WE CAN WIN
I will not just be listening to the Board rooms of Guernsey or to the politicians and Civil Service. I am listening to all of you…well, as many of you as I can speak too!
EVOLUTION
I will start first by saying, if I am elected, I can’t promise to deliver other Deputies votes for my proposals and policy ideas. I know that, and I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you otherwise.
What I will do, is what I have always done, work to build consensus and bring about change by influencing other deputies with well-reasoned and researched ideas. It was my approach when helping to found the G8 umbrella business lobby group, so I know it works.
THE ECONOMY
Secondly, I am primarily running on economic policy. I am doing that because that is my specialist subject. What do I know about healthcare? What do I know about education? What do I know about the benefits system?
The answer, not a lot. My manifesto has views on these and other areas, but I will tell you now, they are not election commitments, they can’t be. They are just my current views. They could very easily change if I had more detailed or different information. They are being shaped by conversations I am having with locals every week.
Like any good director of a business, I look for input from experts and stakeholders in the areas that I am not an expert in, such as doctors, teachers, academics and most importantly you, the public. I discussed complex economic theory in the Yacht with a builder who has no GCSEs, in Costa with an old St Sampsons school friend and Pinquay with a highly trained investment professional. All of them had valuable input for me, all from different perspectives.
I will not just be listening to the Board rooms of Guernsey or to the politicians and Civil Service. I am listening to all of you, well, as many of you as I can speak too!
Finally, my manifesto and ideas are a step change in the the approach to government that we have had for the last 20 years which has been largely stability orientated. My manifesto makes the assumption that there is a significant change coming in global geopolitical and macroeconomic landscape. This means that Guernsey’s approach to governance needs to change. It needs to adopt a higher tolerance for risk, be prepared to make hard choices and be prepared to make big decisions quickly. This requires a step change in approach. I hope to at least start that discussion.
What I can promise to do, is to dig in and around the assessments presented by the hard working men and women of the civil service, strip out as much of the intentional and unintentional biases, ask hard questions and make up my own mind up. I can also promise, I will never accept policy push back from the Civil Service. Politicians direct how to write policy, the civil service implements policy. That is not something up for debate.
MY POLICY AREAS
Please check out each of my policy areas which are broken down into the following categories: