There is a line I saw recently on the social media site X that has stayed with me. The writer known as Capel Lofft – who has over 40,000 followers on X (previously Twitter) – described himself as ‘half-Tory, half-socialist’. At first that sounds absurd. In modern politics you are meant to choose: market conservatism or state socialism, one tribe or the other. But the phrase captures something real. At their best, both traditions start from the same instinct: that a good society is built on duty, solidarity and care for other people – not just on rights, contracts and transactions.
That matters in Guernsey because we are not an abstract society. We are a small island community where decisions are felt quickly and personally. You see the effects in the parish, in the high street, in the waiting room, and in the people you know by name. Our politics have always worked best when it reflects that reality.
Old Toryism, before it hardened into a defence of markets for their own sake – so pre-Thatcher – believed in an organic society: place, continuity, institutions, and obligations passed from one generation to the next. As an aside, I have always considered Margaret Thatcher, and her brand of economics-driven policy making, to be an economic liberal – with a small L – over and above her being a Conservative properly so called.
Conservatives by definition usually look to conserve; Mrs Thatcher was obsessed by ripping up the old world of the post-Second War World consensus and exposing the UK to the tough world of market forces. If anything, this was actually a reversion to the classic economic liberalism of the 19th century in the United Kingdom. So Thatcher was a 19th-century Liberal rather more than a 20th-century Conservative in my view.
Ethical socialism reaches a similar conclusion about the importance of society, place and duties, etc, but from another direction. It says that a decent society does not leave people to fend for themselves simply because the market finds it efficient to do so. Both traditions ask the same basic question: not just ‘Is it allowed?’, but ‘Is it right?’
That is why both sit uneasily with a politics built only on individual choice and the market. If everything is reduced to autonomy, private preference and contract, then the shared moral life of a community starts to disappear. The weakest people feel that first.
You can see this tension clearly in Guernsey’s current debates. On assisted dying, the liberal argument is straightforward: personal autonomy, personal choice, private decision. But the counter-argument is not simply dogma or sentimentality. It is the concern that once a society crosses that line, subtle pressure falls hardest on those who are already vulnerable – the elderly, the disabled, the isolated, and those who feel themselves to be a burden. In a small island, where family, care and dependence are woven tightly together, that risk is not theoretical. It is immediate. I am a long-term sceptic of the notion of assisted dying, even if I can fully understand why the issue is such an important and urgent one. While I can see the arguments about personal autonomy, the key issue for me is the need for protection of the vulnerable. It is, I think, very difficult to provide guarantees about protection of the vulnerable in all circumstances; hence my scepticism. That is not to say that this should not be debated again and the issue explored with sensitivity and respect on all sides of the argument.
The same applies to cannabis. The current debate in the States of Deliberation over whether Guernsey should examine a regulated framework has been presented by some as a matter of liberty, consumer choice and economic realism. But again, that is only half the picture. The real question is what kind of culture and consequences we are prepared to normalise, and who carries the cost when things go wrong. In practice, it will not be borne by abstract adults in a policy paper. It will be borne by families, schools, mental health services and neighbourhoods.
The current requete looks to setting up a working group to consider the policy options and mechanics. That might seem a rather sensible starting point if the requete is ultimately carried by the States; but the working group should not then only look at the issue from the very narrow lens of individual rights to the exclusion of wider societal responsibilities.
We see the same subtle erosion of solidarity in the gradual, technocratic centralisation of our island’s governance. For generations, the civic heartbeat of Guernsey lived in our parish system and the douzaines. These were parochial institutions built entirely on unpaid public duty, local knowledge, and face-to-face accountability. Yet modern administrative reforms consistently treat these historic bodies as inefficient anomalies. When you replace organic, community-led civic duty with centralised state bureaucracy, you turn citizens into mere customers or consumers of government services. We lose these vital local practices where neighbours look out for their fellow neighbours because they share geography not an administrative department.
This is where Guernsey should trust its own political inheritance. We still have institutions that remind us that politics is about more than central government and markets: the States of Deliberation as a parliament, the douzaines, the parish system, the highly regarded voluntary sector, and that older instinct of voisinage – looking after one another because we belong to the same place. That tradition is not nostalgic clutter. It is a reminder that liberty only works when it is held inside a strong culture of mutual responsibility.
Too often we talk as though Guernsey was just a tax jurisdiction, a labour market or a set of economic outputs. It is not. It is more than just a collection of contracts. It is a community, and communities survive by resisting the idea that everything can be measured as a transaction. Housing is not just supply and demand if local people are priced out of their own island. Tax is not just efficiency if it weakens the practical bonds that hold public life together. Healthcare is not just personal choice if the vulnerable begin to feel that their continued existence needs to be justified.
So yes, ‘half-Tory, half-socialist’ may sound untidy. But in Guernsey terms it really means something quite simple: a politics that values duty as much as freedom, solidarity as much as autonomy, and the common good as much as private choice. That is not confused ideology. It is just old-fashioned Guernsey common sense. I increasingly detect a real tension between Old Guernsey notions of duty and common sense with the New Guernsey of liberal values and notions of individual autonomy over everything else. These issues will need to be resolved carefully by our government and community over the next few years in a variety of different areas. But we forget our long-standing community values at our peril in my view. Check out @CapelLofft on the social media website X for more insight into this relevant political dynamic.
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