The Jersey Evening Post reported yesterday that:
JERSEY'S fiscal ‘black hole' has now mushroomed to £145m — around £1,438 for every local resident — according to a draft States financial plan presented to States Members today.
The Council of Ministers' new Medium Term Financial Plan, which covers the four years from 2016 to 2019, not only shows a £20m leap in the estimated shortfall expected by 2019 — up from £125m just three months ago — but also proposes an aggressive package of measures to claw that amount back.
Two things provide me with ironic amusement. The first is that Jersey now uses the language I first used to describe this situation. I predicted a 'black hole' from 2005 onwards and on this blog from 2007, at least.
The second is that Jersey is, like Ireland and the Isle of Man before it, is heading towards a toilet tax to help make good the deficit. Right now they're describing it as a '£10m user-pays tax on liquid and solid waste disposal'. In Ireland it was called a water tax. The Isle of Man called it a sewage tax. What I think we can agree on is that the finances of all these places are going down the pan.
But more worrying is the underlying trend in Jersey. There are also to be £35 million of health charges, cuts in welfare benefits and the ending of the over 75 free TV licence. The sick, the young, the vulnerable and the elderly are to pay for Jersey's continuing existence as a tax haven for major corporations and the wealthy. The sordid nature of the Island's politics has been laid bare.
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I view Jersey as a tabletop model of London’s economy.
Reading this today, it looks like the familiar descent into top-down class warfare and the dismantling of all social institutions, now that the hot-money property boom has pretty much run its course.
If there was such a thing as a journalist – and if there is, in Jersey, no-one’s ever going to know – they would go looking for the stories of social exclusion and emigration: London’s social cleansing is the next stage of the island’s property boom.
Meanwhile, the tabletop model has much to teach a Londoner: watch what happens when the spivs and oligarchs decide that there’s no remaining value to extract, and Learjet off to the Caribbean, leaving a collapsed economy with no productive enterprises and a debt mountain.
Here’s a thought: when Jersey’s local government is suspended by London, try reading out the terms imposed upon them in a German accent and stick ‘-akis’ and ‘-oulos’ on the names of any hapless fools elected to preside over the chaos when the usual mediocrities are thrown out by the voters.
But Jersey is an island which London is not. The rich require more services than us common mortals. Who is going to provide them – slaves?
Of course London is an island…the real London that is.
The City surrounded not by water, but a sea of commoners!
As for slaves….presumably you mean us?
Free services paid crap wages bolstered by hand-me-down benefits?
Maybe Jersey will go for the United Arab Emirates model of a sub-minimum wage workforce of “guest workers” who can be kicked out at any time if they complain. Scary stuff.
indeed
Robots !
“top-down class warfare and the dismantling of all social institutions” …
we can probably have a good idea who within the elite that are responsible directly or indirectly for the economic warfare. It’s a pity their activities can’t be published so they can be individually named and shamed.
If you reach pension age and haven’t figured out Christmas exists and budget accordingly for the extra expenses, then I think we’ve reached a base-line level where no amount of State intervention is going to help you. And no-one ever died from insufficient television.
This story is really about Jersey planning ahead. Some combination of raising taxes and cutting spending is inevitable. There’s a democratic deficit on the island where many taxpaying foreign nationals can’t vote, and they should be bashed for tax secrecy as well, but not for planning a budget.
I have tried to accommodate your callousness and indifference
My tolerance has reached its limits
I strongly believe that when all is said and done the Jersey government will “listen to the people” and pull back from doing away with the Christmas bonus. It is not that they are listening it is that this is a calculated and callous act intended to leave the people of Jersey with the impression that they achieved some concession from the package of measure proposed. The £1.5 million pounds this entails is nothing really, but so much media attention has been given to it rather than to the more serious underlying decisions…
A Water Tax? Jersey is I believe the only place in the world which taxes fresh food and soon I believe will be the only place which taxes water (Ireland having pulled back from the insanity). What is next a tax on air?
Jersey’s problem remains the same:
The Head of the Jersey Civil Service is paid more than the head of the UK Civil Service
The Senior Judge is paid more than the Lord Chief Justice
And so on down through the upper echelons of the Civil Service.
Jersey is a small town of 100,000 people, it does not pay defence or have to deal with foreign affairs, has no debt and yet £1 billion pounds per year is not enough to support so few people?
Never in the history of human endeavour have so many, been taxed so much, to benefit so few.
Jersey’s income tax regime is also the opposite of maybe everywhere else.
Apart from the lowest paid who pay no income tax, all the others are reversed!
Upto around £100k pa income tax is 27%, then next band pays at 20% and the very wealthy only pay at a rate of 1%, yes just 1%
Crazy.
There are nearly 3000 millionaires in Jersey. Surely if they want to carry on living there they can bail out the government on their own.
There are also two homeless for each millionaire. Can’t imagine them wanting to pay a toilet tax.
Worst of all is that Jersey had an election last October in which the candidates who now make up the Council of Ministers simply lied to the public about the whole situation.
They knew we were in a dire situation yet none of their campaigns contained any more substance than “I’m a decent bloke, you can trust me and, by the way, I won’t raise taxes”.
Lo and behold, they’re now proposing introducing new taxes (which is not a smart way of raising revenue because with every new tax means a new costly bureaucracy to manage) which will regressively hit low and middle income Islanders, whilst leaving the wealthiest pretty much untouched.
Only one group of candidates had the guts and the brains to be honest and that was Reform Jersey (the only political party on the Island) who the right then desperately (and sadly successfully) attempted to portray as being anti-finance traitors.
If we had had an honest election then things would have been different, but the junta can only remain in power by lying. That’s how democracy works in a tax haven.