THE Chief Executive of the CI COOP makes some powerful arguments on today’s pages for much greater cooperation across the Channel Islands. What’s perhaps a bigger surprise is that those arguments are even needed.
It is abundantly obvious that Jersey and Guernsey should work much more closely together; and the areas listed by Mr Cox, and others, would make a very sound place to start, from joint procurement to tourism marketing or – and just consider this one for a second – some form of combined civil service, given that jointly the public sectors of both islands employ around 15% of the total workforce.
Mr Cox goes further into joint utility ownership, shared health and education systems and mutual ownership of expensive assets – like waste-to-energy facilities.
The question isn’t so much ‘why’ as ‘why not’? Local businesses do it every day; but although the same logic is there for governments too, actual delivery very rarely follows suit.
Which begs the obvious question as to why? Perhaps the key lies in who really is in charge. For a business, that is normally the shareholder(s) acting through a Board of Directors. They are there, amongst other things, to make sure the company’s management acts as efficiently as possible, properly considers future risks, and takes whatever sensible and pragmatic steps it can to mitigate those risks. When looked at through that lens, working cooperatively with offices in Jersey and Guernsey makes obvious sense, which is exactly why it happens.
Despite regular suggestions to the contrary, governments are not businesses; instead, Ministers are held accountable by the States Assembly, and ultimately by the voters who elected them. But that relationship is much more complex than its ‘business’ equivalent, with political – some might say emotional – considerations often trumping basic commercial pragmatism.
Put too simply, while it might make obvious sense for the two islands to work together, once you look at the same issue through centuries of rivalry, or fears over sovereignty, you soon realise that while everyone might be speaking the words of today, they are doing it through the mindset of yesterday, and with little thought for tomorrow. They are playing to a very different crowd.
The obvious example, chosen from many, is the fact there is no competitive air service between the islands – Guernsey owns the operator, and has decided to protect it from that competition. Rightly or wrongly, at a political level, perceived self-interest will prevail.
That’s why at a governmental level, common sense tends to drain into the sand before it has even entered the water which separates us.
