IMAGINE, if you will, that the States is minded to back Deputy Mike Hadley’s amendment in next week’s States meeting.

At a stroke, and based on a five-line submission, the Assembly would commit Guernsey to a general sales tax.

With few exceptions, everything sold in the island would go up in price by 3% – or perhaps even more as the States could set the rate as high as it likes.

With no idea of the likely consequences, deputies would have fundamentally changed the island’s tax regime, the very structure upon which its wealth is precariously based.

Shopkeepers already battling internet competition and consumer caution would find their products instantly less attractive, householders would see already stretched budgets pushed to the limit, manufacturers’ goods would be less competitive.

What is more, the new zero-10 tax system is not even on the table and the States would be changing the baseline figures that the policy group has been relying on.

Surely, it cannot happen. Deputies are not so daft as to change something without proper examination of all the consequences.

Except, as we saw with tobacco vending machines, they have previous for such an offence against good government.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the very same deputy proposed the tobacco amendment, passed despite an utter lack of evidence.

Flushed by the success of getting one minor amendment under the wire, Deputy Hadley’s latest proposal is in another league altogether.

Statesmen that they are, ministers are resisting the urge to howl at the moon at the madness of changing tax policy piecemeal.

Instead, they graciously acknowledge that the good member has the right to put forward whatever amendment he wants.

But that’s as far as this latest piece of whimsy should go. No debate, no time wasted, members should swiftly kill this proposal at inception.

Anything else would risk this Assembly once again making a leap into the dark.

The landing this time could hurt us all.