Accountability seems to be in short supply these days

What if Exeter airport had likewise decided to turn off the lights and all go home before GR728 had made the round trip back to Exeter?

The waste of money and time for all concerned and the further exposure of passengers to the risks of flying (which go up the longer you fly), was absolutely unnecessary. The airport opening hours had already been extended by agreement, else the delayed Exeter flight would not have taken off.

This is only a wild conjecture but one imagines an inter-departmental spat taking place between the respective civil service bods administrating the States-run airport and airlines. Did somebody at the airport think that, with their recent daily inefficiencies, Aurigny was that day pushing the proverbial envelope too far? When they turned off the airport lights, was someone making a point?

Whatever the case, it seems that these folk forgot they were working for the same company – Guernsey PLC. They let the people down. They forgot their duty to public service and safety.

Who’s to blame?

Accountability allied to honourable service seems to be in short supply these days, both in the private and the public sectors, in Guernsey and the UK. The culture has changed. People don’t resign easily until they’ve negotiated a big fat pay-off.

My own recent flying experience points towards some of the airline’s and our airport’s seemingly intractable operational issues, with which I do have some sympathy but don’t have the space to fully go into here. Suffice to say that after disembarking a recent flight from Bristol, my partner and I were close to three-quarters of an hour late getting land-side after a 10-minute wait on the plane and 20 to 25 minutes waiting for our luggage in the arrival hall.

This was a minor inconvenience compared to some that passengers have recently experienced.

It turned out that the staff who were due to unload our luggage had been busily re-engaged in loading another plane to enable it to leave on time. Needless to say, I have every sympathy for these often overworked, understaffed, and not highly paid people. They have to face an often irate public, while their bosses skulk safely and mostly anonymously behind closed office doors.

It’s at this point that I have to nail my socialist sentiments to the mast and admit that for all the frustration I might share with Lord Digby about our States-run airline and airport – and ‘our States-run system’ generally, his opinion piece of 27 August came across to me as a cheap shot – an excuse for a tirade against ‘socialism’ in the UK and the public ownership of utilities in Guernsey and the UK.

His notions of ‘socialism run rampant in the UK and the inefficiencies of the ‘Guernsey Way’ seem like poor caricatures to me. And his comments about Labour seem rich given that in the last few years, most of the wealth creators and entrepreneurs bringing their talents to Guernsey have been leaving the UK in droves, not because of an incumbent Labour government’s policies but precisely because of 14 years of Tory ineptitude. Witness the hit to the British economy with the debacle and prolonged agony of the Tory contrived Brexit, the gross mismanagement of Sars Covid 2, the scandal of privatised water companies, like Thames Water polluting the UK’s rivers and, not least, years of austerity which have put the country as a whole into greater debt than when the Tories first took office.

Not that I am a fan of the new Labour government. Lord Digby is right to say that the unions will put pressure on the new government, as did the various oligarchs, plutocrats, corporate lobbyists and foreign interests perpetually sponsoring the war-chest of the Conservative Party. And it’s not as if the Labour Party doesn’t make bedfellows of the plutocrats. Tony Blair – now ‘Sir’ Tony – metaphorically speaking went to bed with the establishment when he regularly consulted with ‘Sir’ Rupert Murdoch. He also engaged with ‘Sir’ Michael Levy on dubious million-pound, money-raising projects for the Labour Party.

Today Sir Keir Starmer and his party are no less creatures of the plutocrats and lobbyists now dominating the governments of the UK and the USA.

The truth is, the current Labour Party executive has barely the faintest whiff of genuine socialism about them. Sir Keir, is after all, the former public prosecutor who saw to the incarceration of Julian Assange for all those years without charge, and who openly supports Israel’s ‘war’ against the Palestinians (and by implication the genocide taking place there now).

The only genuine socialist MP to openly oppose those injustices, Jeremy Corbyn was thrown out of the Labour Party.

Having an inefficient airline service must be an extreme inconvenience to our rich residents.

To be fair to Lord Digby, Guernsey does seem to sell itself as a ‘haven for wealth creators’. Some people would see such wealth creation as a euphemism for ‘tax avoidance.’

MARK WINDSOR