Trying to keep the bums happy

He’d been told that the Island was one of the wealthiest places on the planet but whenever he visited all he experienced was gloom, pessimism and the promise of very difficult times ahead.

It seemed to him, he told me, that if all you get from a strong economy with a balanced budget is a lot of pain, you should try an alternative. Marti’s civilisation is a couple of centuries ahead of ours, and I tried to explain that we prefer to live a couple of centuries in the past, but it was a bit beyond him.

Anyhow to try and lift the depression, I suggested some entertainment. After looking through the numerous activities and choices available on a September evening in this thriving tourism centre, we plumped for the Institute of Directors annual debate. That should give Marti a laugh, I thought.

Coming from the Red Planet, he was a little reluctant to surround himself with hundreds of true blue conservatives, some of whom would make Margaret Thatcher look like Mother Teresa.

I tried to tell him that this wasn’t representative of Jersey society, but all Marti could mutter was ‘the bums, the bums’. It was only afterwards that I realized that this was just Marti’s shorthand for ‘businessmen, ultra-conservatives and millionaires’ and I had to admit that there was a fair scattering of bums at the debate.

Marti, who gets the JEP delivered, had already commented on how many millionaires have called for public services to be cut, so he wasn’t expecting much talk about tackling poverty and deprivation, income distribution and protecting jobs at this particular event.

• Read the full column by Peter Body, the editor of Business Brief magazine, in Thursday’s Jersey Evening Post