There is something about Guernsey in late May that makes you think, briefly, that nothing can really be wrong in the world. The hedgerows explode into colour, the light softens, the sea turns that impossible shade of blue-green, and for a few fleeting weeks the island feels almost absurdly blessed.
Normally this is the point where I would insert a mildly sarcastic diversion involving some obscure cultural reference from the 1980s before wandering gently towards whatever political point I was trying to make.
But not this week.
Because beneath the flowers and sunshine there is something else on display at the moment, and it is not especially healthy.
The row surrounding Katie Hopkins and the reaction to her shows has revealed something that has been quietly growing in Guernsey politics and public life for years – an increasingly intolerant belief that certain opinions are simply not permissible to hold, and that questioning approved narratives is itself somehow morally suspect.
Now, to be clear, people are perfectly entitled to dislike what she said. They are entitled to think parts of it were clumsy, unfair, tasteless or simply wrong. Satire is subjective. Personally, I had hoped for something a little sharper and more sophisticated in places. Some of it felt closer to Roy Chubby Brown than Private Eye.
But the more I reflected on it, the more I realised this is no longer really about satire at all. It is about a much broader instinct within parts of our political and administrative culture – the desire to control the narrative, manage permissible opinion, and steer public reaction towards pre-approved conclusions. And if you went to Katie’s show (as I did) you would realise that is her main political point.
It’s become quite grotesque on the mainland, but the more one watches local politics and States communications, the more one begins to realise it’s leaked into the day-to-day culture of government over here too.
You could see traces of the mindset last week in the increasingly chaotic communications surrounding the proposed GST-plus package, where within barely 24 hours we received a succession of clarifications, reinterpretations and apparent recalibrations as the political reaction deteriorated.
I had already publicly opposed the proposal to apply social security contributions to all worldwide income – earned and unearned alike – because social security is not, historically or conceptually, simply another tax. It is a contributory social insurance system.
As any decent public finance textbook would explain, contributory systems traditionally cap contributions on the way in, because benefits are capped on the way out. The logic is reciprocal. The contribution purchases an entitlement.
Admittedly, some of that principle was undermined after zero-10 as successive States searched ever more aggressively for more revenue. But this latest proposal crossed a genuine Rubicon.
Yet instead of openly acknowledging the scale of that shift, the communications effort appeared strangely focused on managing interpretation, narrowing definitions, issuing clarifications and reassuring people that they perhaps had not understood what they had quite plainly understood in the first place.
The most revealing moment came when P&R publicly complained that members were ‘sharing speculation with the media’ before subsequently confirming key elements of what had supposedly been speculation in the first place. It was a curious form of outrage: how dare people infer the logical implications of what they had already been told!
In my own case, I had not actually speculated at all. I had simply extrapolated to the obvious conclusion from what had been written and lamented the fact that journalists had clearly been briefed with information that had not been shared with deputies (though there was not enough space in the coverage for those comments – they having been displaced by the contents of the third clarification issued by P&R).
Increasingly, the objective appears not simply to inform the public, but to control the narrative and shape the boundaries of acceptable interpretation.
And that is the deeper issue here.
We are drifting towards a culture where disagreement itself is increasingly treated as a kind of social offence; where people feel pressured to self-censor; where perfectly mainstream opinions are recast as somehow beyond the pale if they conflict with the prevailing orthodoxy of a relatively small but highly vocal political and cultural cohort.
Sadly, that mindset has bled into wider political and economic discourse.
I wrote last year, in the context of immigration and cultural change, that Guernsey had perhaps lost a little of its traditional character over the past 15 years – particularly within parts of the public sector and political class. Not because of some dramatic conspiracy, but because institutions inevitably absorb the assumptions and instincts of the people who come to dominate them.
Increasingly, parts of the States apparatus feel culturally detached from the historically pragmatic, commercially literate and fiscally cautious instincts that once characterised Guernsey. In their place has emerged a narrower managerial orthodoxy – more comfortable regulating wealth than creating it, more comfortable managing public opinion than representing it, and often deeply suspicious of dissenting views.
Slowly and almost imperceptibly, the States has become culturally captured by a world view that is not especially representative of the island as a whole.
The irony, of course, is that many of the people advancing these ideas are themselves only here because previous generations successfully built a dynamic economy capable of attracting labour, capital and opportunity from elsewhere. I include myself in that category. But it was lost on some who felt moved to send me some rather inappropriate reaction.
Guernsey did not become prosperous accidentally. It was built over decades by people who understood enterprise, competitiveness, investment and growth. They understood that wealth has to be created before it can be distributed.
The deeper problem is that parts of our political culture now appear increasingly disconnected from the basic mechanics of wealth creation itself.
There’s talk endlessly about fairness and redistribution (of other people’s money let’s not forget) but far less about the conditions required to generate the wealth that ultimately pays for all of it.
Economic growth is treated as something faintly suspect and those advocating it risk being shouted down by those peddling the latest managerial fashions surrounding ‘wellbeing economics’ and alternative measures of prosperity.
And this mentality matters. Because once a society begins to lose respect for enterprise, competitiveness, investment and risk-taking, it starts consuming the prosperity created by previous generations rather than renewing it.
And after two decades of stagnation, rising living costs and growing fiscal strain, many islanders might reasonably prefer a functioning economy before being lectured about post-material metrics of happiness.
The common thread in all of this – from speech, to communications, to taxation, to economic policy – is an increasingly visible discomfort with challenge itself and the working assumption that there is one approved narrative, one acceptable framework of opinion, and that stepping outside it requires correction or condemnation.
Prosperous societies do not usually decline dramatically. More often they become gradually narrower, more censorious, less confident and less capable of honest disagreement.
They begin to confuse dissent with danger.
And by the time they realise what has happened, the flowers are still blooming, the sun is still shining, and outwardly everything still looks perfectly fine.
But underneath, something important has already started to decay.
