Copyright jerseyeveningpost
By Ben Shenton WHEN I was 16, I dropped by my father’s office at the Harbour. He was both a Senator and a businessman – a combination that gave him a deep understanding of individual needs and the pulse of the business community. He ran the stevedoring company that loaded and unloaded cargo ships in St Helier. Back then, there were no car ferries or containers. Everything came in by crane, and the work was hard – especially in the biting cold of a Jersey winter. The company employed around 150 “casuals” – dockers who today would be described as zero-hour workers. Despite the conditions, there was a camaraderie among them that I’ve never seen replicated. Each morning, my father would call out the names of the men he wanted for the day’s work. I once asked if he always picked the most efficient. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Tom’s wife just gave birth and money’s tight. Alan’s saving to get married. Bill’s been ill and hasn’t had much income. I haven’t picked Terry in a while.” To him, the company was a family, and compassion guided his decisions. Today, discrimination and data protection laws have sterilised that kind of empathy. The human element has been replaced by policy and compliance, regulation has strangled initiative, and common sense has been legislated into extinction. I asked if he wanted me to join the family business. He said no. Containerisation and ro-ro ferries were replacing manual labour, and he saw the end coming. He was right. And now, I see AI as the containerisation of the white-collar worker – a seismic shift for which Jersey is utterly unprepared. Trust was everything to my father. “No one works for me,” he’d say. “They work with me.” He’d correct anyone who got it wrong. As chairman of JSPCA and Age Concern, I try to live by that ethos. Trust isn’t automatic – it must be earned. Having sold my own investment firm, I now work for a boutique investment company where trust is mutual and real. My father didn’t trust a few of his political colleagues and when I told him I planned to stand for Senator in 2005, he warned me: “Don’t trust many senior managers in the public sector. They’ll smile, nod, and promise to implement policy – but if it threatens their personal comfort or their colleagues, they’ll quietly sabotage it.” I found out that he wasn’t wrong. In my opinion the ethical ethos is actually more prevalent in the private sector, well away from the power of government. If you’re a non-executive director and you don’t trust the management – or the culture is rotten – then you resign, as integrity matters more than a few extra quid in the bank. That’s why I won’t be standing at the next election. I simply don’t trust the culture of Jersey’s public sector. And if you don’t trust someone, why would you want to join their organisation, or work with them? After meetings with senior civil servants, my father would often say he needed a shower – just to feel clean again. I feel exactly the same. Let me give you a recent example. A few months ago, in the Waitrose car park, a woman stormed over and berated me about a nearby primary school. She thought I was still a politician – and I don’t think she believed me when I said I wasn’t. Her complaint? No discipline, high staff turnover, and children behaving, in her words, “like feral animals”. She didn’t leave her name, but it felt like she needed to vent. Later, another person raised concerns about the same school. So I submitted a freedom-of-information request asking: What are the staff turnover rates? What is the school’s behavioural policy? The response to the first was essentially: “We don’t know.” Millions of taxpayer pounds go to highly paid civil servants to manage our schools, and they don’t track staff turnover – a basic metric in any organisation. If they truly don’t monitor it, the minister and the highly paid managers should resign, for that is gross incompetence. If they do monitor it but refused to publish the figures because they’re appalling, they should also resign – for not telling the truth. Authority is not given to you to deny the truth. As for the behavioural policy, the response was: “We believe that teaching children to regulate their own behaviour and pursue positive relationships is more constructive than a system of sanctions and punishments. We aim to focus on solutions rather than problems.” I’ll make no comment on that approach – except to say we’d better start building up the reserves in the Social Security Fund. As I write this the details of the Havre des Pas Lido solution are landing on my desk. Any lingering doubts I may have had about Jersey’s standards, and whether this piece was accurate, were swiftly dispelled. St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft criticised a community group for requesting government funding – then awarded the contract to someone ultimately employed by the States, using the very funding they’d requested. As my late mother used to say: “Don’t hang around with the wrong crowd, for their bad habits might rub off on you.” In my view, those running Jersey in 2025 are, without question, the wrong crowd. Having now read the Lido proposals I’m going off to have another shower. Ben Shenton is a senior investment director. He is a former politician and served as a Senator who held positions such as minister, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, and chair of Scrutiny. He also assists a number of local charities on an honorary basis.
