ON something as important as the cost of living, it’s worth being specific. Just as the Island’s lack of an effective immigration policy has dominated previous elections, this year the cost of actually living in Jersey looks likely to loom large in voters’ minds.
Of course, the phrase “cost of living” opens up conversations on housing, travel, food, health, entertainment, and more broadly, how much we earn at work – and so what jobs are available, and how they might be affected with technologies such as AI.
With those three little words, in fact, you can find a way into pretty much any conversation on a topic of your choice.
Which is why simply saying that the cost of living is going to dominate this year’s election is a truism, and therefore meaningless. Of course it is.
Perhaps we owe it to policy makers, both current and prospective, to be rather more specific. We kicked that off in the JEP this week (Tuesday 27th January) by actually listing some of the actions that could (or not) be taken, which included the government acting as a mortgage lender, removing the need for flats to have a parking space or offering incentives to a cut-price retailer to invest in the island. Readers will strongly agree or disagree with those, and that’s exactly the point.
Until we move the debate on from the bland and generic statements which we are certain to hear from doorstep canvassers, such as “we need to make it cheaper to live here”, we really are going nowhere, and we are doing it rather quickly.
That’s not good enough, and we should call it out. Anyone currently in politics, or hoping to be there by the middle of June, should be able to set out at least three (at a minimum) viable proposals which will actually have a material effect on reducing at least one of the main components of high cost of living, such as food, health, travel or housing. If they can’t do that, they really are wasting your time.
Or they might address the problem from the other end, and do exactly the same exercise, but focussed on improving the ratio between what we earn, and what we need to spend; accept the costs, but create the wealth to pay for it. The route is different, the destination is the same. We feel better off.
What matters is that we fill the vacuum which seems to have developed of proper debate over realistic proposals to address an obvious, and worsening, problem.
