THE political task of leading this Island safely into the future can be compared with driving a car, but with important special conditions imposed.

The driver, who corresponds to the political executive, can see ahead only through a windscreen almost totally obscured by mist, though he has unrestricted use of the rear-view mirror.

That this is so is illustrated by present circumstances. Driver and passengers are obviously aware that there is a road out there, but it is very hard to see the direction that is going to take and correspondingly hard to steer safely.
The analogy, of course, alludes to the global economic crisis and the difficulty of assessing the effect it will have on Jersey, its number-one industry, finance, and Islanders in general.

We should be grateful that the driver has checked everyone’s seatbelt and the airbags – read depositor protection scheme – but we should be far less appreciative when we are told that the view in the mirror is superb and the territory that we have just driven through was safe as houses.

As the financial sector is so fond of pointing out, past results are no guide to future performance. With this in mind, the latest available figures on the overall state of the Island’s economy, which relate to 2007 and earlier years, might be of significance, but they have comparatively little to do with the way ahead. Provisional statistics for last year and substantiated statistics for 2006 paint a picture of booming economic activity with rates of growth which were perhaps alarmingly high, driven largely by a burgeoning financial services industry.

Although it is true that we should be very glad that the Island was doing so well after the downturn of the first years of the new millennium, euphoria is most definitely not in order.

Indeed, only a short time after being in a position to comment – and comment very enthusiastically – on historical economic performance, Chief Minister Frank Walker has been obliged to say that the new priority must be safeguarding Islanders’ jobs because of factors that are entirely beyond local control. These, alas, are very uncertain times.