Six of the Best 601

"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.

Martin Hancox on the insanity of the badger cull.

A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.

"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.

"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.

Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.

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Lenny Harper gives evidence to the Jersey Care inquiry

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Lenny Harper, formally a senior police office on the island, has been giving evidence to the inquiry into the care system in Jersey.

BBC News has a report of his evidence. On the policing of Jersey he said:

Lenny Harper, who was appointed deputy chief officer of the force in 2003, told the inquiry there were approaching a dozen suspects who had been arrested and files were presented to the Law Officers Department but they were not charged by the attorney general. 

He said the police took possession of computers senior members of the IT Department "had bought on the police budgets with pornographic films on the computers and no charges were ever brought against them". 

He told the inquiry he could also remember at least four cases in which officers who had been suspended by the States of Jersey Police (SOJP) were reinstated by the States of Jersey.

And on child abuse on the island he

gave evidence about "a culture emerging in Jersey of systematic child abuse" which was "far worse" than a single paedophile ring. 

He said: "Children were in effect being loaned out to people taken on yachting trips" and there were allegations of abuse taking place outside of territorial waters which were not dealt with properly by the police.

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Jersey is "heading towards bankruptcy"

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Oliver Bullough writes in the Guardian today:

Jersey looks rich – but it is heading towards bankruptcy. 

In April, officials announced that the budget would be short £125m a year by 2019. “What went wrong?” asked the Jersey Evening Post. And that was just the start of it. By June, the annual deficit – now known on the island as the “black hole” – had been revised upwards to £145m, more than £1 in every five that the government spends. 

“The black hole is so big,” according to Connect, a Jersey business magazine, that “filling it will take the equivalent of shutting down every school in the island, laying off every teacher, letting the parks turn into overgrown jungles and having our roads literally fall apart.” 

That is quite a hole, and the question is, how can Jersey fill it? The solutions are not pretty: voluntary redundancies, compulsory redundancies, new taxes, fewer public services. 

Jersey bet its future on finance, allowing its other industries to shrivel, in the belief that it could live well in perpetuity from moving other people’s money around. If that belief was false, then does its fate await another island off the coast of France – one that has also pledged its future to finance? 

In short, is Jersey’s worrying present Britain’s bleak future?

It is also worth quoting a Telegraph article by Gordon Rayner that appeared during the abortive investigation of child abuse on the island:

One more disturbing question presents itself in the light of the child abuse scandal: just why, on a such a small and supposedly idyllic island, did so many hundreds of children end up in care homes? 

The answer lies in another little-publicised fact about Jersey - its unexpectedly high level of poverty, which brings with it the sort of social problems that lead to children being taken into care. 

Although Jersey, with its £250 billion financial industry, has the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in Europe, the island's wealth is largely held by the privileged few. Some 13,000 people - more than one in seven - live in social rental properties, Jersey's equivalent of council houses, and half of all households suffer from one or more of the internationally recognised measures for relative poverty. 

The crumbling 1960s council estates of St Helier are testament to the years of neglect. Rusting cars rot on rubbish-strewn drives, windows have bedsheets for curtains and the paint is peeling off walls and doorframes. "This place is run by the finance industry for the finance industry," says one resident. "Anyone else just doesn't count."

And if the finance industry fails, what will become of the islanders then?

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