Tea with the Lt-Governor

IF THERE’S one thing the Netflix drama Baby Reindeer teaches us, it is that there are some very weird people out there.

Which is why when I received an invitation from a fan of this column, who I had never met before, inviting me to his house for morning tea I was naturally concerned. But on the basis that he lived at Government House and was His Excellency the Lt-Governor, I thought the risk was acceptable.

I naturally did some background checks on him and during a well-timed call from our Chief Minister asked him for his view on my number one fan.

Lyndon was gushing in his praise and told me that the good general ‘gets Guernsey’. Which was good enough for me, so I duly popped up to Government House and immediately went to the wrong door, which I noted smelled strongly of new paint which I duly dabbed with my finger to see if it was dry. It was. I eventually found the right door and soon I was in a deep monologue with the great man himself.

Of course I did, politely, let him get the odd word in now and again. He displayed a great knowledge of my columns and in my mind it now deserves a ‘nearly by royal appointment’ warrant.

What a great man our Lt-Governor is. No wonder he has held so many prestigious leadership roles because he is clearly a man that others would follow. And after an hour or so in conversation with him, I agree with Lyndon that he 'gets Guernsey'. Or, that he gets what he has been told about Guernsey so far and wants to know more about us.

I say us because there are two ways of looking at Guernsey. One, it is a rock in the English Channel, and two, it is a community which lives on a rock in the English Channel. I favour the second. I think His Excellency does as well.

I was surprised that when I described myself as a Sarnian, he told me I was the first he had heard to use that word. He was, I think, a little surprised himself when I told him of the rural backwater I grew up in, where it wasn’t uncommon to find horses still being used on the farm. I went on to tell him of the close community we had then and how if you were naughty as a child the news would have made it home to mum quicker than the bus could carry you there. When you would ask married ladies if they were the girl Le Page and if they used to live by the house that the Germans knocked down during the Occupation. Guernsey then was a place where anonymity was an impossibility. Mention your surname and someone was bound to ask if your uncle went to school with their cousin.

How that has changed in just my lifetime is a wonder to see. But like the curate’s egg, the change has only been good in parts. The Germans lost us our language by forcing so many children to leave. We managed to lose our accent when we moved into offices and over time our ‘eh?’ and ‘is it?’ as well. We even lost our proud Sarnian heritage and self-adopted the pejorative ‘Guern’ to self-identify.

Just as our once beloved Guernsey cow has transformed in my lifetime from a first class Guernsey into a second class Friesian, so our first class island has transformed into a third class City of London crossed with the Isle of Wight. What happened to our cows I will leave until another day, but what happened to our island I will explain now.

We realised, soon after the war, that the island was broke and so were its people, be they here or in England waiting to come home. We would need money to kick-start everything but it would need to come from a new source. We called them rentiers then, we call them high net worth individuals now. We also realised that local people (we could say that then without being xenophobic nationalists) would not be able to compete for houses with rich incomers and so protected a large tranche of homes just for local people.

We created a false market which for decades managed to keep local wages and affordable house prices linked together.

At the time we also realised there was something else we needed which didn’t fit either the local or open definition, namely the few skilled people whose skills couldn’t be found on-island. These were the doctors, nurses and teachers needed to make up any shortage in locals for those roles. I expect, as the numbers were so low, there was no great need to create a third housing tier for essential workers with licences and so a scheme was devised for them to live in the local market but with the value of their home linked to their pay so as not to upset the general affordability for locals.

Back then there were lots of locals for every guest essential worker to support. Over time that ratio changed with now only a handful of locals supported by every guest essential worker. And as the GEWs tend to be in demand and more highly paid, the balance has changed where locals now support GEWs. Indeed, we have so many guest essential workers that now other guest essential workers are needed to support themselves. Plus the local market was opened up to this cohort with on average higher pay and with the benefit of housing subsidies which helped push up the prices of local market properties to make them unaffordable for the people the local market was designed for.

We have now reached the situation that probably the least wealthy segment of our population was either born or brought up here, and for many opportunities are better outside of the island, which puts us in the sad position that many transient workers come here every year following the money, and many deep-rooted locals leave every year because they can’t afford to live here.

Guernsey is now much more a rock with a transient population than the deep-rooted community it once was. The Lt-Governor asked me if, in my opinion, this tide could be turned. I told him, ‘no’.

Am I wrong?