Horace Camp: Fantasy island

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when bright, well-meaning people sit around a boardroom dreaming up a plan without checking if there’s any money, manpower, or common sense to deliver it – look no further than the Voice of Guernsey Business report.

It’s slick, no doubt about that. Glossy graphs, neat buzzwords, plenty of ‘vision’. If reports could solve problems by sheer optimism alone, this one would have the job done by Christmas.

Sadly, the rest of us live on an island where houses don’t build themselves, boats and planes can’t be conjured out of thin air, and the taxman still expects his cut – even if the States hasn’t a clue what they’re going to do with it.

Reading this report is like watching someone stand in the middle of a ploughed field with a packet of seeds, announcing they’ll have a vineyard ready for bottling by next Tuesday. Admirable spirit. No grasp of reality.

Let’s look at what they’re asking for:

• Cheaper housing for workers

• Better air and sea links

• Higher education standards

• Faster, leaner government

• Lower taxes (or at least no nasty new ones)

All good things. All things we’d like too – just like we’d like Aurigny to run on time, or at all, if the weather’s right, the plane’s working, and someone’s found a pilot.

The problem is simple: you can’t have it all. Not unless you’re willing to make some very hard choices – the kind that involve higher taxes, public borrowing, or putting up with serious disruption.

Nowhere does the report admit that. It floats above it all, like a hot-air balloon running on committee-generated hot air.

Then there’s the little matter of who exactly is doing the talking.

Forty percent of survey respondents came from the finance sector. That’s hardly surprising – finance has been Guernsey’s golden goose for years. Trouble is, it’s also been fouling the nest.

The very sector complaining it can’t recruit enough staff helped drive house prices through the roof in the first place. It’s a bit rich now, moaning that ordinary families can’t afford to live here when you helped price them off the island.

You won’t find that awkward truth anywhere in the report. Nor will you find any serious discussion about what happens if the number of locally-born islanders keeps falling – not just as a percentage, but in cold, hard numbers.

Because make no mistake: we’re not just losing a few names off the parish rolls. We’re losing the heart of the island, one generation at a time – and there’s no amount of ‘upskilling’ that’s going to fix that.

If you’re a young lad or lass from the Vale or St Martin’s hoping to buy a home, settle down, and build a future here, this report might as well have been written in London for all the good it’ll do you.

Ah yes, ‘faster decision-making’. The dream of every businessman who’s ever had to fill in a States form written in 1986.

Apparently, what Guernsey needs is a government that moves at the speed of Amazon Prime. Never mind that we run on a consensus system built to move slower than a tractor on a wet day – and with about as much steering.

If the States suddenly started rushing big decisions through without endless debate, you can bet your last fiver that the first people howling about ‘lack of consultation’ would be the very same ones now demanding speed.

Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it – good and hard.

Every few pages, the report waves the word ‘technology’ around like a lucky charm. Technology will fix the housing shortage! Technology will solve transport links! Technology will speed up government!

Apparently, if we just turn everything into an app, Guernsey’s problems will sort themselves out between tea breaks.

Here’s a newsflash: You can digitise the forms all you like – it won’t build houses, run ferries in a gale, or find a maths teacher willing to teach for peanuts and pay £2,000 a month in rent.

Our problems aren’t technical. They’re human. And technology doesn’t build houses – it just makes it easier to see how few there are.

The biggest problem with the Voice of Guernsey Business report isn’t what it says. It’s what it doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say anything about protecting the people who built Guernsey – the ordinary families who farmed the land, ran the shops, taught in the schools, and kept the island ticking over through wars, depressions, and everything in between.

It doesn’t talk about how to stop young Guernsey-born people being priced out of their own parishes. It doesn’t ask how to create real career ladders for locals in finance and technology, not just leave them to serve coffee to those who flew in.

It offers no plan for keeping Guernsey Guernsey.

It speaks for employers. It speaks for commerce. It speaks for a vision of an island open to all – except, apparently, the people who made it worth coming to in the first place.

At the end of the day, this report is a wish list for a fantasy island. An island where houses spring up overnight, planes fly for pennies, taxes are painless, and government is slicker than a Guernsey cow on wet concrete.

But Guernsey isn’t a fantasy island. It’s a real place, with real people, real limits, and real decisions to make. And, of course, the value of the new talent who choose to make Guernsey their home cannot be overstated – their skills and expertise are essential to the island’s future. They enrich our workforce and contribute to the dynamism we need.

However, if we want a future that truly belongs to Guernsey – one that preserves what makes this place unique and doesn’t leave the island’s own people out of the picture – we’re going to need a lot more honesty, a lot more hard graft, and a lot less cloud cuckoo thinking.

If we don’t wake up soon, we’ll find the island we knew has slipped away – not with a bang, but with a whimper, and a few well-meaning committee reports gathering dust in a States office somewhere.