LORD WALLACE of Saltaire certainly ruffled a few local feathers recently when he suggested the Channel Islands’ autonomous status is no longer acceptable. We shouldn’t be surprised. Not only is this a subject which comes up periodically (remember George Foulkes in the 1980s?) but our very success as an international finance centre fuels this sort of attention. In recent years there has been growing UK interest in how we use our autonomy and it was only a matter of time before someone went further and questioned our very right to self governance.

Any assimilation of the island into the UK will be over my dead body, however I do find myself strangely in accord with Lord Wallace on the issue of Guernsey becoming a full nation state. I have no doubt that we have the constitutional right to nationhood and it must be retained as a nuclear option, but it wouldn’t be a good thing. It might make us all feel very important and put a swagger in our step at first, but it would be fraught with difficulties.

Maybe at a cost we could overcome the more obvious problems such as consular representation, passport services, guaranteed access to tertiary health care, fisheries protection and so on. My concern is more about how it would affect our main industry and our hard-earned reputation as a trusted jurisdiction to handle clients’ assets. I know the conventional wisdom is that it is exactly our current level of independence, particularly fiscal autonomy, which is the big attraction. However, we should be careful not to assume that greater independence would mean even more confidence in the island.

While I totally reject Lord Wallace’s suggestion that total independence would put Guernsey on the slippery slope towards becoming a banana republic, that’s because I’m local and know our society. To the outsider, the idea that a nation of just 60,000 souls, handling billions in funds, could be prone to go rotten will seem very credible. After all, it has happened to other micro-states.

To those considering using Guernsey’s financial services, our current status must seem ideal. We are self governing, stable and free from UK party politics. At the same time, the ability of the Privy Council to intervene if we ever went totally off the rails and to restore good government is a comfort to both locals and those who do business with us.

It’s true that lately the Privy Council is taking rather too broad an interpretation of good governance. It’s a concept which should be invoked only in the very unlikely circumstances of the States going really haywire and infringing basic human rights or something similar. It shouldn’t be used to object to policies they simply disagree with or when Guernsey’s legitimate self interest is different to that of the UK. These are the sorts of practical issues we should be battling over, not rallying to siren calls for nationhood, except as a very last resort.

In the meantime, we should realise not everybody is out to get us. We have many friends and we should be fighting to keep them and to win more. That means acting responsibly in our dealings with the international community. Of course we should put our own interests first, but independence/autonomy is not about cocking a snook at the rest of the world. Even major nation states have to abide by international standards if they want to thrive.

Put simply, we shouldn’t be awkward for the sake of it.  Taking a cussed approach to international politics may suit the Guernsey Donkey mindset, but it tends to engender a similar response from those you are dealing with. With 90% of dealings between states coming down to raw power, and Guernsey pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order in that respect, such an approach is not clever.

That certainly doesn’t mean giving in every time someone bigger than us says boo. It means picking our battles carefully and drawing lines in the sand over issues that really matter and are morally defensible. It’s not helpful to flex our muscles foolishly and then have to back down. This applies equally to the smaller islands, as I’ll be exploring in a talk in Sark shortly.

When the next UK parliamentarian questions our autonomy – and they will – we should reply that not only is our self-governance an ancient and inalienable right but, just as importantly, one which we continue to earn as a responsible member of the international community.