Back to Jersey – and Back to the Blogosphere

Clameur de Haro found it a stimulating and rewarding experience living and working again in the Far East for the past few months: but with his last-ever overseas assignment having come to an end, and now lately arrived back on the Blessed Rock for good, he feels it’s time to pick up once again the reins of rightwards-inclined posting, to balance a little the local blogosphere’s majority leftward slant.

So, catching up, to what extent have the numerous undesirable features of the Island’s politico-economic landscape which CdeH hitherto railed against improved in his absence? And despite keeping intermittently in touch with events from afar, what does CdeH find on his return the land of his birthright?

Many of the answers, sadly, are not encouraging.

A still-bloated public sector, where spending appears predominantly out of control, where budgetary discipline seems lax or non-existent, and where sufficient determination to tackle either to the large extent actually necessary (as opposed to some cosmetic tinkering at the margins) looks less likely than snowdrifts in August.

Terry the Taxer and Ozo the Bozo purporting to direct an economic strategy which announced an appallingly cynical curtailment of front-line patient services and public facilities, but retracted immediately when objections were made – if cuts were (wrongly) thought necessary in the first place, why were they not defended robustly, however unjustifiable they were? And their cohorts and satraps already musing about raising indirect tax rates.

A government which almost certainly will have neither the vision nor the courage to go through with implementing much-needed staffing cuts, an absolute pay freeze, and pensions reform in public sector employment, nor any inclination to contemplate shrinking the size of the state by withdrawing from activities better undertaken by private enterprise.

A policing function with an effectiveness reportedly all but paralysed by internal strife, but still retaining the ability to commit the unbelievably ham-fisted bungling of what ought to have been a low-key routine investigation, thereby giving that malignant pipsqueak Syvret a golden opportunity to revel in his much-loved but self-proclaimed martyr status.

How depressing too, to see that the vast majority of the local politics blogs remain firmly anchored at the left-green end of the spectrum: some still obsessing, ostrich-like, with conspiracy theories about cover-ups or justice-denial to the exclusion of all else (and goodness knows, there’s no shortage of other things to get worked up about in this mis-governed island), while others continue to proselytize pernicious eco-authoritarian greenery.

At least Ratleskutle, Tony’s Musings, and Jersey 24/7 are still out there, providing a bit of much-needed wider variety of subject-matter.

So Clameur de Haro looks forward to a resumption of both promoting the alternative free-market and liberal prescriptions of a smaller state, reduced public spending, lower taxes and enhanced individual freedoms, and rebutting the authoritarian collectivist fallacies peddled by the pink leftists and their green fascist allies of convenience. Just as a taster for the latter, CdeH spied, on his pre-departure sojourn in a certain Far East airport, this entertaining piece in the Jakarta Globe about a ceiling collapse in a virtually new school building in Cirebon, West Java. Do, please, note the last sentence –

“Dedi Windiagiri, the head of the Cirebon school board, denied that the contractor was to blame. Climate change, he said, was the true cause of the accident.”

Really, you couldn’t make it up, could you? Ridiculous? Of course. But as an example of the fundamental dishonesty of so many genuflectors before the altar of the green religion, and their desire desperation to attribute any misfortune at all, whatever its cause, to the great holy mantra of climate change, regrettably not untypical.

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