From Nick Palmer.
IT is bizarre that the editorial, and the News Focus article opposite, in the JEP of 16 October, both referred to the ‘one-dimensional approach’ of the green candidates.

If anyone was listening at the hustings, they should have realised that our position was massively multi-dimensional – it was the conventional financial ‘business as usual’ position which was dangerously over simplistic.

Over the various hustings, the greens gave about 40 different restatements of their extremely wide and all-encompassing policies which took into account the local and global environment and economy, social justice, tax reform, ways of future development without growth, the logical impossibility of further conventional growth, rebuilding community, looking after heritage and enhancing quality of life and people’s sense of well-being.

By contrast, one of the successful candidates gave virtually an identical speech every night which was focused on one tiny aspect of States accounting business and nothing else but a plea to trust them further. All the ministers effectively said was that they’d done this and that and to trust them again. They were a policy-light zone.

Herman Daly, at the World Bank, said that ‘the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse’. In essence, this means that economics is just the ‘ecology’ of money and jobs and is a small one-dimensional part of the much greater natural economy, without which the ‘money’ economy cannot be stable or genuinely produce human well-being.

It is astonishing hubris for anyone to believe, as I have heard many times over the years, that somehow the environment is a bolt-on extra that needs an increasingly growing ‘money’ economy for us to be able to afford to look after it and yet Jersey has just re-elected four people who fundamentally believe this nonsense. Talking to them at the hustings was literally like being Copernicus trying to convince mediaeval scholars that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the reverse.

There is a similarly huge, gaping flaw at the very basis of the economic theory that our world economy is run by and the fact that those who have been re-elected do not appear to appreciate this is worrying for those who realise that Jersey’s policies need a severe rethink if we are to cope with the unprecedentedly challenging times ahead.
Winterwood,
Rue des Hamonnets,
St Lawrence.