Andy Sloan: Tax. Sleep. Stagnate. Repeat.

Turns out Deputy St Pier wasn’t the only politician trying to change the narrative this week. Rachel Reeves’ mansplaining complaints were a pretty desperate attempt to redirect attention from the fiscal mess of the UK Budget. And let’s be frank – it’s a horror show, with already pathetic growth forecasts downgraded and Labour boxed into a corner.

If you thought Guernsey’s Budget was Groundhog Day – 15 years of politely clearing our throat about the structural deficit – spare a thought for Rachel Reeves.

The UK is stuck in a low-growth, high-tax doom loop so tight it should come with a health warning: weak growth begets a bigger deficit; a bigger deficit begets higher taxes; higher taxes beget… even weaker growth.

Of course, there is an alternative, but the last person to suggest it was ridiculed for being a lettuce and hounded out of office. Mind you, the one before that refashioned the UK economy, delivering three decades of economic rejuvenation and a country rediscovering the pride it had misplaced after the war. But apparently, according to certain posters (you know who you are, Laurie), I can be a bit of a bore in my veneration for the Iron Lady.

Which brings us back to the lettuce. The mythology around Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership has become a morality tale bearing only faint resemblance to the facts. We are invited to believe Britain’s long-run stagnation, planning sclerosis and monetary distortions were all somehow the fault of a sentient Caesar salad.

The lesson drawn isn’t that sequencing was wrong or communications catastrophic – it’s that attempting anything different carries career-ending risk. Better to hug the consensus tightly than test the possibility of growth.

And that is where the irony lies. Everyone talks about the need to ‘change direction’, ‘reset’, ‘show leadership’ – but the consensus punishes precisely the people who try. Hence a political culture in which doing nothing is the only truly consequence-free option. The brave are ridiculed, the cautious rewarded, and the economy wheezes along at less than one percent growth a year.

So when our own leaders start reaching for the cliche ‘doing things differently’, it pays to listen closely. Because in the post-truth world we’ve drifted into – somewhere between Trumpian pantomime and bureaucratic improv – ‘different’ almost never means different. It means the same orthodoxy, reheated, relabelled, and served with a new garnish of sincerity.

And Guernsey isn’t immune. There’s a lot of ‘doing things differently’ being tossed around as a supposed strategy for hauling the States out of its own fiscal pickle – a pickle which, according to Gavin St Pier on the Guernsey Press Politics Podcast this week (the first one – we were spoilt, there were two), has managed to get £20m. worse the moment he sat down having passed his Budget.

On that podcast, Deputy St Pier described the Sloan/Camp vote as ‘consequence-free’, as though the only votes that count are the ones that win. It’s a neat way to invalidate any challenge: nothing matters unless government says it does – and only after the result is known. But the joke wears thin when you look at the numbers, and this instinct to swat away dissent after the fact is fast turning into a bad political habit.

A third of States members – hardly trivial – looked at our spending trajectory and decided enough was enough. That wasn’t some risk-free flutter. It was a signal that patience with fiscal drift is wearing thin.

Of course, whenever you stick your neck out on fiscal matters you quickly discover who’s actually paying attention – and who’s paying for the system. I had a letter this week thanking me for ‘holding the States’ feet to the fire’, but politely questioning my support of GST. It was thoughtful, sincere – and revealing. People are watching the numbers more closely than government seems to think.

And Mr Chadwick, whose letter prompted the question, raises a fair point. So for the record: in principle I’ve always regarded consumption taxes as among the most economically efficient ways to raise revenue. They give people greater choice over how they spend their own money, distort behaviour far less than income taxes, and – when properly designed – form an integral part of a fair, broad-based system. That doesn’t mean I’m wedded to any particular model for Guernsey, but it does mean I prefer to deal in economics rather than the comforting half-truths that tend to dominate our tax debates.

But if you really want to see whether ‘doing things differently’ means anything in practice, look at the recent Scrutiny hearing on property. Politicians and officials talked confidently about ‘savings’, ‘efficiencies’ and ‘revised cost envelopes’ – yet couldn’t quantify any of them. As the press reported, not a single figure was offered to support the claims. It’s become a habit: announce the intention, skip the maths, and hope no one asks for the working. But people do ask – and they notice when the numbers never appear.

And if that weren’t enough, we also heard the almost casual admission that the department had no KPIs at all for measuring whether its own reforms were working. Not ‘in development’, not ‘being reviewed’ – simply none. I was told afterwards in the Guernsey Press leader column that Scrutiny had ‘missed the mark’, but I don’t think so. We focussed on facts: claims with no numbers, savings with no baselines, reforms with no way of knowing whether they succeed or fail. If accountability isn’t built on measurement, it isn’t accountability – it’s theatre.

Which brings us to the latest bedtime story: that corporate tax reform will magically deliver the tens of millions we need without touching households, businesses or services.

It’s a lovely idea, but increasingly a triumph of hope over arithmetic. We are being invited to believe we can maintain services, invest in new ones, upgrade infrastructure, fix the structural deficit and have no meaningful tax rises – all because ‘something will come up’. It’s optimism that would make Mr Micawber blush.

Another ‘truth’ we heard on the GP podcast was that Guernsey Forward’s much-touted 1% efficiency savings aren’t necessarily reductions in spending at all. Savings, we’re now told, don’t have to produce a net decrease – a distinction nowhere to be found in the manifesto. Instead, we’re offered ‘baseline expenditure reductions’, which – in a feat of conceptual acrobatics worthy of Cirque du Soleil – can still be reductions even when the baseline rises. And the public is expected to nod along while government redefines cost control to mean whatever suits it this week.

And this is where Guernsey’s real problem lies. It isn’t tax policy, or savings targets, or even the deficit. It’s honesty. Islanders can spot political stagecraft a mile away – the rebranded ‘reductions’, the freshly polished cliches, the insistence that everything means whatever government needs it to mean this week. People aren’t asking for miracles; they’re asking to be told the truth.

Disagreement is fine; delusion is not. And after the month (and by the time you read this, the week) we’ve just had – of spin and post-truth theatre – I suspect voters want fewer performances and more candour. That, if I’m honest, is why I stood for election. My world-view may be old-fashioned, but it hasn’t changed: you start by levelling with people. Everything else flows from that.