Don't put finance on a pedestal - Jersey Evening Post

But wait a moment – can it really be fundamentally wrong for a States Member to speak his mind? Perhaps we should recall the Voltaire approach to the Deputy’s comments – ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.’ The Enlightenment philosopher’s famous dictum certainly tallies with liberality – in the best sense of the word – but Senator Ozouf and many others appear to suggest that everyone, and not only politicians, must always engage in rigid self-censorship rather than broadcast views which have any capacity to damage the Island’s best interests.

Some common sense would seem to underpin this point of view. After all, there are quite enough outsiders willing to bad-mouth us without one of our own joining the clamour. But let us be alert to this danger: the possibility that we are allotting such grand status to certain elements of Island life that they are regarded as above disparagement or, indeed, comment of any sort.

Deputy Tadier had the temerity to offer French journalists the opinion that Jersey has been ‘taken over’ by its finance industry – that, in other words, the industry has ‘captured the state’. This may have been an exaggeration, but it is nevertheless true that some of the Island’s political leaders live in the cloud-cuckoo land in which finance can, and never will, do no wrong.

Having mentioned Voltaire, we might come back down to earth by referring to Peter Benchley, author of Jaws. In this novel the authorities’ watchwords are ‘Don’t mention the shark’, on the grounds that fear of a marine maneater would spoil their town’s tourist season. Toeing this line led to further, and avoidable, bloody encounters.

Benchley’s tale was an allegory – some say that his great white shark stood for the Mafia – and it is an allegory that should resonate here. Finance is no maneater and only misguided ideologues compare it with the Mafia, but we are on dangerous ground if we allow an industry – any industry – to climb onto a pedestal so lofty that it and its supporters can brook no criticism.

The proper way to deal with misconceptions about the Island, Islanders and what we do is to confront misinformation with hard fact and cogent arguments, rather than knee-jerk condemnation and ridicule of all gainsayers.