A blott on the electoral landscape
ISLAND-WIDE voting often seems to prompt more questions than answers.
And here we are, one year to the day to polling day for Guernsey ‘25, and we don’t have much idea at all about what potential candidates can, or indeed, will be allowed to do to get their names out there before the electorate.
As we have already seen, and is almost universally agreed, campaigning in 2020 was messy, to say the least.
A mix of parties and independents, Press advertisers and those individuals you wouldn’t know from Adam, keyboard warriors and a select few who pressed the flesh. And a van that wasn’t a party.
And with a majority of sitting politicians now not keen to sanction ‘big spending’, along the lines of that seen in 2020, we are heading for either a mess, with the incumbents holding sway as new candidates struggle to enter the public consciousness, or the state-sponsored one-size-fits-all manifesto booklet, where apparently, if you’re lucky, civil servants might do some editing for you.
At least Guernsey Press-organised hustings meetings might offer some clarity.
Everybody knew where we stood under the parish- or district-based system, where you could make every effort, or none at all, and almost certainly be rewarded fairly, while island-wide voting continues to complicate the electoral landscape.