From the Summit of the Moral High Ground

Twenty years is a long time. When I published the first articles on this blog back in 2005, I genuinely believed that politics could make the world a better place. Like many people entering public life for the first time, I believed that if enough honest people became involved, if enough good ideas were debated, and if enough poor decisions were challenged, then society could gradually be improved. Looking back, I smile at that optimism. It is one of the privileges of youth to believe that problems are simple, that institutions exist to fulfil the purposes for which they were created, and that those entrusted with public office are motivated principally by a desire to serve the public. Experience has a habit of challenging comfortable assumptions. Over the past twenty years this blog has wandered across many different subjects. There have been articles about economics, taxation, constitutional reform, libertarian philosophy, civil liberties, Jersey politics, government policy and the o...

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...