Just who does the States represent?

1. Where's all the staff coming from?

2. If a shop does open on Sunday the only way to attract staff is pay them a premium rate making that day's trade less profitable.

3. The big supermarkets will be the only ones to benefit and the small shops open for years will see their profits drop and may go out of business.

4. It could be inflationary – increased running costs will have to be passed on at some point.

5. If the big stores do open they will need deliveries, so that side of the workforce won't be happy either.

6. It will cease totally to be a family day and will just become another busy day on the roads, annoying many neighbours who at the moment have at least one relatively quiet day a week.

7. Once introduced it won't make a penny more for the shops as a whole. Small ones will lose out big time and although the larger ones will take more over the week, the profit will be gone on increased running costs.

Also, as I've pointed out before, a family can't spend more now than they did before – they have still the same money to budget with – we are an island after all, so no increase in shoppers.

The States went for a populist option without consulting the people who will have to try to make this work – and it won't work that well.

I don't know – they pass this, yet they totally muck the seafront up, and have had so many road closures that shops have had to close or had their profits drastically cut. They got the airport redevelopment totally wrong by not extending the runway. They favoured Condor and that's turned into a disaster.

They are now going to replace the buses with smaller ones, after years of telling us they couldn't do it, for the simple reason they bought the wrong ones in the first place.

Now we move on to the fiasco of the milk retailers. They have been told that, in effect, most of their business has been taken away from them but they still have the monopoly on home deliveries. Big deal. If a man comes up to me and takes a potential 60% of my money away from me, do you expect me to thank him for keeping the other 40%? They have simply 'cherry-picked' the best and most profitable part of their business away from them.

It's a bit like the UK Post Office losing the monopoly on parcel deliveries. Everyone wanted them but nobody wanted to deliver the letters so they left the Post Office with that because everyone knows there's no money in it.

And they are talking about compensation. Well, if they do that they are opening a can of worms. How can you compensate one group and not others affected by States policies? Do they compensate shops because of a road closure? Will they compensate shops that lose money when the big stores eat their profits away? How will they work out how to compensate them?

I would like to say I can think of a good point but I honestly can't. This isn't sour grapes, this is a disaster on the part of those elected to lead us and who, every election time, claim to represent Guernsey and Guernsey traditions – and then spend the next five years trying to destroy them.

MARTIN BISHOP,

Flat 17, Les Casquets,

Amherst, St Peter Port.