IMITATION, they say, is the highest form of flattery. But there are two sides to every coin. When Japan grew into a 20th century industrial power, cynics in the British motor industry — we had one in those days — would allege that the Japanese only chose to drive on the left in order to decimate cheaply their UK competitors.

In time, copy turned to innovation and quality. Sadly, homespun manufacturers reacted by stealing from the Japanese lexicon and indulging in kamikaze industrial practices! Now while, on one hand, there’s emulation for profit, on the other there’s blindly following a lead in order to appear to be players in their ‘big’ league. It’s a lofty ambition, but fraught with large pitfalls.

If you’ve got the nerve for it, you can be different. Jersey’s special, isn’t it? — and that’s surely worth championing. So why are we faced with so many examples of blatant plagiarism?

Does a Jersey police officer really have to be kitted out like a SWAT trooper from some front-line crime hotspot, bristling with every electronic device?

And why should St Helier town centre — through which our ‘bobbies’, weighed down by their walk-challenging impediments, rarely tread — increasingly resemble any standard suburban UK high street from Accrington to Zenor? Having heard so much recently from political lips about Jersey ‘leading the way’, it’s at least reassuring that this doesn’t apply to crime figures. Maybe that’s down to those formidable Robocops!

Sometimes blanket copying can be downright misleading. Have you noticed all those UK-style black slash on white ‘derestriction’ speed signs which are popping up on our roads in place of the more familiar ‘40’ roundels? Because they are unspecific, they rely on road users knowing the appropriate upper limit. So take pity on arriving UK visitors who are very likely to interpret them as signalling their normal 70 mph.

Did all the numerical signs develop terminal rust and need to be disposed of?

What’s wrong with a speed indication which is advisory, specific, readable and easily defended in law? Perhaps there’s some Machiavellian motive behind it to trap more victims into lucrative parish hall retribution. Maybe the thinking is that should the limit be altered at any time in the future, there’d be no need to change the signs — prizes and bonuses for the clever money-saving geniuses at TTS.

It seems that wherever UK developers sniff water, they will have ‘wharves’. It probably comes from the regeneration of commercial docklands. London, Liverpool, Bristol, have their obligatory quota, so I suppose it’s inevitable that we’ve got to have one. A wharf, as I understand it, is a loading platform alongside a waterfront. I’m not aware that such a structure ever stood at the Weighbridge end of the harbour. One only has to suppose that the name Liberty Wharf was chosen in order to appease the sensitivities of would-be purchasers of premises on the site of the former abattoir.

In recent times, we’ve increasingly fallen in line with our northern ‘mainland’. The lure of familiarity with national advertising of high-street products has allowed us to espouse bland branding and gradually accept that if it isn’t part of a chain-store offer, you can’t have it.

Farewell independent bookshops, adieu Hamons, while architectural designs more appropriate to industrial Salford are deemed acceptable for our industrial monoliths by the dominant rams in the planning pen.

No surprise, then, that when Woolies was trashed by corporate bad management, the entire enterprise followed the UK and went down the tubes without a whimper, despite the fact that in the Channel Islands you had two of the most successful branches whose wide customer offer catered well for the needs of a supportive population.

If you’re really bright, you can cherry-pick the things you want to copy and capitalise on those you choose to keep different. So let’s look at what we could adopt.

Decent redundancy legislation or free TV licences for all old folk wouldn’t be a bad start. And before New Look firmed up its intentions, there could have been a sizeable appetite for the Dorset entrepreneur to turn her sights on King Street and re-establish the wonder of Wellworth. Regardless of the STING gang’s pyrotechnics in the Royal Square, you have to question the retention of our own local currency. It’s reasonable to assume that collectors have long since stuffed their wallets with notes they’ll never use. It may be quaint, but it’s the bane of anyone travelling out of the Island.

If, as the UK’s offshore financial arm, we’re locked into using sterling, why not standardise on English coinage? At the same time, given the trend by HMG to dilute our ‘special relationship’, cancelling free hospital care and forcing us to produce passports on demand, we’d miss a trick if we didn’t reciprocate.

Copying big brother might seem a sensible insurance policy, especially for a small island where dependence is not an absolute given. But there’s nothing wrong with an independent spirit, although exercising it calls for maturity and sensitive statesmanship.

There are indeed many UK inspired ‘copycat’ issues queuing up over the horizon. First, there’s the possible import of ‘foreign’ labour to fabricate our upcoming capital projects just as local construction firms are laying off workers — no need to recall the furore a similar initiative generated among UK counterparts.

Then there’s the prospect of new attempts to meddle with GST exemptions on the lines of VAT. And there’s Sunday trading. The current laws are certainly a mess, but religious objections apart, are we prepared for non-stop till-rattling? Do I hear a referendum coming on? Now in continental Europe, they’re normally carried out on Sundays. Worth copying?