Vision on

WHEN I was a boy my mother, bless her, would buy the most eclectic things off the strangest people. The items ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous and my bedroom would often be the final resting place of things she didn't know what to do with. Which is how I came to have a 6ft-tall case of exotic butterflies collected by some long dead Victorian explorer, a blunderbuss and a collection of oriental daggers.

All were once magnificent but had seen better days. The most glorious butterfly in the collection was a wonderful incandescent blue but had lost half a wing, the blunderbuss flintlock was seized and the daggers were blunt and pitted with rust.

I was never short of a book. Mum bought boxes of books at auctions. Sets of encyclopedias with only SAW-TER missing, small black bound books in Latin (could they have been those Black Books?) and even a full set of Shakespeare with each volume an inch tall.

One portentous night, probably after finishing my new Biggles of the Special Air Police (not the best one of the series in my opinion), I reached down and randomly selected a big book bound in shabby blue and smelling a bit mouldy. It was called Fowler's English Usage and I fell in love with it.

Some years later I found out that its authors, the Fowler brothers, had lived in Guernsey and Fowler's was conceived here even if it wasn't completed here.

A war and another story intervened.

Knowing that this wonderful book was connected to our beautiful island made it even more special to me and if you have never owned one then you just don't know what you are missing.

When I read Policy & Resources' new plan for our future (hereafter referred to as The Gavin Plan) the first thing that popped into my head was something I read in Fowler's. 'Vision, in the sense of statesman-like foresight or political sagacity, is enjoying a noticeable vogue.'

Given that this had to refer to the 1920s when Fowler's was published, I wondered if the state of vogue had returned, so I checked out Google's Ngram Viewer. For those unfamiliar with Ngrams this definition from Wikipedia won't help: 'In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus.'

Typing in 'political vision', the Ngram charted a slow bouncing along the bottom rise starting in 1800 and then creeping up in a slow curve until the 1920s, proving Henry Fowler correct that it was indeed in vogue in his time. Then the line continues its growth, losing a bit of ground post-war, then a slow but continual rise begins until we get to around 1980. After that the line rockets up in an ever steeper trajectory until becoming almost vertical as Gavin was hatching his plan.

If political vision was in vogue during the 1920s then it is now vogue+++.

What has 20 years of phenomenal global growth in political vision achieved so far?

With that question still fresh in your mind, let's turn to The Gavin Plan. My editor probably won't let me go off on another tangent here but just to say, I defined it as such in honour of Asimov's Seldon Plan, which I think it is meant to emulate. Sci-fi geeks will get this. Moving on.

'Great Today, Better Tomorrow.' Promising start. Perhaps it borrowed a little from the Marvel Universe's arms manufacturer, Stark Industries' 'Building a better tomorrow, today', but still, a powerful statement.

There are four elements to the plan: our quality of life; our community; our place in the world and our economy. Very good, seems to cover it all. All are equally valued, which is why the main graphic gives them equal space.

No, wait. life, community and place share one line and economy has a line all to itself.

Probably no significance there, just how the graphic designer wanted to lay it out. Accidentally, that does make the points under 'Our economy' – 'Strong, sustainable and growing' and 'Sustainable public finances' stand out more clearly. But I'm sure the economy is given no more weight in the vision than our collective happiness.

How will the plan be funded? is the second question asked. It doesn't actually answer that one but leaves an open question and a feeling that even though we don't usually fund new projects as part of our austerity controls, it could be a good idea to get some funding for The Gavin Plan. Which, of course, isn't one of those silly pet projects that deputies are always trying to get funding for.

No, of course not.

No Active Travel Unit or biodiversity funding here – this will be money well spent.

Future Guernsey is 20 years away but The Gavin Plan will focus on the next five years of the remaining three-and-a-bit years of his term of office.

That makes perfect sense because each States always follows the direction left them by the last one.

Just look at the waste strategy or the schools debate for proof of that.

Or does Gavin believe he will lead us throughout the 20 years of the plan? He will still be younger than some current deputies in 2036 so he could do it.

Wow – my word counter has clocked up an awful lot of words so far and I've not actually written a word of substance about the plan at all. I've just rambled and used rhetoric but not really written about anything at all. Just a load of self aggrandisement and hot air.

That reminds me of something I read recently.

Oh yes, The Gavin Plan.