There is something faintly dishonest about the way the GST debate is being framed in Guernsey. We are invited to argue about mechanics, whether it is fair, whether it is regressive, whether tourists will pay their share, whether income tax should fall if GST rises, and all of that may be interesting to accountants and economists, but it is not the real argument, it is noise around the edges, because the real question is much simpler and much more uncomfortable, which is why the States of Guernsey says it needs more money at all.
If this island were a household, or a small business, or even a badly run parish club, it would already have been called in for a serious talk, not because it is poor but because it is careless, because it does not seem to know what it gets for what it spends, because it does not measure success in any rigorous way, because it does not stop doing things that are clearly failing, because it rarely admits mistakes in plain language, and because it simply keeps spending and then, when the sums stop adding up, it turns to the taxpayer and says the answer is more income.
That is not modern government, it is adolescent behaviour, the sort you see in the child who burns through pocket money in two days on rubbish and then appears at the kitchen door with an empty wallet and an innocent face and explains that the real problem is that the allowance is too small, and the parent who simply hands over more money without asking where the first lot went is not generous, but irresponsible.
The States of Guernsey has spent £42m. on projects that delivered nothing, not a bit less than promised, not late, not imperfect, but nothing, and in the real world that would end careers. Yet in Guernsey it barely seems to dent the flow of policy letters and cheerful assurances that lessons have been learned, and when a system can lose £42m. and carry on as if it were a mislaid receipt, the problem is not revenue but judgment.
So when that same system comes along and says it needs GST we should not admire its technical cleverness but ask why it has not learned to look after what it already has.
Supporters of GST talk about resilience and stability, they talk about broadening the tax base, they show neat graphs and international comparisons, but they never answer the most important point, which is what evidence there is that the States will spend the extra money any better than it spends the current money, and there is none.
Look at how things actually work. We have committees that commission consultants to tell them what they already half believe, strategies that sit on shelves, consultations that exhaust the public and change almost nothing, and projects that drift on long after it is obvious they are not going to work because stopping them would mean admitting error.
In Guernsey process has become a substitute for success. If a working group meets, a report is written, a press release is issued, then something must have been achieved, but what has usually been achieved is the transfer of public money into salaries, fees, and administration while the outcome remains foggy, delayed, or quietly abandoned.
No serious private business could operate like this, no family could, yet the States does, year after year, and then says the answer is a new tax.
GST is being sold as inevitable, as if the mere fact that other places have it makes it virtuous, but plenty of badly run places have taxes too, and having a tax does not make you competent, spending it well might.
We are told that GST will come with an income tax cut. Perhaps it will for a while, but once a tax exists it never really goes away, it becomes easy to increase and politically awkward to remove, income tax can creep back up, GST can creep up too, two taps feeding the same leaky bucket.
This is not about being anti tax in principle. It is about refusing to reward bad behaviour. Before you ask people in St Sampson’s, St Martin’s, Castel, Vale, the town and everywhere in between to pay more, you should show them that you can be trusted with what you already take, and at the moment that trust has been badly eroded.
There are no clear productivity measures across the States. Nobody can easily say what output we get for each pound spent in most departments. There is no brutal, public comparison of what works and what does not. There is no culture that says if you designed a failure you will not design the next big thing. Instead failure is absorbed, wrapped in soft language, described as challenging or complex or evolving, and then the system moves on, slightly embarrassed but fundamentally unchanged.
When people say that Guernsey faces big pressures, an ageing population, health costs, infrastructure, they are right, but pressure is not an excuse for waste. In fact it is when discipline matters most, because a household under strain does not respond by borrowing more and hoping, it cuts back, prioritises, and makes sure that what it does spend actually works, and if it does not, it goes broke.
Guernsey is not broke, but it behaves as if it assumes it never will be.
There is something deeply unfair about the moral tone of the GST argument, because it is often framed as responsible, grown up, unavoidable, and the implication is that anyone who questions it is childish or nostalgic, but what is really childish is to keep making the same mistakes and expecting someone else to cover them.
Real adulthood is learning from failure, stopping what does not work, admitting error without wrapping it in jargon, and treating other people’s money as more precious than your own, not less.
At the moment the States treats money as abstract, as numbers in a spreadsheet, but every pound it wastes is a slice of someone’s life, someone worked for it, saved it, paid it in tax, and losing it is not just a technical error but a moral one.
None of this is a personal attack on public servants. Many of them work hard and care deeply. But good people trapped in a bad system will still produce bad results, because systems matter more than intentions.
GST will not fix a bad system. It will feed it.
If the States wants people to trust it with more money it must earn that trust first, not with speeches or glossy documents but with behaviour, by stopping big failing projects early, publishing clearly what went wrong and who was responsible, measuring outcomes not activity, closing things that do not work, changing leadership when leadership fails, and showing that £42m. will never again vanish into thin air.
Do that for a few years and then come back and talk about new taxes, because at that point people might believe that extra money will not just disappear into the same mist of good intentions and poor results.
Until then GST is not a sign of modern government. It is a sign of a government that has run out of ideas for controlling itself.
So what do we do about it?
Do we shrug, mutter into our tea, and let it roll over us again, or do we finally draw a line in the sand and say no more?
Because this did not arrive by accident. A great many of the deputies now sitting in the States were elected on the basis that they would not support GST. They said it on doorsteps. They said it in hustings. They said it in leaflets and posts and promises. People voted for them on that basis.
And then, when the first real test came, it was those very same deputies who refused to freeze the 2026 budget at 2025 levels. It was those very same deputies who insisted that their committees could not possibly get through 2026 without more money. It was those very same deputies who said that restraint was unrealistic, that everything was urgent, that everything was essential.
You cannot campaign as a brake and then govern as an accelerator.
If you tell people you will not support GST, but then you create the financial conditions that make GST ‘necessary’, you have not kept your word, you have just taken a longer, quieter route to breaking it.
So the choice is not abstract. It is not about models and forecasts and glossy papers. It is about memory.
We either allow politics to become a place where promises expire the moment the ballot boxes are emptied, or we remind people that words said to voters still matter after the election.
And this is not a time for murmuring into teacups and hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting, because power rarely changes course when it is asked nicely, it changes when it is made uncomfortable, when it hears noise instead of whispers and sees faces instead of spreadsheets.
If deputies were elected on promises not to support GST, and then those same deputies refused to freeze the 2026 budget at 2025 levels, and then insisted their committees needed more and more money to get through 2026, they did not drift into contradiction, they walked into it with their eyes open, and if voters respond with silence they will quite rightly conclude that promises are theatre and elections are just the opening night.
So yes, it does need shouting, and it does need marches, because democracy is not a spectator sport, and when people in power learn that breaking promises carries no cost, they will keep doing it, calmly, politely, and without a flicker of embarrassment.
Shouting is not thuggery, it is clarity, and marching is not mob rule, it is memory made visible, it is people saying we remember what you said, we remember why we voted for you, and we will not pretend that your words evaporated the moment you sat down on those red seats in the Royal Court House.
The States is used to consultations that can be managed, letters that can be filed, emails that can be answered with templates, but it is not used to crowds, to voices, to the physical reminder that its authority comes from people who can still stand up, walk together, and make themselves impossible to ignore. If they want GST, let them argue for it honestly, not as the result of ‘circumstances’ they themselves created, but as a conscious choice that breaks what they promised when they wanted votes. Let them look people in the eye and say, I said one thing to get elected and I am now doing another. Let them own that in daylight.
Because the real danger is not GST itself. The real danger is a culture where promises mean nothing, memory means nothing, and voters are expected to swallow whatever is put in front of them because complaining is seen as bad manners.
So yes, shout. March. Be awkward. Be visible. Be remembered.
Not because you enjoy noise, but because silence has already cost you £42m. and a government that now thinks it can spend first, fail quietly, and then send the bill to everyone else.
And if that does not deserve raised voices and full streets, then nothing ever will.
