ONE of the most worrying aspects of the Wales Audit Office’s withering condemnation of the States of Guernsey’s inability to manage anything in a remotely acceptable fashion was the reaction to the news by the island’s deputies themselves.

Well yes, they told Wales auditor general Jeremy Colman, we recognise the picture you are painting, we know you are holding up a mirror and we can see ourselves in it.

That being so, the one question islanders will have is if the elected representatives – who after all cost taxpayers not so far short of £2m. a year to look after their best interests – could see the problem, why didn’t they do something about it?

The answer, as the WAO knows, is that members like things just the way they are: unaccountable, financially uncontrolled, secretive and with lashings of power for individual departments, which can do just what they like no matter how counter to Guernsey’s best interests.

That damning indictment runs throughout the WAO’s report, which highlights no fewer than six separate warnings about the financial and reputational risks posed to Guernsey by the current system of government.

Things can and must improve – but that will happen only if there is a sea change in the culture and attitude of States members. The WAO is acutely aware of that, which is why the studiously diplomatic auditor general went out of his way to tell reporters that islanders needed to press their deputies to take action on the report.

In other words, left to their own devices, nothing will happen. And it will be an uphill struggle to bring to heel those who happily squander money with no regard for the principles of good governance.

Even while the WAO review was in train, 27 deputies, more than half the Assembly, published a letter in this newspaper demanding a continuation of a system which is now exposed as executive government by department, a rankly tribal system that concentrates power without effective scrutiny or accountability in the separate hands of their political boards.

No wonder five of the 27 opposed to change are the ministers of Education, Housing, Environment, Public Services and Social Security.

But will the nought-out-of-10 brigade now recant their misguided and damaging ways?