I have to confess I like our current Chief Minister.
He was an old political sparing partner in his Mec Vannin days when he just narrowly missed being elected as an MHK for the party.
Allan was on the ‘pragmatic’ wing of Mec Vannin and I was one of the ‘hair-shirt brigade’ so eventually he went his way and my ‘fundamental nationalism’ coalesced even more in MV.
I hear lots of criticism of him and what he’s done, or doing, but I tend to turn a deaf ear to the critics because Bell was slogging it out in Tynwald when most of his critics were still in ‘trainer nappies’. Plus he has to act as ringmaster to a pretty viperous Council of Ministers.
However, ‘fan’ that I am, I do at times get exasperated at the priorities that his government has.
I mean they could bring forward ‘a bill to get the AG back to work’ and save us all the expense of paying two salaries. Or they could bring forward ‘a bill to prevent MHKs terrified of their electorate dodging into LegCo’. Or ‘a bill to eliminate the need for foodbanks’. Now that surely is worth devoting some scarce legislative time to! But they don’t.
It’s not as if they don’t take time from the machinery of government to deal at haste with something that is hardly a pressing priority.
A case in point is the ‘Representation of the People (Amendment) Act 2015’. This was rushed through because once in the last hundred years some folk were found to have attempted to fiddle an election. This being the Isle of Man they were caught and dealt with swiftly. However the government has cracked on to ensure that political parties are properly regulated.
Now, at the time this ‘electoral jiggery-pokery’ was going on no one suggested it involved the Manx Labour Party, Mec Vannin (they don’t stand candidates anyway – see ‘fundamentalist’ above), or the Liberal Vannin Party. So obviously the government’s response is to create a bureaucracy to regulate parties that have never been involved in malpractice.
It won’t affect Mec Vannin because as long as the President, Speaker, et al, are bowing and scraping to some little old lady in another country it won’t be fielding candidates.
For the other parties it’s another challenge for an island political process in which party politics has never really been a serious force anyway.
Of course it will ensure that parties will have to produce transparent audited accounts – and that must be a good thing? Well my experience of political parties, particularly Mec Vannin in the pre-republican days when it fielded candidates, was they might get some physical support but they had to find the funding themselves. The Nationalist Party (and I am sure it’s the same for LVP and Manx Labour) did not have a great electoral ‘war chest’. So there will be slim pickings for a ‘registrar’ studying these accounts.
The new legislation I would predict will ultimately kill off the slim remnants of Isle of Man party politics, which, depending on your point of view, may be a good or a bad thing.
Going back to when Allan Bell stood in Ramsey for Mec Vannin all those years ago, I’ll wager it a certainty that his electoral expenses were borne by himself. There may have been MV foot soldiers out of the stump with him or posting leaflets through doors, but his campaign will have been self-funded.
Now, the one other area where I do have a ‘little tiny bit’ of experience outside of the nationalist party is in the trade union movement. What I can say without fear of contradiction is that over the years a number of candidates did receive financial support from unions – strangely, however, there’s no mention of trade union funding in the new Bill. Strangely, some of the people who enthusiastically voted to regulate Manx political parties may themselves have been beneficiaries of political patronage from the trade union movement. Who knows? It’s a funny old world!