Thursday
Back in the olden days when I first started attending public meetings for Penguin News, it was immediately apparent that the most powerful lobbying group in the Islands, the Chamber of Commerce, essentially had the field to themselves. Indeed, election campaigns still have hustings just for them, which is such a weird thing for candidates to agree to.
So I was pleased to see the General Employees Union engaging in a recruitment drive. The benefits you receive for £2 a month are potentially life-altering, not just for the worker but for the culture of the Islands, which can only benefit from finding a better balance between the interests of capital and the rights of the individual. On issues such as the minimum wage, employment rights and tenant’s rights, the Falklands has fallen badly behind.
A strong union presence in the Islands does not have to mean confrontation. The union, I have no doubt, is not looking for an adversarial relationship with the Chamber. As a matter of fact a healthy union is good for business. The evidence is clear that complete dominance by moneyed interests is self-harming, with standards and productivity falling alongside the morale of the workforce. So, in joining the union you’re not just helping yourself, but the economy of the Islands as a whole. You might even argue it’s your civic duty.
Friday
One area the union article mentioned was housing. I think what bothers me about this is the way everyone pretends it’s some knotty and unsolvable problem. Perhaps it’s watching public figures pontificating on how they’d love to do something. Unfortunately and sadly and frustratingly they’re unable to help at all, they say, before returning to their own massive houses. Maybe it’s hearing vested interests opine on how landlords should be able to make a profit, on top of having tenants buy their houses for them, as if gouging the maximum possible price from desperate Islanders is a remotely respectable way to behave.
You might have seen the news on the fires in Los Angeles recently. With many citizens having seen everything they owned go up in flames, rental prices in the area rose by 124% as landlords responded to the increased demand. This might be nothing more than capitalism in action, but is it the behaviour of somebody you’d want to know?
What’s happening in the Falklands, in my view, is that obvious methods of controlling rents and housing Islanders are being ignored or ruled out because the people with money, otherwise known as the ones who matter, wouldn’t like it. And is that the way you want your government to run? Is that what you were after when you cast your vote last time out?
Monday
Talking of which, I was dismayed by the last issue’s story on the MLA debate over electricity cards. There was a discussion over reducing the price, but the vote on it split 4-4, so they ended up leaving it where it was. I know, it seems unbelievable that your MLAs voted to do f-all, but there it was in black and white.
We didn’t get too much detail beyond that, because it all took place in the closed section of the Standing Finance Committee. Therefore I’m not going to go on too much about the wrongs of maintaining what is effectively a regressive tax measure. I share the Chamber of Commerce view that the price should come down, though I would take issue with their assertion that businesses are forced to pass costs on to the consumer. Are you, guys? Are you really? Or do you just choose to?
Instead I want to talk briefly about secrecy. I understand the reasons for closed sections in some committees, and they are good and necessary. Others, not so much, and it is a mechanism that is massively overused and abused. Information that the public have every right to is withheld, often for reasons that amount to little more than ‘I’m in the secret club and you’re not’.
This becomes particularly egregious when it comes to information about your elected representatives. MLA Mark Pollard, to his credit, spoke to Penguin News and told them how he voted. Now, I think I could take a pretty good guess at which way everyone else on the assembly voted on this issue, and you probably could too. But we don’t know, do we? We’ll know only if they decide to tell us, and don’t you think that sort of information is important, when these people ask you to vote for them? For me, any MLA worth their salt should be perfectly happy, insistent even, on telling you how they voted on every issue, and furthermore they should tell us how everyone else voted as well. Why wouldn’t they?
It would mean a more educated electorate, and end dishonesty on the campaign trail, or at least provide explanations if members act differently to their candidate rhetoric. It seems strange, in fact, that nobody ever does this – is there some rule or agreement in place? Because whether it’s a rule or just a norm, a gentleman’s agreement that it’s just the sort of thing a chap doesn’t do, the voters have the right to know about that, too.
Tuesday
Perhaps it’s the new year blues, but the discourse dominating the UK’s news trumpets at the moment is especially exhausting. At the centre of it is the world’s richest man Elon Musk. Fresh from buying the US election for momentary BFF Donald Trump, the Musketeer turned his attention to British politics, bringing with him the full depth of his political wisdom, which can be summarised as you either agree with everything he says, or you are a paedophile with learning difficulties. Those are the two options; there is no grey area in the middle, wherein for instance you might disagree with him while being a paedophile with no learning difficulties. It’s all or nothing.
Musk has been using his considerable social media reach to dig up the story of the child trafficking ring that operated in Burnley, Rochdale and Rotherham a few years back. Although the scandal there was of abused working class children being ignored by authorities, including corrupt police officers, the angle right-wingers took is that authorities were afraid to prosecute because one particular group was made up of British-Asian men, and the police didn’t want to be called racist.
This should be a non-starter, really. Because historically, it hasn’t really been the police force’s main concern has it, not being called racist? You’d have to say that if this has been something they’ve been actively avoiding over the years, we could probably pronounce the scheme a failure by this stage. Furthermore, in general I am against claiming criminal activity is a genetic predisposition for a particular ethnic group. As a white male, this would leave me on the hook for quite a lot of misbehaviour, including inconsiderate driving, serial killing and genocide.
At a press conference, PM Keir Starmer decried the use of malicious misinformation to influence government policy, which is indeed corrosive and damaging. However the only way this messenger could be less suited to that message would be for Boris Johnson to join Starmer on stage for a rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Sweet Little Lies’. When you are engaged in a head-to-head bout with Johnson for the title of most mendacious public figure in British history, it’s rather undignified to start screeching when a bigger boy does it.
