Message from Sark is all wrong
Friday 6th August 2010, 2:30PM BST.
WHAT on earth is going on in Sark – and what part do the Guernsey authorities have in it?
These are strong questions and are regrettably prompted by a deeply unpleasant poster campaign which likened the managing director of the island’s biggest inward investor to Adolf Hitler.
It says much about the integrity of Chief Pleas – or, perhaps, its blind hostility to the value of a £9m. boost to its economy this year alone – that the conseiller behind the poster remains in office.
More than anything, that sends out a message that Sark’s government condones such actions and, for all we know, other conseillers actively assisted in placing the posters around the island.
In that context, the speed with which Guernsey’s Law Officers apparently drafted legislation requested by Chief Pleas designed to frustrate Sark Estate Management’s legitimate business interests looks questionable, especially given the delay in working on Guernsey’s animal cruelty legislation.
Sark Estate Management clearly isn’t a comfortable bedfellow. Its demands for transparency and a 21st century approach to good governance and accountability do not sit easily with some in Sark and its newsletter can adopt a very aggressive tone in calling for change.
Yet the points are frequently well made, for all that they are muscular, and ought not to be ignored by any forward-facing community.
And it is a peculiarly Guernsey conundrum that some of those to whom the MD appeals for fair play in his open letter on these pages are also those whom, in different circumstances, he might regard as agents of oppression to be used by Chief Pleas in its campaign against SEM.
This does not reflect well on the Bailiwick and, unchanged, will only result in loss all round.
Sark’s establishment has done little over the years to secure an economic future for the island and now faces the risk of overseeing the withdrawal of its only significant investor – the equivalent of Guernsey rejecting £15bn-worth of business out of ill-will.
With more than 50% of Sark’s workforce benefiting from that in-flow, Chief Pleas should be looking for a skilled mediator to help end the stalemate for the benefit of the community.
Instead, it is protecting a conseiller with no judgement or shame and is harming its own reputation in the process.
Campaigns
Voice For Victims
Voice for Victims is a campaign aimed at promoting the rights of those affected by child sexual abuse.
This is Guernsey
Guernsey Press
As ever with your editorial relating to the SEM, this comment manages to present a staggeringly one-sided viewpoint. This may be a ‘deeply unpleasant’ poster campaign – or it may be a few stupid and misguided posters which most sensible people would have ignored – but it bears precious little comparison to the ‘deeply unpleasant’ Sark Newsletter, which has been publishing smear and innuendo for month after month, with scarcely a whisper raised by the Guernsey Press. To say that it ‘can adopt a very aggressive tone in calling for change’ is a laughable interpretation of what most people would see as downright victimisation of those people in Sark whom Kevin Delaney considers to be against SEM. As other writers have pointed out, the problem lies not so much with SEM but with Mr Delaney’s bullying attitude. SEM may indeed have much good to bring to the island, but so long as Mr Delaney is churning out his offensive propaganda on a weekly basis, is it any surprise that many Sarkees will be glad to see the back of him?
Report abuse
I don’t think that any reasonable person would think that whoever put up the ‘Hitler’ posters was suggesting that Mr. Delaney murders people or indeed that he is Austrian or even Fuhrer of Germany. I think everyone would be agreed that the point being made is that he is acting like a dictator. And that charge might seem to have merit.
I have not really paid any attention to the Sark issue before, but I read the content in yesterday’s Press. One thing seemed to ring out loud and clear and that was Mr. Delaney’s view that he (or his backers) can buy their way into Sark. Not only that, people should be grateful! Well why should they? Sark got on very well for hundreds of years before these people turned up. Is it any surprise really that many resent it? OK, their laws may not be the way Mr. Delaney thinks the world should be run, but that is just his view. As far as I know Sark people were not sending young children down mines or locking their wives indoors. Mr Delaney’s comments brought to mind the attitude of the Colonialists – only these days you can’t make people work for nothing, you have to pay them. Corporate Colonialism perhaps?
I expect Mr Delaney’s threat to leave will be as empty as the one Flybe makes every time it does not get its own way.
Report abuse