By Douglas Kruger
LAST week, two ultra-wealthy international investors had something stark to say about the state of the UK. It’s uninvestable.
That judgment came from Jonathan Oppenheimer and Magda Wierzycka, who cited an example that makes the point. A UK council recently announced its intention to upgrade an 18-mile stretch of road. The project will require an estimated timeline of… are you ready for this? …30 years.
People outside the UK can’t understand this. They shake their heads in wonder. But people within the UK can’t understand why people outside of the UK can’t understand it. Because people in the UK are mired in several layers of blanketing paralysis, which have become normal to them. And other places in the world are not.
I’ve witnessed the difference. South Africa has many problems, but the pace of construction isn’t one of them. One day, a team will set up camp in a patch of empty veld. Blink, and a five-storey luxury mall has exploded out of the ground, complete with multiplex cinemas, giant water fountains, indoor climbing walls and parking for several thousand, above and below ground.
And that’s not uncommon. I was on a speaking tour of South Korea and my host told me about how new roads pop up in Seoul more or less overnight. One day, you’re using a certain route. The next day, that entire road is gone, an overpass has been built in its stead, and the area beneath has been beautified. Blink and it’s done.
The UK, once THE great nation of builders and innovators, simply cannot compete with that, and apparently isn’t even trying. It was once the most industrious nation in the world, but UK growth has flatlined compared to nations like France, Germany and the US. GDP per hour worked is some 20% lower than these countries, a gap two decades in the making.
Take that 30-year roadworks project as an exemplar of the problem. The only way it is possible for such a project to take that long is if:
- You unionise yourself into a stranglehold, so that no one ever does any work.
- Then add holidays, closing it all down for three days out of four, as you become ever more like the Roman Empire in decline.
- Put a socialist paper-pusher in charge of planning, rather than an experienced chief executive, to maximise inefficiency at every step.
- Allow every dreadlocked hippy to forbid you from endangering the rare toadstool in your path, as though it were a sacred artefact and not a common fungus.
- Invite planning permission to add years and layers of difficulty to your process, tripling your expenses and ensuring maximum inconvenience to the public, as they pretend to keep people safe from non-existent threats.
If all that doesn’t get you to 30 years, you could also send some of the local taxes to the Middle East to fund terror tunnels. Or Kazakhstan, for gender ideology programmes. That should do it. You’ve achieved your 30-year goal.
It’s a time-frame suspiciously convenient for anyone who desires a lifetime public-sector career, without the inconvenience of results delivered prior to retirement.
It’s also very strange that an emerging nation like South Africa could build you 30 full-scale malls, consecutively, within that same time frame.
Investors view it all with despair. A grand spirit of “can’t be done”.
Jersey doesn’t have to make this mistake. Essentially, we should reverse every input listed above. But first, there is a mindset that must be addressed.
Let me pose several suggestions, and I invite you to observe your own reaction to them. Outside of our island, these would not be even slightly controversial. Here we go:
- Jersey needs a mall. Every tourist destination on earth has at least one. We should build a good one, and it should be done and open before the end of this coming year.
- We should build connecting tunnels between Jersey, Guernsey and mainland Europe. The Faroe Islands did it easily, affordably, quickly, and they have offered to show us the way. We should get that done forthwith in order to speed up trade, make deliveries less costly, and encourage tourism, and also to ease our housing market, thus dramatically lowering the cost of living.
- We should build a lot more modern amenities, to raise standards of living and retain young families. There is no reason we should haemorrhage talent, and the only reason we do is because vibrant young people grow bored. So fix it. Start with the mall, which can include gyms, laser-quest, cinemas, climbing walls, go-carts, skateparks, ice-rinks, night-clubs, wave-pools and super tubes, which would just about bring it on par with every other tourist destination.
Then a few drive-through take-out joints. Revolving restaurant looking out over the bay. Monorail train. Lanes of highway ribboning around the coastline, jetties and piers with over-sea jogging, look-out points, stores, restaurants and kids’ play areas at various attractive stops. Couple of ziplines and cable cars, next to the new Ferris wheel.
How did you react? Laughter? Shock? A deep-rooted certitude that such preposterous notions could never really see the light of day, being too ambitious by half for the likes of us?
Why?
Are we also the kind of people who think repairing a road takes 30 years? I sure hope we have more spirit than that. We must not allow ourselves to sink in the same malaise as the UK. You fix a road in days, not decades, and that includes the building of entirely new ones.
To attract investors to Jersey (even as they flee the depressing mire of the UK), we need to shake things up here. Liberalise. Make Jersey the most business friendly economy in Europe. Don’t just aim for improvement – aim to be number one.
We might begin with a small but ruthless task-team with a single mission: Make things hum! Pull together the best practices of every upwardly mobile economy and map them onto Jersey.
Funny thing is, we wouldn’t have to add much. Most of it would be subtraction: inefficient layers, bureaucracy, legislation that gets in the way. Excise the deadwood to the great benefit of the Island’s total prosperity. Argentina, the new case study for slashing government layers, is currently enjoying 6.3% year-on-year GDP growth. Cutting the fat absolutely works.
Case in point for Jersey: We have a two-tier entitlement system for incoming talent, enforced by government. Who does that serve? It makes everything harder, slower and stupider. Ditch it. Enable and encourage, rather than dampening and slowing.
Let’s show the world that repairing a road is an overnight project, not a multi-year profit centre for a bloated bureaucracy. Imagine a Jersey that gets things done, ingeniously, aggressively, with an endearing spirit of innovation. Let’s show the UK just what they’ve lost, by being what they could have been.
Douglas Kruger is a Hall of Fame speaker and the author of several bestselling business books, including Poverty Proof, They’re Your Rules, Break Them! and Wicked Smart. He speaks on innovation and agility. Meet him at douglaskruger.com.
