Matt Fallaize: The party of the future – or the last of its kind?

Slick is the word I have heard most from people who were at Future Guernsey’s launch.

Some have used slick to mean impressive, professional and efficient. The packed-out Performing Arts Centre was a fitting venue for the beautifully curated videos featuring Future Guernsey supporters and the serious and thoughtful speeches from the organisation’s founders, explaining what they were trying to achieve and why. Launch night followed days of meticulous public relations and months of preparation by paid staff, donors and volunteers. I left it thinking this was unmistakably the first serious attempt in decades to create an enduring political party in Guernsey.

Others have used slick to mean polished but insubstantial and pretentious, even insincere. They saw a supposedly policy-based movement launched without any policies. They heard calls to remove the dominance of personality in Guernsey politics from an organisation conceived and powered by arguably the biggest personality of the past decade. I left the launch wondering whether the people who backed island-wide voting in the referendum of 2018, or who told Future Guernsey’s researchers that the political system wasn’t working, really wanted to end up with a political party like this one, or indeed with any political parties.

Future Guernsey was not unexpected. I don’t mean only that its gestation was a well-known secret, but also that it was probably inevitable given other developments in Guernsey politics over the past few years. In particular, the States has become more tribal, and the new electoral system requires voters used to judging between perhaps 12 and 15 candidates suddenly to judge well over 100. These changes provided fuel for the idea of groupings and parties after decades without them.

First, there was Charter 2018, a group of 11 deputies described by one of them, Neil Inder, as ‘not just a talking shop but an action shop’. Then there was Carl Meerveld’s Islanders’ Association, which pledged not to be ‘another States-like talking shop’, and Peter Ferbrache’s 2020 Association, which promised ‘a better vision for Guernsey’. At the last election, although the Alliance Party got nowhere, the Guernsey Party, dreamed up late in a fit of pique, won six seats, and the Partnership of Independents, confusingly a party claiming not to be a party, won 10 seats. But both then disintegrated. They were all forerunners of Future Guernsey, making primitive, hesitant steps on the journey towards organised parties.

If anyone was going to make the giant leap to form a proper party, it was Gavin St Pier, Future Guernsey’s political adviser, which some of his critics claim means leader in all but name.

• Listen: Matt Fallaize was joined by Future Guernsey founders Lindsey Freeman and Gavin St Pier on the Guernsey Press Politics Podcast

I met him at his first general election and my second, in 2012, immediately after which he tried, thankfully with only limited success, to organise a leadership takeover by deputies newly-elected in the so-called ‘Sarnian Spring’. He has run more vigorously than anyone has ever run for the top jobs in the States. He is more driven, more resilient and more single-minded than most of the rest of the Assembly combined, which is at times a strength and at other times a weakness, and he is quite obviously able, under-employed and frustrated. He enjoys being the centre of attention, which exasperates some of his friends as much as his critics, but also works hard to find the compromises and build the coalitions needed to make government function.

At the launch, I was too far away from the front to see whether he was smiling when he insisted he didn’t want Future Guernsey to be about him. His colleagues in the movement believe him, but expecting voters to may be a forlorn hope. He certainly wants this project to endure long after he has left politics, but at the next election in just six months’ time, Future Guernsey is bound to be seen as ‘Gavin’s party’. For a start, it currently has no other deputies, and may still have none the day before June’s general election. When I offered him the chance, the day after the launch, to say on the record that he didn’t want to be the party’s candidate for the presidency of Policy & Resources next summer, he demurred.

Inside the political bubble, sides for and against Future Guernsey will be taken too quickly because of its leading figure. For reasons that have always eluded me, ‘anti-Gavin’ sentiment has long driven a big part of the tribalism which has sadly infected Guernsey politics. But the bubble overstates that effect among voters. A few thousand will be sympathetic towards the man himself, a few thousand unsympathetic or even hostile, and many more thousands neutral or uninterested. It is the third group, by far the largest, that Future Guernsey needs to think about most over the next six months.

First it has to convince those voters that the island would be governed better by deputies in parties, whipped into line to vote together on major policies, than by independent deputies voting according to their conscience or judgement or possibly, in a few cases, what they were told by the bloke down the pub or the woman on Facebook. Future Guernsey has produced credible research showing that most voters say they want the island to be run on the basis of policy rather than personality – no surprise there. It has then pointed to that research as evidence of a yearning for political parties – frankly, an enormous leap of logic. On the other hand, it’s true to say that 40% of seats at the last general election were won by parties with a fraction of the preparation and organisation of Future Guernsey. Let’s assume my scepticism about voters’ longing for parties is misplaced. Future Guernsey then has to convince them of its policy ideas, which remain in development, and of its slate of candidates, the selection of whom remains uncertain.

It has made an impressive start on policy. More than 50 volunteers are already working in six groups, each focused on a key area of policy, with a seventh group considering how to tie these policies together and convert them into a programme for government. The challenge will be in balancing the need for sufficient detail to be credible, without which the case for a party falls apart, and the need not to be so prescriptive that too many voters and indeed too many prospective candidates are put off by ideas they dislike. Striking this balance has eluded everyone else who has previously thought about launching a genuine party.

Although that may be easy, or easier, compared to the challenge of attracting and selecting capable candidates and, as importantly, excluding others less capable, especially if nobody else already in the States, a reasonable proportion of whom are bound to be re-elected, signs up.

Which begs the question – what would success look like for Future Guernsey the other side of polling day on 18 June? To some extent the answer depends on how many, if any, sitting deputies stand under its banner. Let’s assume that only one does.

It is not going to win the 21 seats needed for a majority in the Assembly and so no time needs to be wasted thinking about the revolutionary idea for Guernsey of a single party governing alone.

If Future Guernsey wins, say, 12-14 seats, it will have done extremely well and could conceivably run the States with the support of several independents on an issue-by-issue basis, although this still seems unlikely.

If it ends up with, say, six, eight or 10 seats, it will have made a good start and have a strong basis from which to build in future elections. It will be in Reform Jersey territory – holding a relatively small minority of seats but enjoying disproportionate influence by acting collectively on key issues. It is worth noting, though, that after 12 years as the best organised and most disciplined party the Channel Islands has ever seen, Reform Jersey holds one in five seats in Jersey’s Assembly. Political life for most people in a small party consists of hours of constituency casework, asking questions of committees or ministers and taking proposals to parliament which often lose. Whether Future Guernsey will attract candidates who would be content to do these things for four years or eight years or 12 years or more, in the hope of their successors one day leading the island, remains to be seen. It would require enormous reserves of commitment to parliamentary politics and patience.

If Future Guernsey wins one seat or only a handful more than one, its dream of transforming the States will be over, the scepticism of its many critics will be justified, and it will be a long time before anybody else thinks slick is a good look in Guernsey politics.