Pondering the future of our ‘boomerang’ society

Living as we do in a ‘boomerang’ society, where ‘issues’ have the annoying tendency of coming back over and over again, if Islanders woke up on New Year’s day to find that the clock had shifted forward an entire decade, would life be all that different?

So, dear reader, join me in gazing into a magic crystal ball to analyse the hot topics from 2022 month by month.

New Year’s day 2022 was the most iconic landmark date in Channel Islands history when the United Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (Jernsey) became an independent country. In pouring rain, President Sir William Bailhache, and Prime Minister Sir Philip Ozouf, jointly lowered the Union Flag for the last time at Mont Orgueil and handed it to King William and Queen Catherine.

Unfortunately, a bus drivers’ strike prevented an expected huge crowd of Bailiwickers gathering on the Castle Green.

Premier Ozouf closed his inaugural speech by promising that his cabinet would at last grasp the nettle and introduce government reform. To the embarrassment of those assembled, the Constable of St Ouen announced that his parish was having none of it and he announced a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) to be immediately followed by the Constables of Trinity and St Mary.

February 2022 was a sorry and sad day for the good burghers of St Clement. As a thunderstorm drenched the island, the last open space was approved for development and the parish became incorporated into Greater St Helier, as St Saviour had been two years previously.

In March, Jernsey’s most celebrated 1(1)K resident, Dame Cheryl Cole, braved light showers to open the long-awaited bridge to France. Unfortunately, the entire population of St Martin – still living in a tented city in Sark two years after the parish was compulsorily purchased to accommodate the bridge’s infrastructure – demonstrated en mass and blocked traffic for two weeks.

Bus drivers staged yet more lightening strikes and St Brelade, St Lawrence and St Peter declared UDI resulting in a hung parliament.

April showers and a month-long bus strike paled into insignificance as the Island is now ruled from Guernsey after Greater St Helier joins the rebellion. The local pound tumbles as the finance industry quakes in its boots in the new financial centre that, by 2022, has grown so substantially that the whole of St Aubin’s Bay has been reclaimed and built upon.

Liberation Day proves to be a riotous occasion, in spite of yet more torrential rain and Islandwide flooding.

Outlawed Union Flags again fly proudly around the Island as Grouville and St John complete the set by declaring UDI. Inspired by the patriotic British groundswell, bus drivers return to work.

Hi-jacking the entire fleet, including the sedan chairs used on less popular routes, they provide free transport to get the revolting masses to Liberation Square where the Constable of St Ouen raises the Union Flag from the Pomme d’Or.

Having held out for as long as possible in their luxury penthouse office suite on the 92nd floor of Hemmings Heights, at Plémont, come June, the hapless Coterie of Ministers flee, thanks to the Barclay Twins’ helicopter, to the relative safety of Guernsey.

However, the unrest spreads as the burghers of Castel brave driving drizzle to declare UDI.

On an unusually dry July day, as the sun beats down for the first time in ten years, a civil servant decides to escape his humid office to explore the temperature-controlled vaults below Squirrel Le Marquand House. Blowing the dust off a box that catches his eye, he reads the faded handwritten title: The Clothier Report. Distant memories are stirred. Meanwhile, above ground, the old States Chamber gets a spring clean and it is business as usual.

As Guernsey joins the rebellion, life goes on as it has every August for more than a century as both islands prepare to do peaceful battle with flowers.

For the first time in tens years it doesn’t rain for an entire month and bus drivers work every day. The bailiwicks reconvene their dissolved individual assemblies and vote to reinstate the islands’ status as Crown Dependencies.

The brace of Coterie of Ministers flees to Switzerland where they are granted asylum by the grateful Gnomes of Zurich.

Life in the Bailiwick of Guernsey quickly returns to normal, while in Jersey, as unemployed finance workers find gainful employment dismantling the bridge to France, September and October fly by as every Islander is consulted on the proposals for government reform in the ancient Clothier Report.

Guy Fawkes night takes on renewed significance as British Prime Minister Sir Boris Johnson announces that the islands have been reinstated as Crown Dependencies. Jersey Water declares a drought and introduces rationing as the States of Jersey declares a public holiday and gives bus drivers a massive pay rise.

With sufficient land cleared for the good burghers of St Martin to at last return home for Christmas, albeit to a devastated parish, the States of Jersey finally approves the Clothier Report.

As 2022 draws to a close on an Island at last at peace with itself and buoyed by the promise of effective government, it begins to snow.

Icy roads, for the first time in ten years, and a lack of snow chains prevent the buses from running.