Look at the facts:
On the arrival of the German occupation force in 1940, democracy in Guernsey was suspended and a small committee was established, directed by High Command.
Regulations were imposed by decree and arrest and imprisonment for infractions of the regulations (often involving solitary confinement) became commonplace, reinforced with blood-curdling warnings; fines were issued; intrusive house visits by the authorities were a regular feature; secret hotlines were put in place to report on neighbours and sow terror and curfews were introduced with people stopped and required to give reasons if they left their homes outside the prescribed times.
Travel was banned except for ‘essential’ work which included fishing, and a travel ‘permit’ was required, and normally refused, to visit Jersey only.
The Occupation years saw many terrible things happen but perhaps the most shocking was the sudden erasure of all human rights and freedoms, these were trampled on with impunity.
In this toxic atmosphere the population was cowed into submission with fear used as the key driver to achieve this. It was verboten to challenge the occupiers in word or in deed and many locals were terrified at the thought of an allied assault… in short the island withdrew into itself.
The damage to the island economy from being totally isolated was, of course, catastrophic, because any small island cut off from the rest of the world for a long period of time is akin to someone without any arms. They can exist but they cannot thrive or, over time, even survive.
Guernsey under the Covid-related regulations.
Look at the facts:
The island is cut off from the world and has been for almost a year now. We are ‘locked in’ and we are now also in rigid ‘lock down’.
There is a tiny committee (CCA) with a handful of elected representatives, but it seems to be controlled in all Covid health-related decision making and therefore in terms of the strict regulations – with the concomitant assault on freedoms and human rights that this entails – by unelected officials.
Quarantine home checks are intrusive and can be intimidating; locals are sometimes being stopped at night if they venture out on the road and asked what they are doing; a travel ‘permit’ is mandatory to leave the island; anonymous hotlines exist to report people to the authorities; £10,000 fines are served for any quarantine infractions and even on people who self-evidently do not have the financial capacity to pay the fine – so they, including pensioners, are handed lengthy prison sentences.
Democracy exists only in as much as there is a titular assembly, but the CCA appears to have unrestrained powers to direct and control us more or less as they wish.
Rule is by decree, sometimes trailed at lofty press briefings. Abject fear has enveloped the island, well symbolised by the regular sight of lone drivers in their cars wearing masks or mask-wearing pedestrians in remote country lanes diving into hedgerows when another pedestrian appears.
And total obeisance has trumped grown-up discourse about where the Covid strategy is taking us and the collateral damage it is inflicting.
A vocal and not so vocal element of the local population has been cowed into a submissive mind-set.
Articulation of views that diverge from the CCA/Guernsey Together orthodoxy are attacked vehemently. This can be summed up as the notion that the CCA is infallible and we must accept ‘Fortress Guernsey’ and welcome whatever tools – and however draconian they may be – to enforce this.
To question the direction we are being taken in is to be seen as a heretic. But the zero-risk Covid strategy, with elimination of an endemic virus as the endgame, is like chasing a rainbow.
An already seriously ailing local economy will be irretrievably damaged as indeed will people’s physical and mental health if this rigid isolationism goes on, to say nothing of the severe impact on people’s financial wellbeing.
Private sector workers take the full hit of course, as almost everything and everyone continues to be sacrificed on the Covid altar.
Last time I wrote about Guernsey, the ‘locked-in’ island, I made a number of observations and factual statements and I referred to the intolerance that is now the hallmark of the local armchair warriors who stalk social media.
The response on social media to the previous column proved my point – these people are not interested in debate, they are like a lynch mob and are only interested in stamping out debate.
So are we now living under a ‘Germ Occupation’? On a number of metrics I mention it could be construed that we are. If the CCA were now to proceed with 14-day solitary confinement – which resembles the legal definition of torture – in hotel room/prison cells and to do this just as we have vaccines that will soon have protected the groups that represent 99% of those at risk of death from the virus, then we will assuredly have slipped completely into a dystopian world and pretty much returned to those aforementioned historically very dark times.
The Jersey government, having sensibly rejected the Guernsey CCA’s now discredited elimination strategy and recognising the importance of travel connectivity and opening up the island to the world as the fundamentals to the underpinning of your economic recovery, means that you are now well positioned to emerge from the Covid crisis this spring and summer and forge ahead.
I fear that the CCA over here, with their unyielding zero-risk strategy, will leave our island frozen in the slow lane and in your slipstream. Left to some people on this island, who seem to be exhibiting a form of Stockholm syndrome, we’ll still be living a ‘locked-in’ straitjacketed life this time next year. And with the island already nursing unsustainable levels of debt we will by that time have sunk beneath a tidal wave of debt. Could it now be time for an injection of new blood onto the CCA to avoid the hazards of entrenched groupthink?
I asked the editor for anonymity once again because, as a Guernsey resident, to criticise the CCA and to point up their failings is to fall foul of the vox populis on our island.
And to do that is all it now takes to be demonised and denigrated in the most unrestrained fashion both in the letters pages of local Guernsey media and of course on social media.
That intolerance in parts of Guernsey to any differences of opinion is inimical to free speech and therefore to uphold the cherished right to free speech and by doing that to also uphold core democratic values – one of which is to feel able to speak truth to power – it is important that this column is published so a wider audience can begin to appreciate what is happening in Guernsey.
For more comment and opinion pieces, see today’s Jersey Evening Post
