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A vision of the future or put-up job?
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century life bore any relationship to forecasts made in the 1950s we would all be wearing indestructible tinfoil jump-suits, commuting by personal jet copters, subsisting on protein pills and working a three-day week.
In 2007 and 2008 the States co-ordinated the Island’s own episode of crystal ball gazing. Called Imagine Jersey 2035, it was an elaborate consultation exercise which sought to elicit not only the shape of things to come but also the shape of things likely to appeal to Islanders.
Now a new vision of the future exercise is being planned. Detail about the nature of the exercise is at this stage thin on the ground, but it is suggested that the object will be to mirror Imagine Jersey – in terms of its goal, if not its process.
This prompts an obvious question – if the earlier exercise provided a vision of what the Island will be like in 2035, why should a new consultation be necessary? The answer is, as Harold Macmillan once said in a different context, ‘events’, those miscellaneous and often troublesome facts of life which can so rapidly make a mockery of plans and prognostication.
So there must be a follow-up question – if the results of consultations of this sort are so fragile, what is the point of conducting them? Until someone comes up with a fully convincing answer, this will remain a legitimate concern, even if some of the impetus for Imagine Mk II must be coming from the latest population statistic of 99,000 and rising.
It is, meanwhile, well worth remembering that Imagine Jersey, which appeared to indicate that Islanders had an appetite for working longer and paying higher taxes if those expedients would protect services, came in for some very harsh criticism. It was branded a waste of money and resources and it was even suggested that it was rigged to produce the results that senior members of government wanted to hear – notably that immigration was capable of solving some economic and social problems.
We should not condemn the proposed new exercise out of hand – in part because taking stock of where we and of potential trends is always of value. That said, it must be a genuine consultation, it must acknowledge that possible paths into the future are many and various, and it must not be a put-up job aimed at bolstering policies that have already been mapped out behind closed doors.
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