Elections Review part 4 - Do we need the Senators after all?

I know there is at present a clarion call to bring back the Senators, but I think it must be resisted. I was myself a huge fan of the Senators, I looked upon their removal with dismay.... but then I started to look at how the arguments against their return stack up, and I have changed my mind.

A lot of the original rationale for the Senators has now been lost. We have 12 Senators because in the 1948 reforms, they replaced the 12 Jurats in the States. 

They were elected in alternate cycles, 6 every 6 years, on an island wide mandate, where Deputies were only elected for 3 years at a time. The plus was that they could provide an element of long term stability - the minus was that, once Ministerial Government came in, a Chief Minister could be elected mid-term and not face the electorate, which I don't think was healthy. 

Much has been made of the fact that John Le Fondre is the first Chief Minister to lose his seat in an  election, but both Senator Frank Walker and Senator Terry Le Sueur came in mid-term, and left the States at the end of the 3 year period, just at the point when they would have faced the electorate. I don't know how well they would have done, but Frank Walker came in 6th as Senator in 2002, and Terry Le Sueur 5th in 2005. Neither were poll-toppers, and given Terry Le Sueur's crass failure over Bill Ogley's golden handshake, and his attempt to derail the Care Inquiry completely, and his attempt to reduce the Millennium Park to a fraction of its size - he may well have lost his seat if he had faced that challenge. 

The Senators elections also always came before the Deputies, which was a good way for aspiring politicians to get publicity if they were to go on and stand as Deputies - a number did precisely that - and also a back door so that if ejected from the ranks of Senator they could creep back in as Deputies, having two bites of the cherry, and in some cases even getting their old Presidency back despite the Island wanting them out. The notion that they somehow represented the popular will was a nonsense - poll-toppers sometimes were relegated to the back benchers. Those who lost as Senators and returned as Deputies were not given lesser roles as a result, or even moved from unpopular portfolios.

The move to a single day election, and a 4 year election cycle, and a reduction of Senators to 8 meant there was a lot more risk involved for sitting Deputies aspiring to the rank of Senator. John Young failed to get re-elected and was in the political wilderness for four years. 

But it also encouraged all and sundry who had nothing to lose, and we had a number of candidates coming forward who had not the slightest chance of election - the eccentric, those who drank too much, the one who put a cardboard cut-out in his place at some hustings. They wanted their moment of fame, their chance of the limelight, even if it wasted everyone's time. At least once hustings were online on Youtube, you could fast forward past the boring bits!

So why still aspire to Senator? It was seen as a given, from the inception of Ministerial government, that the Chief Minister would be drawn from the ranks of the Senators, not the Deputies. So there were potentially just 8 candidates rather than a pool of 37 candidates. Excellent candidates would be out of the running just because they didn't have that title. An island wide vote of approval was prioritised  over excellence. Do we really want that again? 

An island wide vote also lent itself to a tendency to favour rural Parishes, so the representation of the Senators did not sit well with the demographic of Jersey. It gave a bias towards country over town, and a cadre of members who often became Ministers but had little understanding of the needs of St Helier. I remember well that Terry Le Sueur, as new Chief Minister, saying that he wanted a broader consensus - before nominating all the other Senators apart from Stuart Syvret to the posts of Ministers. If every there was rampant cronyism, that was during his tenure. That's what you get with less diversity.

More representation to urban districts - where more voters live - mean a more balanced representation, where we have people who understand the issues facing St Helier much better than someone living out in a comfortable house in the country. Yes, you have the extra votes, more votes - reduced to (mostly) 4 and a Constable (5) from 8 + 1 or 2 + Constable = 9 or 10, but the pool of choice is actually diminished island-wide. Look at the cheerful attempt to grab the People's Park as a hospital site.

Remember when the last Chief Minister (as Jersey came out of lockdown) had said that people could meet in a back garden if they had one, and expressed surprise that there might be houses where you have to go through the house to get to the back garden. Indeed the whole tenor of that period - if you are privileged enough to have a garden, you can sit out in lockdown, and later meet friends - ignored the unfairness to those cooped in flats. The same disconnection occurred when Christmas eve was ruled out for family, wholly ignoring the European diaspora for whom Christmas eve is as meaningful as Christmas day. The Chief Minister was not a bad person, by any means - he was (and is) a nice person, but coming from a rural enclave, he seemed oblivious to the needs of a good proportion of the population. Do we want a return to that?

A reduction of the districts to put back 8 Senators would mean the probable loss of a number of last placed candidates, who may have been ill-fitted to stand as Senators - Andy Howell in District  Stephen Ahier in District 4, David Warr in District 6, Karen Wilson in District 8, Rose Binet in District 9 - all of these were elected on a far wide and more representative demographic of the make up of the Island as a whole. An Island wide vote, although we were used to it, encouraged geographical detachment, and a more ungrounded, government, less representative of the whole island.

There's a way of looking at statistics called stratification. An opinion poll, however random it may be, may not have a demographic that represents the island well. It may be weighted in favour of men. It may more be people of a certain age. To get a better idea, what is called a stratified sample, is when you take those results and adjust them to compensate by the proportions there are in the census. So if a census gives, say, a 50-50 split between men and women, but the poll sampled has 70-30, you adjust the results proportionally so they match the census. That way you have a more balanced sample that better represents the island. The Island wide vote of Senators always tended to represent the figures before they had been adjusted. The new districts and loss of island wide vote mean we have a much more diverse representation. Isn't that a good thing? Hasn't everyone been praising it?

The move to districts has also led to less Deputies being elected unopposed, which is also surely a good thing. (I'll deal with NOTA in another post, but I think it was a brilliant idea). And it has meant more even representation, whereas a St Mary Deputy had an electorate barely half the size of the larger urban and semi-urban Parishes.

This new landscape seems strange to us because we are not used to it. The call for the return of the Senators appeals to the populist vote because the changes are so new. When Queen Elizabeth I fixed Anglicanism into what was seen as a muddle, neither one thing not the other, Catholic or Puritan, it seemed like a poor hybrid. It was not popular. And yet a generation or two later, it was seen as part of the fabric of the English church and society. 

Any seismic change always causes unrest, what Karl Popper called the "strain of civilisation". And has he warned there is always a tendency to seek security, a return to what is in fact a more closed and less open society, because that gives reassurance, and we all crave certainty. To give up without even giving the new arrangement time to bed down, seems to me to be, in the words of 1066 and all that, "a bad thing", and I hope that we can have at least some time before we meddle and make further changes.

Also to read:
Elections Review - Part 1: The Alliance Party is Over
https://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2022/06/elections-review-part-1-alliance-party.html
Elections Review - Part 2: Coalitions have a bad track record.

https://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2022/06/elections-review-part-2-coalitions-have.html

Elections Review - Part 3: Reforming Candidate Take-on

https://tonymusings.blogspot.com/2022/06/elections-review-part-3-reforming.html