older person’). Under current economic conditions that market is deader than the dodo.

With final salary pensions gone for most and pension values decimated the only older people well off enough to visit the Isle of Man are also able to, say, cruise down the Rhine or go on photo-safaris in South Africa. Why would they visit ‘heritage exhibitions’ of communities which, by their greed, they played a major part in destroying?

To gloat? Even geriatric Thatcherites aren’t that sick!

Most will be familiar with the saying “history is written by the victors” (which implies that such history is somewhat subjective). The heritage industry, in comparison, is market-driven history written for the losers. It would not exist unless some bean-counter had calculated that enough losers would pay to view exhibitions portraying a somewhat sepia-tinted vision of past communities which misdirect the blame for their demise onto outside elements (venal foreign manufacturers and evil multinationals, etc. etc.). This is just so much bunkum.

The irony is that the vanished Ramsey it mourns was destroyed by the plans of the very Rotarians and political interests which now proudly claim credit for the heritage centre. The terraced houses and small shops vanished to make way for the first multi-storey flats, intended not for locals but first as holiday flats for wealthy tourists (just as the price of jetting off to Greece or Spain tumbled and the traditional British seaside trade vanished), and then for retiring Brits who might like to escape from the dreary, overtaxed UK (but who quickly discovered that they could retire to sunny Spain for far less). The small shops vanished because government chose, instead of tax breaks or grants for refurbishment to local retailers, to give development grants and tax holidays to the offshore finance firms who are now ‘regrouping’ in other offshore locations when such cash incentives are gone and higher standards of financial supervision are being introduced.

It also has to be said that racism is a subtle undertone throughout the heritage industry. This is a ‘history’ favoured by dispossessed elderly white people because it turns on photographs of houses, streets and businesses in which no black faces are seen. It edits out Empire (except as a source of fortunes for enterprising white people or the cheap goods from the semi-slave conditions in the Empire country farms and factories they were enabled to run). It quietly misdirects the blame for the disappearance of such a mythical community onto the aggressive tactics of ‘foreign business interests’.

Most ironically, in modern Ramsey such elderly locals are not even cared for by their own families, but by carers from other countries. Because in reality the community and family values such exhibitions claim to celebrate and encourage do not exist now, any more than they did in the times of the sepia tinted photographs, and the conservative business and political interests which dismantle our current community while underwriting this myth factory must know that.

OK, OK, I'm back

I learnt recently that Positive Action Group have calculated that the Manx Government wastes (sorry ‘devotes’) between 60-90 minutes per year on formal prayers – and that’s not even including the bogus religious ceremony on Tynwald Day itself.
 Hmm!
It strikes me that according to your personal belief (or lack of it) this finding could lead to one of three conclusions.
Either….. Nobody’s there, so politicians should stop mucking about and get on with what we pay them to do.
 Or……… Somebody’s there, but doesn’t think it’s her/his job to sort out the mess Tynwald made, so politicians should stop mucking about and get on with what we pay them to do.
 Or….. Somebody’s there, takes pity on us poor Manx citizens and has been intervening to lessen the damage caused by government.
If that is the case, do you even dare imagine how bad things would be without divine intervention if we had to live with the full extent of political bungling?

Home affairs

I don’t usually bother with Manx online petitions as – to be blunt – they’re usually thrown up by racists or other redneck insomniacs intent on keeping themselves in unearned privileges and the rest of us hard at work to subsidise them.

Today I found an exception.

Laura Cull is a young ex-workmate of mine who I’ve watched go from clumsy school-leaver and drummer in a raw but energetic girl band to savvy IT worker and out lesbian. She was one of the first to enter a Manx Civil Partnership and is now finding out the hard way that 'equality' does not extend to housing rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Laura is fighting back with a petition to fully implement our 2010 Equality Act, and not just the parts that our politicians and our employers cannot avoid. You can support her, her partner and many others pondlife with powerful political friends can currently safely ignore with your signature at http://www.gopetition.co.uk/petitions/equality-act-2010-on-the-isle-of-man.html.

Do it now. Make our politicians and legislators do something for somebody other than themselves and their bad business associates.

Sark raving madness

Apologies for not posting recently, and further apologies in advance as I may not post much in coming weeks. Daytime reality, sadly, is getting in the way of my other interests.

But for now, this (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/hr/iomcs/isleofmancivilse.xml ) makes amusing reading to anyone who has been around offshore finance long enough to remember ‘the Sark Lark’.  

For those that don’t, it was a scam, ended around 2003 on ‘advice’ from the OECD Financial Action Task Force (see http://www.fatf-gafi.org/ ), whereby Sark residents were recruited to act as ‘directors’ and’ trustees’ of shady offshore structures. Not professionals with business qualifications or experience of, say, banking and trust management, mind you, but simple souls who could just about spell their own names, and not much else. To be fair, Sark wasn’t the only place this happened in the bad old days, and much of the recruiting was done by Manx outfits whose staff will have now retired – some from senior government posts and with honours from Her Maj.

Actually, that isn’t the only reason it makes amusing reading. For some time I’ve been following the civil war on Sark between the locals and two unpopular newcomers (who just happen to run a large bank).

Private Eye has carried some of the best stories, but http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/28/grandees-sarkees-channel-island-feud will give you a pretty good idea what Mr Kniveton is walking into. However, if you really want on-the-spot progress reports from a native, keep an eye on http://ebenezerlepage.blogspot.co.uk/ , where, somehow, I feel sure we will soon be reading a somewhat frank appraisal of his progress.  Meanwhile, if you’ve ever had dealings with Sark, take a read through to find what names behind the illegible scribbles on many a corporate document are doing since their old ‘business empires’ collapsed earlier this decade.