I cannot recall a time during the last 50 years – I am 65 but I cannot pretend I thought about these things much before the age of 15! – when the world has seemed such an uncertain place. The possibility of trade wars between the United States and China, two major economies of the world, is depressing – bad for business and for the economy, and therefore bad for all of us.
I am sure that we all say in our personal lives, although it is presumably not strictly accurate, that the world is getting smaller day by day – whether because by chance we meet people we know in far-flung parts of the world, or merely because of the globalisation and the changes in technology, the rate of which seems to be increasing. To those of us brought up on ‘wet’ photocopies from a Gestetner copier, the mauve ink from which tended to come off on our hands, and the world of teleprinters and telex, the fax machine was an almost incomprehensible development; and look where we are now when simply by talking to a machine, what you say is automatically printed the other side of the world.
Another change, nearer to home, is the Brexit debate and disagreements around it – and although Brexit is in the news so often that we must all be fed up reading about it, the fact is that the relationship between the United Kingdom and the EU member states is fundamentally important for us all, for our security and safety, for our standard of living and for the maintenance of the life that probably we have all come to take for granted. I can well understand why the internal arguments over Brexit have been so passionate – for wherever you fall on the debate, they concern constitutional structures which, at the end of the day, are fundamentally important.
We know that in Jersey because we regularly have to assert our own internal autonomy when others seek to put pressure upon us to make changes. At the end of the day democracy demands that we should make our own minds up about how we are governed and what steps need to be taken to improve the lives of our community. That indeed is the democracy we enjoy.
We achieve this by teamwork – by working together and finding compromises. Lawyers know well that a good compromise will leave all parties to it feeling slightly unhappy with it. In a small community, that is perhaps even more necessary than in a larger one.
Teamwork and our community are first cousins – they go hand in hand.
The smallness of our community calls for that. I can think back this year to the World War One Armistice Centenary celebrations; to Jersey Sings!, an event at Fort Regent in June where we had a choir of 600 people performing a selection of new songs, medleys and in particular a medley to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day; or to the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, where Jersey competitors performed brilliantly together. We can take pride in the achievements of Serena Guthrie as captain of English netball, a position to which she would not have been appointed without her leadership and teamwork skills.
So there are real positives to be taken from the civic, music and sports worlds, teamwork to be applied in all other areas of work and play in the Island. It is something we are good at, and at a time of world uncertainty, we need to remind ourselves of how these strengths can work to make lives better in this small island.
My wife and I wish all the Jersey Evening Post readers a peaceful Christmas, filled with the confidence that by working together solutions will be found to the problems of 2019, whatever they may be.
