From the Summit of the Moral High Ground

 There is a phrase which seems to sit somewhere in the background of almost every bureaucracy: "Leave the lawyers to sort it out." It is a remarkably convenient phrase. The civil servant can make the decision. The administrator can impose the condition. The prison officer can take the action. The politician can announce the policy. And if somebody complains that what has been done is unlawful, unfair or unjust, there is always another department waiting somewhere in the background. The lawyers will sort it out. Except that lawyers are not some magical mechanism for turning injustice into justice. They are human beings too. And they operate within an economic system. The Price of Justice One of the most uncomfortable things I have learned from my experiences with the Jersey legal system is how quickly the question of justice can become a question of economics. How much is the case worth? How much can the client afford? How much time can be justi...

There is something else I have learned from watching institutions operate. We have been taught that doing something is better than doing nothing. Action is regarded as virtuous. Initiative is praised. Activity is treated as evidence of competence. We admire the person who takes charge, solves the problem and gets things moving. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if sometimes the most moral thing a person can do is nothing? The Virtue of Restraint There are circumstances in which action is obviously necessary. If somebody is in immediate danger, doing nothing may be unconscionable. If something is broken and needs repairing, somebody has to repair it. If an injustice is taking place in front of you, there may be a moral obligation to intervene. But there are other circumstances where the consequences of acting are uncertain. You do not have all the information. You do not understand the situation. You do not know what will happen if you interfere....

Perhaps one of the most important things I have learned from my experiences with the Jersey justice system is that evil does not necessarily look like evil. That may sound like an obvious statement. But it is not. We tend to imagine evil as something obvious. We imagine somebody who knows that what they are doing is wrong and does it anyway. We imagine cruelty. We imagine hatred. We imagine somebody deliberately setting out to cause harm. But I have come to believe that some of the most dangerous forms of evil arise when people genuinely believe that what they are doing is good. The Good Person Most people do not wake up in the morning and decide that they are going to do something evil. They wake up believing that they are good people. They go to work. They do their jobs. They follow the procedures. They answer their emails. They attend their meetings. They make decisions. And they go home believing that they have done what was expected of them. They ...

If every government power creates opportunities for abuse, one might expect governments to exercise great restraint before assuming new responsibilities. History suggests the opposite. Modern governments have grown steadily in size, scope and influence. They regulate more activities than previous generations could have imagined. They collect more information, levy more taxes, administer more services and influence more aspects of daily life. Why? The obvious answer is that governments seek power for its own sake. Sometimes that may be true. More often, however, I believe government grows for a far simpler reason. Every problem creates a demand for action. When crime rises, people demand tougher laws. When businesses fail, people demand financial assistance. When housing becomes expensive, people demand regulation. When inflation rises, people demand intervention. When people lose their jobs, they demand support. When healthcare struggles, they demand additional funding. Politicians res...

For a place like Jersey , the weakness of independent politics is not just fragmentation — it is vulnerability. An isolated States Member can be pressured, managed, delayed, exhausted or quietly neutralised by an entrenched civil service far more easily than a disciplined political party can. Political parties are not merely electoral machines. They are structures of accountability and collective resistance. A lone deputy who challenges the bureaucracy risks being isolated: denied influence, excluded from informal networks, overwhelmed with procedure, outmanoeuvred by institutional continuity, or gradually absorbed into the administrative culture they were elected to scrutinise. But a party changes the balance entirely. A party gives elected representatives: shared policy, shared research, collective discipline, institutional memory, and political consequences for betrayal or drift. Most importantly, parties create loyalty to voters and principles rather than dependenc...

Based on the hypothesis that everything that happens in one's own existence is simply an outward reflection of one's internal soul, that everything happens for a reason and that everything is interconnected has proven over time to be a sound basis upon which to work. So what has the nine months since my last blog post taught me? Recently I have been conducting some experiments on the process, which is occurring either by design or organically as a result of the conscious actions of the bureaucracy, of controlling the community consciousness. Or just why do you think, what you think and how does the government try and perhaps succeed in affecting this. Where did the idea come from? I recently went to the Magic: The Gathering London Grand Prix, this is a game which developed as a result of some Dungeons & Dragons players wanting to have a better way to play out wizard battles which uses cards which represent spells, the aim being to kill your opponent before they kill you...