SO Jersey is on the world’s white list. Weh-hey, and whoopee! Now we can all breathe again and open the champagne and we will all have jobs and the finance bosses will be able to buy new cars and yachts and designer labels.

Not quite. What happened last week at that G20 meeting in London is that all the big countries with economies dependent on the big banks agreed that they needed to allow offshore financial centres to continue.

What it does not mean is that the big bully countries with the big banks will make things any easier for those offshore finance centres. In fact, according to those in the know, things are likely to get a little more difficult in the coming months.

UK prime minister Gordon Brown, who chaired the G20 summit, was no doubt pleased that the three Crown dependencies – Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man – were viewed as compliant enough to be on the white list. After all, we are his indirect responsibility, in international terms.

But Mr Brown will not be so happy to carry on providing the subsidies that the Island has hitherto enjoyed from the UK Treasury because, to put it bluntly, he can’t afford it. The upshot is that the concessions we used to take for granted are disappearing at a rate of knots.

True, this week the UK legislators did a U-turn over their plans to force Island residents to queue up at passport control on arrival in the UK, for all the world as if we came from Outer Mongolia. Given that many of us have birth certificates from mainland registries, this would have seemed more than a little incongruous.

But the right to free health care while in the UK is now gone for good. It does, of course, work both ways. This month it was the turn of the UK Department of Health to tell its citizens that travellers to the Channel Islands would no longer be getting free health care.

The number of column inches in travel and finance magazines devoted to this change is evidence enough that UK travellers take it very seriously. As we know, historically the average age of visitors coming to the Island for recreational purposes is around 55, and many loyal fans are considerably older than that. For them, obtaining travel insurance will not be easy.

Take another concession affecting school leavers and families. For many years Jersey students were able to attend UK universities at similar cost to students living on the mainland. But in recent years the cost to Jersey students has been rather more onerous and now the gap is set to widen still further.

Negotiations, we are told, are currently ongoing and those working in the education system are a little anxious about the consequences. For some, the costs have already doubled. Last year the Open University announced that Jersey students would in future be regarded as ‘foreign’ in terms of fees paid.

In truth the Education department is offering generous grants for those earning less than £40,000 per annum. But this only applies to students who do not already have a degree-level qualification. The fact is that many mature students are trying to learn something new or even change their career and having a degree in another subject is not going to help them.

If fees at all the other universities go up as well, there is likely to be a return to the old two-tier pattern of education whereby those that can afford it will go and those that can’t will have to find something else to do.

In turn, it will also mean that the number of students heading for Highlands College will swell dramatically and that the States will need to find the means to keep them occupied. Some steps have already been taken, for instance by introducing the foundation level of a finance degree and, later this year, a new IT foundation degree.

But the current recession will do nothing to help families who are already paying to put their children through university. Neither will it help those who are trying to help themselves through independent study.

The latest figures we have show that unemployment is now around 1,000 – considerably higher than I remember in past recessions.

And the official figures only include those who have bothered to register as unemployed. Many will simply keep trying for jobs or, if their home is elsewhere, will move out of the Island.
A third cloud on the horizon, in terms of the UK, is the forthcoming Chancellor’s budget.

Normally, most Islanders barely notice it – after all, we have our own Budget in November and in the main it has far more impact on our own economy. But this year there will be many in the finance industry keeping a closer eye than usual on what Alistair Darling decides to do.

For one thing, according to the Financial Times earlier this month, there could be a new voluntary code of practice which the banks will be encouraged to sign up to, promising that they will not use tax ‘havens’ to help their tax planning.

Now that Jersey is no longer a tax haven – because we are on the same white list as the City of London – does it mean that they can use Jersey with abandon?

Not necessarily, because Jersey is often a link in a chain of financial structures which can end up somewhere entirely different, like the British Virgin Islands.

Finance industry pundits say that banks like Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland would never sign up to such a code. But now that the UK government owns quite a chunk – up to 70 per cent in the case of RBS – perhaps they will have no choice.

The UK budget could herald other changes, too, such as a further crackdown on non-domicile residents with money in offshore companies or trusts, or the EU Low Value Consignment Relief, which allows Jersey firms to send goods valued at less than £18 to the UK free of VAT, the raison d’etre for many an internet shopping operation.

So the ways that the bigger boys could, and can, and will, make life more difficult should not be underestimated. White is better than grey – but there are many shades of pale, and some are whiter than others.