To describe the recently published Economic Growth Strategy as a waste of paper would be grossly inaccurate.

I imagine there are very few paper copies around and most of it is on the Internet, including a brand new website which underlines the importance attached to the subject by the Economic Development Department.

There are also going to be public workshops, although I can’t imagine what the attendees are going to talk about. Certainly there’s not much in the strategy to get their teeth into.

But perhaps I’m missing a trick. Perhaps the message is so subtle that a mere hack doesn’t get it. Or perhaps, like Christmas, I’ve been looking forward to it for so long, that it turns out to be an anti-climax.

Mind you, I understand that I’m not alone in my reservations about this document. A group of senior businessmen who saw a draft before it was published, apparently turned to each other and asked ‘Is this it?’

Even a ‘rigorous economic advice document prepared by the States Economics Unit, which should be read in conjunction with this paper’, is nowhere to be seen.

To be fair to the authors, the document is clearly marked ‘Policy under Development’, and the strategy is so important that there will be multiple reports and several other strategy documents. So perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place for answers to the question of how Jersey is to grow its economy in the future, because this report doesn’t provide any kind of answer.

But what really rattles my cage is that this so-called economic growth strategy reads more like a political treatise at times, and dogma appears to have replaced common sense.

Right at the start the Economic Development Minister makes it quite clear that this strategy does not involve intervention by government. Government will merely take a ‘supportive’ role and will not actually get involved. Businessmen will apparently decide on the economic future of the island and all the States will have to do is to provide unspecified amounts of money.

EDD and the Council of Ministers apparently think they can sit back and basically let the markets prevail and the economy will sort itself out. After all it’s what happened when Jersey shifted from making it’s living from knitting to cider making – or was it the other way round? The Island’s economy has indeed proved resilient in the past but even the strategy document itself acknowledges that we can’t leave it to chance.

So it might have been helpful if amongst the extensive research undertaken when drawing up this draft, that EDD had looked at how other small economies promote economic diversity and what the competition is doing. This might have answered the question about how much or how little government intervention is necessary, instead of relying on blind faith that no intervention is needed particularly as it might upset their friends in the Chamber of Commerce or the Institute of Directors.

Such research might show that businessmen are actually much keener on intervention than EDD apparently thinks. Of course there will be many businessmen and entrepreneurs who will say they don’t want government interference, although many are also only too pleased when it helps their particular industry or company.

For example, where would Jersey Finance Limited be without interference from the States? Naïve observers might believe that all the States do is hand over dollops of taxpayers’ cash to JFL and let them get on with it. But, quite rightly, the States want to know where and how the money is spent, and whether that expenditure is justified. If that’s not interference, I don’t know what is.

However it’s not just the Island’s biggest industry that is to benefit from this supposedly non-interventionist policy. Other industries are going to have their own quango under this new strategy, although there’s no mention of how much financial assistance they will receive, if any.

What the strategy totally fails to appreciate is that intervention in the economy is as much of a public service as health or policing. That’s why I have consistently argued against large spending cuts because it not only damages front line services, which is bad enough, but it also means there is less money to invest in the future of the economy.

This undoubtedly horrifies the exponents of small government and tea party lovers, but it is an observable fact of 21st century economic life. No country, however conservative or Conservative, finds it possible to leave the health and the direction of the economy to businessmen.

After all, businessmen might know a lot about their industry and even more about their own business, but they rarely have an overview of the entire economy. That’s what government is for. Only Jersey’s Economic Development Department can talk about an economic growth strategy that is ‘leading the charge to deliver smaller, focused government’.

That goes down well with the Small Society, if it’s still around, but it’s pie in the sky. Here we have a government department telling us that they want to be slimmed down (presumably to the point where they cease to exist) and that they certainly don’t want to spend any more money because a modern, diversified economy can be produced out of a hat.

Even the history of our past economic success shows this to be hogwash. Where would the recent rather feeble attempts at diversification have come from, if not through intervention by the States?

They were slow and late, of course, but slimming down EDD and the whole States isn’t going to make them faster on their feet. Less cumbersome consultations with industry might help to make us more nimble, as the growth strategy admits, but I can’t see it happening if we’re also supposed to have a more ‘business friendly’ attitude as the strategy also suggests.

I’m sorry to say that even the title of the strategy annoys me greatly. It’s called ‘Jersey’s future economy – Quality of life through economic success’. Only someone who has lived in the Borneo jungle for the past 40 years would not know of the major debate about whether economic success does indeed produce a better quality of life. There is an even more recent debate about economic growth and the environment, although Jersey’s new strategy says little about that.

In fact the strategy appears to welcome the transfer of all rural economy budgets to the Environment Department as proof of their concern about environmental issues. To my mind this merely shows how they continue to view the environment as a separate (obviously subordinate) issue, probably in conflict with economic growth, when the economy should go hand in hand with the environment. Other jurisdictions, which are more advanced in their economic planning, even see the environment as a huge opportunity for growth.

The Isle of Man, for example, already has a ‘cleantech’ strategy and is putting money into it, even though they have very severe budget problems.
Our financial problems are nowhere near as difficult, but it’s unlikely we would put taxpayers’ money into something where it might look as though big government was intervening.

The end result, of course, is that the Isle of Man has had consistent economic growth for a quarter of a century, and we haven’t.

I must look it up in our new strategy to see why that is.

By Peter Body, Editor, Business Brief magazine