A timely confidence boost
Earlier in this newspaper, Matt Fallaize, former political colleague of Lyndon Trott, lays out the political strengths and weaknesses of the new ‘chief minister’.
It makes for a fascinating read, but has already been set up by Deputy Trott’s interviews earlier this week, outlining the whys and wherefores of the amendment which has been developed to save the Education Committee and its plans for the Les Ozouets campus.
Positivity leaps off the page, as he explains how an expected £10m. extra from corporate tax receipts has magically become £30m. ‘The truth is that we expect those receipts to be even more than we are forecasting,’ he added.
With a nod to the, by now, well-recognised shortfall in public finances, Deputy Trott was still upbeat.
‘Investing in our island reflects the confidence that we should rightly have in our growing economy,’ he said.
You just wouldn’t have heard that kind of talk from a P&R verging on the desperate to raise taxes on the population, even if they too believed that it was true.
The challenge now is to take this good news manifesto and spread it across the community, building confidence which may be cracked, if not shattered. Using it just to patch holes and twist temporary political allegiances would be a let down, when a confidence boost can do so much more for the island.