Horace Camp: Can we weather this storm?

There is little we can do to ward off what nature throws at us, except to batten down the hatches and take it on the chin. We thought Moneyval was to be our next big external test but nature can never be taken for granted.

When it comes to internal testing times, we can do something about it. Things that we inflict upon ourselves should be avoidable, and why would anyone want to inflict bad things upon themselves and others? It’s a mystery to me, but it seems that in 2020 we outdid ourselves in finding 38 people who, though individually are nice people, once they Assembled as a group instantly splintered into two factions and wittingly or unwittingly unleashed the dogs of hell upon us.

Why do I say this? Because it suddenly occurred to me that every deeply concerning thing that has pulled us down into the Slough of Despair that wasn’t instigated by a foreign hand was in fact inflicted upon us by our own representatives.

There was nothing we could do about a foreign hand increasing mortgage interest rates, but we could fix a leak in a school roof.

Do you remember Covid? Instigated by a foreign hand, but pretty well run by our representatives. At the beginning, when we actually worried if we were about to be decimated by the new plague, we trusted our leaders and their advisers. Even if the whole thing was over the top for the actual threat, we didn’t know that and our leaders made us feel safe. For a short time we came together as a community. They were really tough times for many. Confined to our homes, some with no green spaces and others with little money. The mental challenge was extreme and though it took its toll on some, the regular briefings and cheerful demeanour of our 'Covid Crew' did an awful lot to keep us smiling in the face of real adversity.

We came out of Covid in a reasonably good joint frame of mind. It cost us a lot of our reserves, but what’s money after all? In fact, Covid cost us less than our off-island investment managers lost on our investments in their first year of managing it for us. I still wonder why, as an international finance centre, our local investment managers lost the mandate and our economy lost the management fees, but hey-ho, the States must know what it’s doing, eh?

How then did our mood, our hopes for the future and our feeling we could tackle anything turn into the black beast surrounding us all? We were fiscally able to weather the economic blow of Covid without even borrowing. But in a very short time, we were facing destitution and ruin. Now most islanders believe the hype that the States has pushed out and, by extension, we are just waiting for the sheriff to sell us all up, with the last to leave turning out the lights. The whole ‘we are doomed’ scenario pitched to us by a group of people who should have known better is the entire reason many of us believe Guernsey has no future.

Guernsey, which survived Nazi occupation, now believes we face a greater peril – the ‘Deficit’, which will swallow us all up at some yet unknown time in the future, but it’s probably definitely coming before 2050.

Fear is a great motivator but not necessarily the best one to employ when trying to get people to do what you want. It can work, and history is full of examples. Certainly if a trireme captain wanted a bit more speed from the 170 oarsmen, he didn’t rely on motivational posters or mindfulness sessions when he could just give them a lick of the lash. It can work but it doesn’t necessarily build the best team or prevent the captain and his officers from being dumped overboard when a resourceful slave frees himself from the shackles.

We are where we are. We aren’t just up the creek without a paddle – we don’t have a canoe, or even the will to tread water.

Things could have been so much better. The Covid sacrifice and its legacy of togetherness could have been used by our new government to lead us into the reality of our situation. We are donkeys after all. Carrots are much better than sticks if you want us to follow you somewhere. And we aren’t daft. Our schools may be letting lots of our youngsters down but we have the potential to fight above our weight as our forbears did so many times before.

Fear wasn’t just used by P&R but it was also used by our Education Committee. There was a letter in Tuesday’s Press, suggesting the States should be run like a business. Imagine if you ran a private school totally dependent on parents being satisfied enough to cough up fees for their little darlings. Then a roof starts to leak. What do you do? Immediately board up the building and stop educating pupils in it? This is the ESC answer. Or do you fix the leak and carry on teaching? This is everyone else’s answer.

How would ESC cope if it was in charge of educating the children of Ukraine in a war zone? Why is ESC accentuating the dangers of a leaky roof? The answer is it wants hundreds of millions which P&R says we haven’t got to build a new campus which, by its past record, it will let go to rack and ruin within 25 years or so.

We’ve got to get out of this hole we are in. But by swapping out P&R and ESC, all that is going to happen is that we will just find ourselves in Old Bill’s better ‘ole. A better ‘ole will be a temporary improvement, but don’t we really need not to be in an ‘ole at all?