Offshore wealth – here for sure or just to camp?

Lord Digby’s first piece (there has been another since) seemed to imply that the slow plodding intransigence of the island’s politicians and our island’s political system is discouraging more wealthy people coming to the island. That, and the lack of housing, for rich and poor alike.

Well he would be frustrated by Guernsey, wouldn’t he? As former trade minister in Gordon Brown’s Labour government (though a cross-bench peer and not a Labour MP), as a former director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (from 2000 to 2006), and still as a champion of small businesses and business in general, the lord must be champing at the bit to get Guernsey going. You can take the business leader out of the UK but not the egoic business leader out of the man.

For the good lord isn’t here for tax reasons, he says. He simply likes the place – that is why he and his wife came to live here. And now as an ‘islander’ of just five years standing, he wants to shake Guernsey out of its lethargy.

The lord’s apparent ‘outsider arrogance’ is all too much of a ‘bull in a china shop’ syndrome for some locals. Lord Digby’s criticism of the ‘Guernsey Way’ elicited predictable knee-jerk responses from defenders of the Guernsey faith (myself included).

He certainly raised the hackles of ex-farmer Horace, one of the Guernsey finance industry’s most well-publicised donkeys.

Never a true fan of political correctness, Horace climbed briefly back on to his tractor and stooped to retort: ‘You know when the next boat is Lord Digby’.

Lord knows he does, but will the boat be on time, or ‘go tech’ before it is due to depart?

As one of Guernsey finance’s long-standing employees, Horace is one of its beneficiaries. He was there at the industry’s outset, when it was just an amoeba in Guernsey’s verdant pond. However, in his response to Lord Digby’s article he was surprisingly rueful about the deleterious effects evolutionary finance has had on the local way of life.

Horace recognises the island has to move with the times – allegedly – but he has a sentimental attachment to those days before the island was invaded by the finance industry’s technocrats and functionaries. Since then, horticulture has all but vaporised, while agriculture and tourism have been slowly strangled by ‘Europe’ and other factors, and are now hanging on to their last wheezing breaths.

The island’s dependence on just one industry has left politicians caught like rabbits frozen in the headlights of oncoming worldly traffic.

Put on the defensive foot, former farmer Horace, champion of the local finance industry, regularly retreats into the safety of whimsical nostalgia – one of the reasons for his column’s popularity in the GP.

To be fair, Horace is the first to admit that the island has done comfortably well as an offshore centre, managing wealthy individuals’ financial assets. But, here’s the snagging point – without them necessarily having to live over here. That’s the whole essence of offshore finance centres – or at least that’s what Guernsey folk like Horace like to think.

The finance industry – the island’s one-trick pony, is the undoubted mainstay of the local economy. We have nothing else to offer the world except our dubious insularity and the benefits of wind and tide that go with it. And we haven’t exactly been proactive in investing in these natural assets – as Lord Digby would likely point out. Not that the lord would want to see wind turbines off the south coast as he ponders the twilight years from Guernsey’s beautiful cliff tops.

In my opinion, wealth creation in Guernsey has to be a lot more than our continuing to be a residence for tax avoiders – which is the island’s effective specialism.

We used to live by a different tide, but now the politicians do pretty much as they are told, in awe and forever obsequious to finance.

There is a balance to be struck. Guernsey people don’t want the island to be an exclusive enclave for rich people who have no intrinsic interest in Guernsey’s history and its people – as I am sure the good lord is aware.

If Lord Digby Jones could lay out some concrete ideas for creating wealth in Guernsey in which the benefits for all could be seen (and that means ordinary local people, not just financial exiles who come here with an oversized sense of privilege and entitlement), he might garner some support.

So far his notion of wealth creation seems allusive, with no real substance, yet.

Ideas please, on a postcard, to the Guernsey Press.

Mark Windsor