Douglas Central MHK Chris Thomas has suggested that Chief Minister Alf Cannan should step down and seek a fresh mandate from MHKs to carry on the job, but he won’t be supporting him.
Tuesday’s Keys sitting will see the first confidence motion of any type brought against a Chief Minister since the ministerial system was introduced, but it will not be a binding resolution.
While if 13 MHKs did back the motion it would be politically impossible for the government to carry out, even a win, if not a comprehensive one could be problematic.
Mr Thomas told Manx.News that he is currently minded not to support Mr Cannan as he sees the government as “still fudging” key decisions.
Expectations
Mr Thomas said: “Already people are asking, what happens if there’s three votes against, five votes against, seven votes against, nine votes against, 11 votes against, 13 votes again?
“Well, it’s, you know, if 13 the motion has been passed, and surely the Chief Minister would would honour it, even if it’s seven or nine or something around there, that’s quite a significant amount of people who are expressing no confidence.
“Myself, I’ve argued that, conceivably, the Chief Minister should step down and put himself up for a vote of confidence, resubmitting himself, because the public perception is that there are divisions inside the Council of Ministers, there are sort of factions inside the Council of Ministers, and there are clearly divisions inside the House of Keys if somebody is prepared to put this motion down.”
New Chief
Despite voicing his availability for the top job, Mr Thomas, who only last week was appointed by Mr Cannan to serve as a political member in the DHSC, said his candidacy is about the process and not himself.
The Douglas Central MHK claimed he is not seeking the crown because of “personal ambition”, rather likening himself when Donald Gelling returned as Chief Minister after Richard Corkill quit in 2004, albeit those were under enormously different circumstances.
He said: “If by chance, the Chief Minister resigns, or if he loses the vote, the law requires there to be a new chief minister election within a month.
“Standing Orders give an obligation on the speaker to arrange it between seven and 21 days after the need for a new chief minister. The law has a minimum of seven days.
“I do think we all owe it to the people we represent as MHK is to do this quickly, smoothly and get onto the real business, which is fixing healthcare, sorting out the energy issues, because they’re huge issues at the moment, sorting out education, sorting out the economy, getting back the respect of both business people and workers.
“We seem to somehow have lost with politicians, everybody, everybody’s respect, to an extent.
“So we’ve got massive political challenges, and we need to get past this and it seems to answer your first question, I don’t think this government’s done a very good job of managing expectations and keeping political confidence and trust in the last three years.”
Bureaucracy
Addressing the issue of the public perception of a growing number of back office roles across government as opposed to frontline roles, Mr Thomas said: “If we go into constantly trying to prove that we’re doing a good job that encourages bureaucracy.
“Communications, if you take the view that we’re always going to say what the public service and the state is doing, is right, you’re going to have a community communications department trying to keep one stuff ahead of Juan Turner and Paul Moulton and the other people involved in all of this.”
Interview
See Juan’s full interview with Mr Thomas below:
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