Colonic irrigation?

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

Edmund Burke, 1729 - 1797

Richard Digard recently posted a piece on the This is Guernsey blog which coins the delightful phrase 'the Bottom Up Brigade'. No, this is nothing to do with Deputy Ron Le Moignan's personal Room 101. It's his characterisation of those who are wont to ignore, whenever it's convenient, Edmund Burke's principle (quoth above).

Reflecting on this, I thought I'd pass on to you a glorious example of 'bottom-up' government from The Other Island, which illustrates Burke's point beautifully.

In the 1980s, reports commissioned by the States of Jersey from the British Geological Society showed that water supplies were very limited and contaminated with pesticides. Last year, drought hit the island, and the water shortage became acute. In low-lying areas the water was found to be contaminated with salt water, a sure sign of over-extraction. Senator Freddie Cohen reacted swiftly to draft water conservation legislation and slow consumption.

Enter George Langlois, water diviner, backed up by a lobby group consisting of fellow dowsers and borehole-drillers. It's all fine, he said, Jersey's ground water doesn't come from Jersey rain, it actually comes in under the Channel via 'streams' from France, and it'll never run out!

At this point, we must get one thing straight. Water divining is total bunk. There is bugger-all credible evidence that it works. Diviners and dowsers are deluded or dishonest. Langlois's claim was no more than blind speculation. Worse still, it was flatly contradicted by the available scientific evidence. A senator wouldn't have to do a particularly onerous amount of research to convince himself of this.

Sadly, a lot of the Jersey public either don't have the time, the inclination or the presence of mind to relinquish this little bit of hogwash of its popular pedestal, and who can blame them - we'd all rather be happy than right!

But what does the States of Jersey do? Do they act swiftly on the unequivocal advice of the scientific experts to avert a crisis? Or do they, instead, eject their brains and vote on the say-so of a man with a twig?

You guessed it. Cohen's legislation was vetoed.

A lesser man than Cohen might have thrown up his hands in despair at this point and booked a one-way ticket to New Zealand, leaving George Langlois and his soothing words to waltz the island into certain disaster. But Cohen instead stuck to his guns and used taxpayer's money to buy them out of their own ignorance. He successfully launched a £70,000 investigation to drill two deep boreholes at sites chosen by the diviners, to test whether the water comes from Jersey or from France as the diviners claimed. He even got George Langlois onto the working party, and secured his commitment to accept the results.

The verdict was announced in January. Surprise, surprise, the ground water in Jersey comes from rainfall in Jersey. There is no link with France. New legislation to clamp down on water usage is now imminent.

You'd think that would be the last of it, but no! The protestations of the dowsers still rumble on. The sad fact is that in a perverse way, the £70,000 blown on this utterly unnecessary exercise will only bolster the expectation that dowsers should be taken seriously, and they probably still wouldn't think twice about blowing the same amount again.

The senators can stop a repeat of this, but only if they can learn when to keep their heads out of their bottoms.