The Antique States roadshow

WITH the prospect of falling tax receipts amid an ageing population, an economy highly susceptible to the advancement of artificial intelligence and the ever-worsening climate crisis among the laundry list of challenges the future holds for the island, the current antiquated leadership and communication of our government is only setting the next generation up to fail in the bid to solve tomorrow’s problems.

In my experience, local politics to most young people is endlessly uninspiring and gatekept by the same distant and unrelatable faces term after term. Election 2020 underlined this alienation. From June to October, I worked on the election team taking hundreds of phone calls and questions from the electorate. If you had profiled all the people I had talked to, you would have assumed the minimum voting age was 30.

Then, when young candidates for deputy such as Pierre Ehmann and Josh Macksoni, who ran progressive, persuasive and vitalising campaigns, missed out to a number of deputies offering identical agendas, indistinguishable experience and endlessly recycled visions, it likely means a grossly under-engaged younger generation.

But we have seen young people hold climate change conferences and demonstrations, attend the Black Lives Matter rally in droves and make their feelings on selection and school models known, whether they would be listened to or not. So why is there such a lack of enthusiasm around the actual political process?

The first turn-off is an antiquated line of communication from the States meetings themselves.

When tuning in on BBC Guernsey or Microsoft Teams, the current arrangement of echoey voices and muffled microphones makes for something of a 20th century radio broadcast. While this may carry a quaint nostalgia for the current listenership, it does little to attract those raised on colour television.

In bridging the generational gap, the States needs to set up and make visual broadcasts of States meetings available on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter etc., just as we do with Covid briefings. Making local politics available where young people are active and consuming media will go lengths in demystifying a process which should already be transparent and widely accessible.

It is one thing to know you want change, it is another to know who to petition and how change happens. Visual broadcasts of States meetings will open up avenues of knowledge and opportunity for young people to effect change.

Deputies also need to lead by example in the effort to modernise. We must be one of the only jurisdictions where the top politician does not have a public social media account.

Some may think that to be a trivial detail, but in 2021 not having an online platform to communicate agendas, general information or interact with islanders is a conscious choice to not be available to a certain demographic of constituent. Deputy Ferbrache has made this choice – it is not good enough from a chief minister.

A further shortfall is one of engagement. In seven years of my education, from the start of St Sampson’s High School to the end of Grammar Sixth Form, I could count on one hand the number of times deputies had come to speak to us or answer questions – and have fingers to spare. From Years 7 to 13, deputies remained mostly anonymous to us throughout, even when topics such as the 11-plus and the future model of education were the issues of the day.

The cumulative effect of these failings has made the entry point to local politics so unappetising that most young people leave it alone until they have some decades of experience in finance, business or law. These are indeed invaluable competencies, but when they are the only backgrounds our lawmakers can boast it creates a stale and tired political zeitgeist, where the fresh ideas of a Pierre Ehmann or a Josh Macksoni struggle to break through.

This is not an ask for some kindergarten coup, but pragmatic action – modernising States communication, deputies being present on social media and spending more than the bare minimum time listening to and involving young people.

These changes do not require eye-watering value judgements with public money, but a belief that democracy functions best when the full spectrum of society is engaged.

Having greater youth involvement would not just bode well for the island’s future but could have been so beneficial in recent years. For example, could the education debate have been helped along by the contributions of a deputy or two who had actually been through the system in the last decade as opposed to the past century? And when it comes to the climate crisis, it is worth considering whether a greater sense of urgency and dynamism would have been injected into the States’ green agenda with younger representation in the Assembly. This is not to say the current deputies are not capable of seeing climate change as a threat, but it isn’t easy being green when half the States are grey.

Contrary to what you may think or read, young people are interested in politics, but when the political establishment feels like an ode to yesterday, it cannot hope to do right by those who will lead it tomorrow.

When you cast an eye to the challenges on the horizon, the shelf life of this neglect becomes even more apparent.

This apathetic political arrangement in concert with an impregnable housing market means the future generations on which the island will be sustained have no choice but to look to the mainland.

But should we choose to tackle these issues head on and treat young people as genuine stakeholders in local democracy, then I know there is a collaborative path forward.

Give us a say in the future and we may just stay for the future.