Yin and yang

I’M GOING to once again pay my respects to Nigel Lewis, who passed away at the end of May. He had done many things since, but I knew him as the former deputy CEO of the States, who was a dab hand at winning at the West Show, who gave me my first job in Guernsey as an economist just before the financial crisis.

Sixteen years and two children later – doing my bit to help the demographics, though ironically my 10- and 11-year-olds still have a bit to go to qualify for residency – I’m still here. Many thanks, Nigel. Bless your soul.

I have many fond memories of working with Nigel. It’s a terrible cliche, but they don’t make them like him anymore. No nonsense and pragmatic, he was the purveyor of the ‘is it good enough?’ test. Not an ‘is it good enough?’ in the sense of ‘should we, ought we, need we, do more?’ but in the ‘surely that’ll do, no need to go overboard, any more effort’s a waste’ sense. He was very clear on this, and it was a rule of thumb that resonated personally and professionally with me. It’s a rule of thumb that’s been very absent in recent years. It’s one I’m sure would have saved us some of that eye-watering £23m. the president of P&R boasted we’d spent preparing for Moneyval.

When I posted on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after Nigel’s passing, I took the opportunity to recall that the States lost Nigel Lewis, deputy CEO, and Mike Brown, the CEO, to retirement in rapid succession some 10 years ago, and that in my opinion the States had never recovered from the loss. A sentiment that I know many people share. They were very much different, quite a yin and yang, but between them they helped keep the Guernsey ship of state sailing broadly in the right direction. And they would both discreetly often save politicians from themselves. And I’ll let you into a secret, they very often did some of their thinking for them too. The reason it worked was because Nigel and Mike knew what they were about.

At the time of their departures, many got the feeling that things might be changing not for the better. Nigel was quite open about his feelings on this too. At his leaving do, one of the (many) jokes contained in his farewell speech was about a strange noise he’d been hearing in his office on the fifth floor at Frossard House.

In those days, the fifth floor at Frossard House was a rather dour affair but Nigel sat in a rather large office strategically positioned right in the middle of the floor where, in his own words, he could keep one eye on the chief minister and one eye on the chief executive and he could see the States treasurer coming from a mile off.

The joke went that he’d been quite perplexed because he’d been hearing a strange scraping noise in the office for weeks. It had been really bothering him because he didn’t have a clue what it was nor where it was coming from. But, he said, thanks to the marvel of modern technology, he’d managed to find an app that could identify any noise on the planet, and he’d downloaded it to his phone. The sound, according to the app, he proudly announced, was that of the Titanic hitting the iceberg. The audience was in stitches.

Now, in the telling of this joke, one needs to appreciate the context that Nigel had spent many, many minutes building up to the punchline. And he’d just previously delivered his thoughts suggesting the name for a political party – One Direction– for a group of then senior politicians accompanied by a cartoon portraying them as a boy band going over a cliff, Road Runner style. It was this ‘Sarnian Spring’ cohort of politicians that then gave us the current dysfunctional States with their machinery of government review and then oversaw a referendum that gave us island-wide voting. Prescient stuff from Nigel.

Mike Brown, the chief executive, the yang to Nigel’s yin, wasn’t always everyone’s cup of tea, but he’d been the chief executive of the States for something like forever and knew more about priorities than most elected political minds and the need to focus first and foremost on the economy. His pet saying when discussing spending programmes was to remind everyone that ‘you’ve got to first make sure you’ve got an economy to tax’. His focus on the economy was why Mike and I got on. Mike’s perspective was always economy first.

It’s a perspective now lacking. I can’t recall the last time a budget was focused on economic growth or improving competitiveness. They’re just balancing the books (or not as it happens) exercises and have been for a long time. Treasury is an economic policy-free zone.

When Keir Starmer made the comments campaigning in the UK general election that wealth creation was Labour’s number one priority, there was quite a flutter on social media. Could anyone imagine our States making such a similar commitment? The consensus was that this was highly unlikely accompanied by much chuntering and lamentation. Pretty poor expectations for a government of an offshore finance centre methinks.

But there used to be a formal commitment to something very similar. I’d meant to dig it out and contribute to the discussion on X but didn’t get around to it. Let me reproduce it for you now.

‘Fiscal policy in Guernsey is based on the direct assumption that the private sector is the engine of growth, and that government’s primary role is to provide a stable, competitive environment for the private sector to thrive. The primary objective of fiscal policy is therefore to promote long-term economic growth.’

Wise words, indeed. Yes, I admit I wrote them. This was one of the cornerstone principles wired into the Fiscal Framework adopted by the States in 2009. A fundamental principle that was removed when the framework was ‘revised’ some seven years later after I left the States. Shame. And no accident, no doubt.

But expectations of our government from some are even poorer. Richard Digard’s ‘screwed middle’ column last week, which was excellent by the way, was scathing. He said that ‘politicians demonstrate very little interest in the welfare of islanders’.

Sadly, it’s true. The one fiscal change that’s been mooted by the president of P&R for this year’s budget, an increase in the rate of income tax, can hardly be argued to be a policy move to improve the welfare of working islanders. With increases in social security rates and statutory pension contributions kicking in this year, it would be a triple whammy of tax rises for working islanders. Raising the headline general rate of income tax would hardly improve our economic competitiveness either.

We shall see if such a moronic idea makes it into this year’s budget. If Nigel and Mike were still around keeping everyone on the straight and narrow, and doing a bit of thinking on P&R’s behalf, I suspect not.