FOR a supposedly business-friendly island, Guernsey’s bureaucrats are displaying a distinctly hostile attitude towards one of the best-known and liked shops on the Bridge.

Johns the Butcher has been providing excellent service – especially on a Sunday – for longer than people care to remember. But because it has changed hands, fresh permission has to be granted under the island’s restrictive and pointless Sunday trading laws.

In the red tape world promoted by Commerce and Employment – also supposedly business-friendly – the Johns family can trade but new owner Charlie Le Poidevin can’t. Except, that is, through his existing L’Islet branch.

While that’s nonsensical enough, the real villains are the St Sampson’s douzaine and constables. While they, too, might be expected to be supportive of a parish business, they really can’t be bothered to process the application from Charlie’s Family Butchers.

The weeks are dragging by and thousands of pounds of lost trading are mounting up. But that means nothing to the douzaine, which won’t even explain why it is willing to damage the butchers in this way.

It may be, of course, that the problem rests with Commerce and Employment. Since the debacle of Le Friquet Garden Centre, which led to the Castel douzaine facing legal threats from C&E unless it restricted the centre’s Sabbath activities, it is clear that the States department employs officials who are rabidly anti-Sunday trading.

Are they throwing up all sorts of picky interpretations of the dog’s breakfast legislation to delay St Sampson’s approval of the application? Or is the douzaine sticking to its comfortable monthly meeting cycle and to hell with a small business rather than sorting it out in a day over the telephone?

That adults in positions that impact on people’s livelihoods can behave in such an uncaring manner is telling enough. More revealing will be what happens next now that this rather shabby saga is out in the open.

If Charlie’s isn’t able to open for business this Sunday, islanders will know the truth: the bureaucrats care only about their own red tape and not the people they are supposed to serve.