Quotes from one former and two serving deputies in the Press of Monday 9 March made clear what is wrong with Guernsey’s system of government, and why the electorate has been discontent with its performance for decades.
Deputy Haley Camp was quoted as saying ‘Deputies are … elected to exercise their own judgment on behalf of the public’. Having received 5,886 votes at the 2025 election, she acts ‘on behalf of’ only 30% of the 19,686 islanders who voted, and only 22% of those on the electoral roll.
The average number of votes received by serving deputies was 7,144. That’s only 36% of the number of islanders who voted. Guernsey’s government is one of the least representative of any democracy’s electorate in the world.
Former deputy and political commentator Peter Roffey was quoted as saying, ‘Nor are committee members bound by any sort of collective responsibility’, and also ‘… much of government goes on at committee level’. He has identified a significant problem without apparently meaning to. In the absence of ‘collective responsibility’, what is there to encourage committee members to compromise on their way to reaching agreement, and in what sense can they be held collectively accountable for anything at this key level of government?
The chief minister was quoted as stating that few deputies have ‘any interest in moving to a ministerial or cabinet system’. This is true, but why would our ‘independent decision-makers’ – as Deputy Camp describes them – want to sacrifice any of their independence to an executive?
Imposing an executive on our current system will never work which is why Guernsey’s machinery of government has not been restructured for decades – it has merely been tweaked.
Deputy de Sausmarez also dismissed the idea of government reform by suggesting that the only alternative is the deeply flawed ‘first-past-the-post’ party politics of the UK, disregarding the vast number of list-based systems around the world that offer stability through representation proportionate to voters’ wishes.
These quotes make it clear that the Guernsey electorate lacks proper representation, that our committee structure lacks accountability, and that our government lacks effective leadership. We have deputies who wish to exercise their ‘own judgment’ instead of speaking for those who elected them, who are not required to compromise while formulating policy, and who carry their widely-diverse opinions into the Assembly where they expect unrestricted liberty to express them at length. It is no wonder that it is taking so long for clear decisions to be made on, for example, how we educate our children or how we raise taxes.
The States’ Assembly & Constitution Committee recently commissioned a survey on Guernsey’s electoral system. But it was, in fact, merely a survey on Guernsey’s voting system, confining itself to questions concerning the mechanics of how we vote for 38 independents.
A far more important question is whether we consider a 38-way coalition of independent decision-makers exercising their ‘own judgment’ to be an effective form of government. This is where our attention should be focussed, and not on tinkering around the edges of an outdated system that has failed us for too long.
Nigel De La Rue
Vale
