Vote4Guernsey a ‘charter’, not a party, says Murray

Bob Murray, a member of Policy & Resources since 2022, has dedicated a page to each of the themes on the site vote4guernsey.gg with suggestions to prospective election candidates on what questions they could face.

He has also uploaded several short videos in which he covers a variety of topics with States colleagues and other islanders, ranging from political discussion to juggling personal life with being a States member.

Deputy Murray insisted the new site was not the start of a new political party or a movement, describing it as a ‘sort of charter’ of priorities the next Assembly was going to have to get to grips with.

‘It’s primarily aimed at candidates, so they know what they’re walking into, but as importantly, I think it’s for islanders to understand whom they need to elect to deal with those challenges, and what skills they need,' he said.

He said the importance of electing candidates based on recognition of the challenges the island was struggling with could not be understated, not least because he considered the current committee system of government to be ‘past its sell-by date’.

‘We have to get the best calibre candidates, whatever system we had, with the best candidates in there we would make some success of it,’ he said.

‘But I think the current system mitigates to some extent against that, it’s forcing people to think in silos and there is no central focus for strategic thinking and prioritisation. We [the States] make decisions and then we think “oh there’s an impact somewhere else”, or “is this even the right time to look at this policy?”.

‘That should be done before we even get into the Assembly, and it’s not, because of the way we’re structured in the committee system.’

He was hopeful his website would provide some insight into the decision-making process from a States member’s perspective, so that the next crop of deputies would be more prepared to entertain a machinery of government review.

‘Quite frankly, until you’re in the seat, you don’t realise the full extent of what you’re dealing with. A big shock, I think, has been the impact of demographic change in Guernsey. I couldn’t see that from the outside.’

Another of Deputy Murray’s biggest concerns was the limitations the island faced due to its size.

He has dedicated a page on his website to what he has described as ‘sub-scale Guernsey’, detailing why he believed Guernsey’s size was increasingly impacting the provision of services.

‘I don’t think islanders particularly recognise the limitations size puts on us in terms of being able to provide things in a cost-effective way,’ he said.

‘We’ve got to identify what universal entitlement actually means for people, I think at the moment people think it’s all free, and to some extent some things can be free, but increasingly some things cannot be free.'

His ultimate aim with his website was to reach a point where those standing for election fully understood the scale of the challenge the island was facing.

‘I want to know that, if I was to stand and to be elected, I will have people in the Assembly who actually see these challenges, and then we’ve got a chance of working together to perhaps fashion a future that we can actually sustain.’