Lord Digby Jones: Is this the ‘Guernsey way’?

‘A bad system will beat a good person every time.’ A very senior UK civil servant said this to me in Whitehall some 17 years ago.

As I sit here on my ‘thinking bench’ in the glorious sunshine high up on the cliffs between Gouffre and Petit Bot, reflecting on the various slings and arrows currently assailing our wonderful island, those words have never seemed more timely and relevant.

My quill finger has been twitching for some time but what tipped me over the scribbling edge was the news last week that one night, at 11.35pm, the airport turned away an Aurigny flight that was on final approach with landing gear in place and 90 seconds from touchdown because the agreed time for closing the airport had arrived. They just switched off the landing lights, everyone knocked off and went home.

I guess someone is going to say that, well, this is the ‘Guernsey way’. The ‘system’.

We all know that there aren’t enough houses in Guernsey. There aren’t enough affordable local market houses and there aren’t enough expensive ones available on the open market. We can’t attract or keep women and men in the myriad job vacancies that a growing economy competing in a global marketplace requires.

There is now a rampant socialist UK government stomping around in the style of a Seventies economic vandal, full of ideological spite, giving pensioners the ‘heat or eat’ choice this winter so they can stuff massive, unproductive, inflationary wage rises down the throats of their well-heeled trade union paymasters. There is the threat of new workplace legislation which will, at a stroke, take the UK back 50 years to the sound of ‘You won’t get me, I’m part of the union’ as, especially small, businesses just shut up shop. Through increased taxation of capital, the provisional wing of the UK public sector, aka HMG, will make the creating and keeping of wealth in Great Britain a thing of the past.

Invitations to leave the country could not be more clearly written. Enquiries from the wealthy to move themselves, their entrepreneurial spirit and their capital here are, and will continue to be, growing exponentially. Yet Guernsey doesn’t have a sufficient open market housing stock to satisfy demand. We need 250 more properties so designated as a matter of urgency. Some current owners of open market property who selfishly campaign for no more OM housing to be created for fear of reducing the value of what they currently have (a fat chance of that – see above, which isn’t stopping any time soon) should consider the long-term damage such a stance is doing to our island. As should those who say that such economic migration isn’t welcome full stop.

How do you explain to anyone wanting to move here, whatever their means and ambitions, that we’re sorry about the vast acreage of derelict greenhouses and planning laws which belong to a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but there isn’t a house for them? Ah! That’s the Guernsey way! The system.

We all know the machinery of government isn’t working. Whichever way you look at it, from whichever part of the delivery mechanism you hail, it’s broken. Deputy Rob Prow recently expounded on the failure of consensus government and he was spot on. Nothing gets done and everyone can take refuge in... er... the system. But no one tries to change it – they all put it in the ‘too difficult’ box.

Island-wide voting has removed local accountability. It’s relatively easy to get elected into the well-paid position of a deputy on a manifesto with promises you can’t deliver (the... er... system won’t let you) and then pick up your monthly dosh and hide for four years. Very little, or nothing, gets done. Well-intentioned, office-holding deputy after deputy, be they chief minister, chair of a committee or a simple, enthusiastic, democratically elected representative with a good idea, goes on TV or appears in the pages of this august journal to explain (often with an air of patronising resignation) how the current... er... system (that word again!) won’t allow anything to be done about this or that until, if ever, the next time Halley’s Comet comes over the horizon.

To have you and I, as taxpayers and electors, owning both the airline and the airport and watching a big sign being put up over our island (as that flight was turned away just 90 seconds from touchdown) that said ‘Don’t come here, we can’t run a whelk stall’ is past disgraceful. And all we get from the politician in charge is ‘sorry’, not a hint of a political resignation, of accepting responsibility. No wish to change the system. Not a whiff of putting the customer first, second and third. Just a load of huff and puff which, roughly translated, says ‘The buck has failed to stop here and is now running fast and loose through a well-remunerated, expensively pensioned, unaccountable public sector looking for somewhere to stop’.

Ah... the Guernsey way... the system.

The sad thing is that we all know it could be so different, with not a lot of effort. This is not about what policies are required (in a free world, we will always thank God all have different wishes and desired outcomes). This is about getting things sorted in the first place, so things can get done.

As people have read this, from the doer to the done-to, within every single person there will be the flicker of acknowledgement that, no matter how reluctantly, they know I’m onto something. And yet... we all just resign ourselves to watching example after example of a bad system beating a good person again and again.

Soon, it won’t matter anymore.

This wonderful island, this haven in so many ways, this treasure trove of values and security will have irretrievably become a passed-over, irrelevant backwater. As I sit here on my thinking bench, on another fabulous Guernsey day, I thank God we live here and not elsewhere, but...

Change? Change? Nah! It’s the system. Just accept it. Change? That’s not the Guernsey way!