By my reckoning this year was going to be the year that we started to see the benefits of closer inter-island co-operation. However, although it’s still only February, at this rate we’ll be lucky if we end the year still talking to Guernsey.

The warm words coming out of the mouths of politicians in both Jersey and Guernsey last year were supposed to herald a much more collaborative approach to tackling the problems that beset both islands. There were going to be huge savings in working together, they said. It was our destiny.

Now I’ve always been very keen to see the islands working much closer together because I believe that we’re much stronger as the Channel Islands and more able to withstand the enormous international pressures.

However, I was a little sceptical at the haste with which some politicians became ‘collaborators’. They simply saw it as a means of saving money. The two islands would share as many services as possible, while competing furiously for finance business, thus helping each island to trim its budget at a time of severe financial problems. It was all about money, and I’m not sure that this is a good basis on which to build closer relationships.

In any case, the examples of inter-island co-operation that we have seen so far will save tiny amounts of money, if any at all. There are currently two senior regulators covering aviation and competition policy in both islands, and it has been suggested that Jersey and Guernsey might also eventually have the same Medical Officer of Health. None of this is going to make huge savings, particularly while the laws remain different and each island has to have its own staff (and premises) to administer those laws.

But it’s early days and we’ve made a reasonable start, so I shouldn’t be too curmudgeonly. However to achieve any meaningful level of co-operation and joint working, far more fundamental changes are needed and, frankly, there doesn’t appear to be much willingness to do this.

Perhaps it’s because even when the islands do manage to co-operate, they don’t seem to really trust each other. Take ferry services, for example. Here there is very little choice but to co-operate.

The ferry market is only viable because it is a Channel Islands market and so the islands have to agree on their approach to whoever wants to operate the routes. This has been done fairly successfully, although it hasn’t stopped members of the public and politicians in both Jersey and Guernsey complaining that their island gets a raw deal from the arrangement. One States member in Jersey this week made it painfully clear that working together with Guernsey was OK, just so long as Jersey was in charge. After all we account for two thirds of the ferries market, so what we say goes.

It’s this kind of attitude that puts the kibosh on any greater co-operation with Guernsey. Jersey’s economy is bigger and we account for the larger part of the Channel Islands market for just about everything. So why would tiny Guernsey want to co-operate with Big Brother Jersey when it will simply be a junior partner?

However it’s also evidence of a far wider problem that affects the way the States operates and the islands think. It’s the belief that it’s all to do with money and the only way you can measure success is in terms of cash. As my favourite saying goes – we are becoming people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Thus if co-operation with Guernsey results in saving money, then that’s a Good Thing. If that co-operation simply means you work closer together with your cousins for the benefit of both communities (and perhaps) the world outside, then we’re less interested. If you can’t measure it in economic returns, it’s not worth having, they say.

It’s as though the founders of the EU were only interested in a common market, for example. That was certainly an aim and proved to be a great economic success, but the prime objective of Europe getting together was to avoid World War III. Differences of opinion between Jersey and Guernsey are unlikely to cause a major global conflict, but the world will be a better place if we work closer together for reasons other than to save a few bob.

Of course, the saga of zero-ten confirms the islands’ inability to work together in any meaningful way. Guernsey took a dramatically different approach to the EU Code of Conduct on Business Taxation. Jersey was prepared to fight much harder against any forced changes to our zero-ten.

Naturally enough, both island governments were clear that they had to decide what was best for their own communities regardless of what the other island did. In other words, the interests of their own island came first, not the interests of the Channel Islands as a whole. Guernsey might therefore consider zero-ten was not so vital to its economy that it was prepared to accept the risks of upsetting the UK and its EU neighbours. Jersey took more persuading.

This produced a rift which could have been disasterous if it had resulted in the Crown Dependencies having significantly different tax regimes.

That rift will no doubt be papered over and both governments will now make soothing noises about their keenness to co-operate closely with the other island in future. But it can’t hide the obvious fact that our governments are only interested in their own communities and electorates. They don’t care whether EU policy has an impact on the Channel Islands as a whole. They are only interested if it impacts on their own island – and that means that each island has to fight on its own for its own cause.

The joint Brussels office might change attitudes, although it has the potential to cause perhaps as many disputes between the islands as it does benefits. We will see.

There is an alternative, of course. Perhaps the islands really could co-operate on international matters and not just swap notes and pay lip service to working together. A compromise might be needed when dealing with Europe, for example, so that neither Jersey nor Guernsey would get everything they wanted. But it would certainly be easier to persuade the EU to agree to a joint Channel Island approach, rather than one island differing with the other. A similar argument could be made about relations with the UK.

Unfortunately, that’s out of the question while current attitudes prevail. The islands are on their own and apparently that’s the way they like it. While Jersey and Guernsey may well be able to save some money by sharing public servants, it’s extremely unlikely there will ever be true co-operation and perhaps working together is not our destiny.

Peter Body is the editor of Business Brief magazine