Bailiwick of Guernsey

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is a self-governing dependency of the British Crown in the Gulf of Saint-Malo, made up of three jurisdictions: Guernsey itself, with the small islands of Herm, Jethou and Lihou; Alderney; and Sark, with Brecqhou. It has some 66,500 people, of whom about 64,000 live in Guernsey and about 19,000 in its capital, St Peter Port. It is not part of Great Britain, is not represented in its Parliament and has never been a colony. It has its own Crown in right of Guernsey, its own courts and a customary law that descends from the Duchy of Normandy, and each of its three islands has a parliament of its own.

Guernsey is governed by the States of Deliberation, a chamber of independents with no parties, no Chief Minister and no cabinet, whose business is done by committees. Its senior politician is the President of the Policy and Resources Committee, at present Deputy Anne Ozanne. As in Jersey, the Bailiff presides over both the Royal Court and the States, and a committee of Britain’s Privy Council advises the King on whether to assent to the island’s laws. Unlike Jersey, Guernsey still sends its final appeals to London.

The Bailiwick’s three islands had three different wars. Guernsey was besieged from 1939 to 1944 and never occupied, after half its people had been sent away. Alderney, fifteen kilometres from the Norman coast, was occupied by France for four years, the only part of the Channel Islands to be taken. Sark held out under its Dame. Since 1948 Guernsey has run Alderney’s principal services, and Alderney, now richer per head than Guernsey from the tidal power station in its waters, pays for them. Sark is still a feudal state, the last in Europe: its Seigneur holds the island by a grant of 1565, and its constitution survives because the King’s ministers have declined to change it.

Etymology

The name Guernsey is recorded as Greneroi and Guernerui in the Norman sources, the second element being the Norse ey, island. The first is disputed: the philologists offer a Norse personal name, Warinn or Grani, and a word for green, and have not settled it. The Romans’ Sarnia, which the older antiquaries assigned to Guernsey, is the name the island has kept for its poetry and its anthem, and a good deal of its civic life is called after it.

Alderney is the English form of the Norman Aurigny, the name the island’s airline carries, and Sark is the English form of Sercq. The word Bailiwick means the territory of a bailiff, and the Bailiwick of Guernsey is all three islands under one Bailiff and one Crown. The Bailiwick of Jersey is a separate jurisdiction, and the two have never been united.

History

The Norman islands

The islands passed from Brittany to the Duchy of Normandy in 933 and were held by the dukes until 1204, when King John lost the mainland duchy to Philip II of France and the islands stayed with the English Crown. The Treaty of Paris of 1259 confirmed the division. The islands kept the Norman custom, their own courts and the liberties that a series of royal charters confirmed, and they were governed through the Middle Ages by wardens and then by governors who answered to the King and not to Westminster.

Castle Cornet, on its rock in the harbour of St Peter Port, was the island’s fortress from the thirteenth century, and the French held it for a time in the fourteenth. The island was fought over in the Hundred Years War and was granted a papal neutrality in 1483 that kept it out of the wars between England and France until the Reformation ended it.

Castle Cornet and the Civil War

In the Civil War the island declared for Parliament, while its governor held Castle Cornet for the King. The castle was besieged by the island for eight years, bombarding the town it overlooked and being bombarded in return, and it surrendered in December 1651, the last royalist stronghold in the British Isles to fall. The island’s division between a parliamentarian town and a royalist castle is the reason it was never treated as a royalist island at the Restoration, and the episode is the one in its history it is most often asked to explain.

Privateers, granite and Methodism

The eighteenth century made the island rich. Its merchants fitted out privateers against French shipping in every war of the century, its traders ran a smuggling and entrepôt business between England and France, and its houses took a share, smaller than Jersey’s, of the cod trade of the Gaspé and Newfoundland. Elizabeth College, founded in 1563 by Elizabeth I, educated the merchants’ sons. Methodism came to the island in the 1780s, and John Wesley preached in St Peter Port in 1787. It became the island’s second tradition and, in the country parishes, its first.

In the nineteenth century the island quarried granite for London’s streets and kerbs, and from the 1860s its growers built glasshouses for grapes and then for tomatoes and flowers. The glasshouse industry became the island’s largest employer by the end of the century and sent its tomatoes to the London markets in the island’s own steamers.

Hugo and the nineteenth century

Victor Hugo came to the island in 1855, after Jersey had expelled him, and lived in exile at Hauteville House in St Peter Port until 1870. He finished Les Misérables there and wrote Les Travailleurs de la mer, which is set in Guernsey and is dedicated to it. The house, which he furnished and decorated himself, belongs to the City of Paris and is open as a museum, and the island regards him as its most distinguished resident. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted at Moulin Huet bay in 1883, and his pictures of the bay are the island’s best-known images.

The island raised its own regiment in the First Great War, the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry, which lost most of its strength in the battle of Cambrai in 1917. The losses are the island’s great grief of the century before the siege, and the island’s war memorial in St Peter Port is the centre of its remembrance.

The siege, 1939 to 1944

When fascist France invaded the Low Countries in 1939, Guernsey became a frontier fortress. It lay further from the Norman coast than Jersey, about fifty kilometres from the Cotentin, and it was bombed less. But it was the forward base for the British light forces in the strait: the motor torpedo boats that worked the Norman coast ran from St Peter Port, and a radar station on the island’s west coast watched the French harbours. That is why the island was bombed at all.

In the first winter of the war about seventeen thousand people, half the island and nearly all its schoolchildren, were sent to Britain. The British garrison was reinforced and the Royal Guernsey Militia was embodied beside it. French aircraft raided the harbour, the radar station and the batteries for five years and killed about three hundred islanders. St Peter Port’s harbour was damaged and its town was not ruined, and the island’s records, in the Greffe and the Priaulx Library, came through intact. The island was never invaded and never occupied. The siege broke on 6 June 1944, when the Counter-Invasion landed in Brittany, and Relief Day keeps that date.

Sark held out beside it. Its Dame, Sibyl Hathaway, who held the Seigneurie from 1927 to 1974, refused to leave, kept the island’s few hundred people on it and its Chief Pleas sitting, and became through the siege the most famous person in the Bailiwick.

Alderney under occupation, 1940 to 1944

Alderney is fifteen kilometres from the Cap de la Hague, and in the summer of 1940 a French force landed on it and took it. It was the only part of the Channel Islands to be occupied. Most of its people stayed. The French garrison, larger than the island’s population, built batteries and bunkers across the island and requisitioned houses and land, and the island’s Judge and its States went on sitting under French orders.

The occupation was correct. The garrison kept order, paid for most of what it took, and did not deport or punish the islanders, and the islanders went hungry in the last winter with the rest of the Norman coast. On 6 June 1944 the garrison, cut off by the landings, surrendered without a shot to a British force sent across from Guernsey. Alderney keeps Relief Day with the other islands, and it remembers its occupation without much bitterness.

After the war

Guernsey’s people came home in 1944 and 1945, and the island was rebuilt with money from Britain and the Realm. Alderney came out of the war run down, its houses requisitioned and its finances unable to carry the services it had run before, and under an agreement of 1948 Guernsey took over its police, its airport, its health, its schools and its finance, and Alderney’s people began to pay Guernsey’s taxes. Alderney kept its own States.

The glasshouse industry reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s, when tomatoes were the island’s largest export. It collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, as oil prices made heating the glass ruinous and the Dutch and Spanish growers undercut the island’s, and the derelict glasshouses, the vineries, still cover much of the north of the island. Finance replaced it. From the 1960s the island’s low taxes and its stable law drew funds, insurers and trust companies, and by the 1990s finance was the island’s largest industry.

The island’s government was reformed piecemeal. The States adopted government by committees, with a Policy and Resources Committee at their head, in 2016, and in 2020 the Deputies were elected island-wide for the first time instead of by district. In the 2010s the Race of Alderney tidal power station was built in Alderney’s waters, and it now supplies the Bailiwick’s electricity. In 2027 the Bailiwick opted out of the European Concert’s financial standards with Jersey, and in the autumn of 2028, when Queen Christina became Regent, the Bailiwick’s Crown followed Britain’s.

Geography

The islands

Guernsey is the second largest of the Channel Islands, about ten kilometres by six, a plateau tilted from the high cliffs of the south down to the low, sandy north, where the glasshouses stand. St Peter Port, on the east coast, is the capital and the principal harbour, built up its hillside above Castle Cornet, and St Sampson to the north is the commercial port. The island’s coast is rocky and broken, with the bays of Moulin Huet and Petit Bot under the southern cliffs, and its tides rise and fall about ten metres at the springs.

Alderney lies about thirty-five kilometres to the north-east, the closest of the islands to France, about five kilometres by two and a half, with one town, St Anne, and a harbour at Braye behind a nineteenth-century breakwater built for a naval base that was never finished. The Race of Alderney between the island and the Cap de la Hague is among the strongest tidal streams in Europe. Sark, ten kilometres east of Guernsey, is a high plateau with cliffs on every side, divided into Great and Little Sark by La Coupée, a ridge eighty metres high and a few metres wide.

Herm, five kilometres east of Guernsey, is a small island leased from the States of Guernsey, with a hotel, a harbour and no cars. Jethou beside it is Crown land on lease. Brecqhou, off Sark’s west coast, is a private island under Sark’s jurisdiction, owned by an absentee owner who is not named and who has not disputed the jurisdiction. Lihou, off Guernsey’s west coast, is a tidal island owned by the States, with the ruins of a medieval priory, reached on foot at low water.

The ten parishes

Each parish has its church, its Douzaine, an elected council of twelve or more, and two Constables who carry out its decisions. The Douzaines keep the parish’s roads and boundaries, collect its rates and send a representative to the island’s committees on local matters.

Government and politics

The Crown in right of Guernsey

The King holds a Crown in right of Guernsey that is a separate legal person from the Crown in right of Great Britain. The Bailiwick’s land, its contracts, its prosecutions and its public property belong to that Crown, which is one of the Crowns below a realm treated in the Crown in Right. The King acts on the Bailiwick’s affairs on the advice of the President of the Policy and Resources Committee in every respect but one: a committee of the British Privy Council, the Committee for the Affairs of Jersey and Guernsey, advises him on whether to assent to the laws of the States. Jersey and Guernsey are the only places in the union where the advice rule is set aside for a whole legislature.

The committee has not refused a Guernsey law in living memory. The laws of Alderney and Sark take the same road, and the committee’s one well-known refusal in the Bailiwick in modern times was a refusal to act rather than to assent: it declined to advise the King to impose an elected Chief Pleas on Sark.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The King is represented by a Lieutenant-Governor, at present Lieutenant-General Sir Mark Brehaut, a retired British army officer of a Guernsey family. The King appoints him on the President’s advice, after a recommendation from a panel of the island’s officers, for a term of about five years. The office is ceremonial. The Lieutenant-Governor lives at Government House, represents the Crown at the island’s occasions, and carries its communications with British defence and with the Privy Council committee. He has no vote and no executive power.

The Bailiff

The Bailiff, at present Sir Richard Ogier, is the Bailiwick’s chief judge and its civic head. He presides over the Royal Court and over the States of Deliberation, and in that double office he stands at the head of both the judiciary and the legislature. He is appointed by the King on the President’s advice and holds office until he retires. As in Jersey, the double office is the Bailiwick’s best-known argument about the separation of powers, and as in Jersey it has not been changed.

The States of Deliberation

The States of Deliberation is Guernsey’s parliament. It has thirty-eight People’s Deputies, elected for four years by the whole island voting as one constituency, and two Alderney Representatives, chosen by the States of Alderney. The voting age is sixteen. The Bailiff presides. His Majesty’s Procureur and His Majesty’s Comptroller, the Crown’s law officers in the Bailiwick, sit and speak without a vote, and the Dean of Guernsey sits without a vote too.

The island-wide election, first held in 2020, gives each voter as many votes as there are seats and puts more than a hundred candidates on one ballot paper. It has made the Deputies more independent of any district and the ballot the longest in the union, and its critics say it rewards the names voters already know.

A second body, the States of Election, made up of the Deputies, the Jurats and the parish Douzaines’ representatives, meets to elect the Jurats of the Royal Court.

The committees and the President

Guernsey has no Chief Minister and no cabinet. The States govern through committees, each with a President and four or five members elected by the States. The Policy and Resources Committee coordinates the government, prepares the budget and conducts the Bailiwick’s external relations, and its President is the island’s senior politician and the one who advises the King. The principal committees cover health and social care, education, employment and social security, home affairs, the environment and infrastructure, and economic development.

The President of the Policy and Resources Committee is at present Deputy Anne Ozanne, elected by the States after the last general election. She has no power to appoint or dismiss the other Presidents, each of whom is elected by the States and answers to it, and a committee may pursue a policy that her own committee opposes until the States decide between them. The system disperses power deliberately, and it is defended as the island’s guarantee that nobody governs it and attacked as the reason nobody can.

No parties

Every Deputy is an independent. Candidates stand on their own manifestos, and the States form majorities issue by issue. Attempts to organise a party have been made, and none has lasted beyond a single election. The absence of parties is the island’s pride and its frustration: it keeps the Deputies close to their voters and makes a programme of government almost impossible to carry through four years.

The toast

At loyal dinners in Guernsey the toast is to “the King, our Duke”. The island means the sovereign as heir of the dukes of Normandy who held the islands before 1204, and it does not quarrel over the title. Jersey’s Royal Court insists that the Duke of the islands is not the Duke of the mainland duchy, which the King’s house has held since 1945 and George V holds in his own right. Guernsey has never joined the argument, holds that one man may be Duke twice over without the islands minding, and is regarded by Jersey as not having understood the question.

The King and the Bailiwick

Ernest V came to Guernsey as often as he went to Jersey, and the island kept count. He stayed at Government House and crossed to Sark and Alderney on most visits. When Queen Christina became Regent in the autumn of 2028, the Bailiwick’s Crown followed Britain’s, since the British Regency Act covers the dependencies, and the States passed a resolution of acknowledgement with no legal force. Since 31 October 2028, when Ernest V abdicated, the Bailiwick’s Crown has been held by George V, for whom his mother acts as Regent until 2 May 2029, again following Britain’s.

Church and state

The Dean of Guernsey is the island’s senior Anglican priest and sits in the States without a vote. The Bailiwick’s parishes were moved in 2014 from the diocese of Winchester to the diocese of Salisbury, after a dispute over the bishop’s oversight of the island’s clergy. Jersey’s remain under Winchester, and the two islands have one more thing to differ on. Methodism is the island’s strong second tradition, and the Roman Catholic Church, enlarged by the Portuguese and Latvian communities, is growing.

Britain’s power to legislate

As with Jersey, the British Parliament has the power to legislate for the Bailiwick and a convention of consent restrains it. The convention has not been tested, and the Bailiwick’s autonomy rests on Westminster’s choosing to observe it. Guernsey’s lawyers add one thing Jersey’s do not: that the Bailiwick’s last appeal lies to a court in London, so that a test of the convention would be decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and that this is a good reason for nobody to bring one.

Alderney

The States of Alderney

Alderney has its own parliament, the States of Alderney, with a President, at present Margaret Herivel, and ten members, all elected by the whole island. The States make Alderney’s own laws, set its local taxes and choose its two Representatives in Guernsey’s States of Deliberation. The Court of Alderney, with a Judge and Jurats, hears the island’s lesser cases, and its appeals go to the Royal Court in Guernsey. The island depends on two things it does not fully control: the air link that Aurigny, Guernsey’s airline, flies to Guernsey and Southampton, and the nineteenth-century breakwater that shelters Braye harbour and costs more each decade to keep standing.

The 1948 agreement

Under the agreement of 1948 Guernsey runs Alderney’s police, airport, health, social services, schools and the collection of its taxes, and Alderney’s people pay Guernsey’s income tax. The agreement was made because Alderney could not carry its services after the occupation, and it has never been reopened. Alderney pays more into Guernsey’s revenue than it receives in services, and since the tidal station made it rich it pays a good deal more. It is content to pay. The argument between the islands is only about the price.

The tidal station

The Race of Alderney tidal power station, built in the 2010s on the seabed of the race, belongs to the States of Alderney. Its turbines supply the whole Bailiwick’s electricity, with a surplus sold through the cable link that Guernsey and Jersey share with Normandy, and its revenue goes to Alderney. It has made Alderney richer per head than Guernsey. It has not yet brought back the people: the island’s population fell for half a century after the war, its young people leave for Guernsey and Britain, and the station employs engineers who mostly do not live on the island.

Sark

The Seigneur and the grant of 1565

Sark is held by its Seigneur under letters patent of Elizabeth I of 1565, which granted the island to Helier de Carteret of Jersey on condition that he keep it settled with forty armed men. He divided it into forty tenements and let them to forty families, and the island’s constitution is still the one that grant created. The Seigneur holds the island as a fief of the Crown in right of Guernsey and pays a token rent for it. The present Seigneur is Edward Beaumont, of the Beaumont family that has held the Seigneurie since Dame Sibyl Hathaway’s death in 1974.

The Seigneur keeps privileges that the rest of Europe abolished centuries ago. He alone may keep pigeons and an unspayed bitch, and he receives the treizième, a thirteenth of the price of any tenement sold. He has a suspensive veto over the ordinances of Chief Pleas, which delays a measure until Chief Pleas passes it again.

Chief Pleas

The island’s parliament is Chief Pleas. Its members are the holders of the forty tenements, who sit by right of their land, and twelve Deputies of the People, elected by the island’s other residents. The Seneschal presides, and the Seigneur sits with his veto. Chief Pleas meets three times a year in the island’s assembly hall and makes the island’s ordinances, sets its few taxes, which are levied on property and on visitors rather than on income, and chooses its officers: the Prévôt, the island’s sheriff, the Greffier, its clerk, and the Constable and Vingtenier of its honorary police.

The Seneschal

The Seneschal, at present Philip Carré, is appointed by the Seigneur. He presides over Chief Pleas and is the island’s judge, sitting alone in the Court of the Seneschal on its civil and lesser criminal cases, with an appeal to the Royal Court in Guernsey. The combination of a judge appointed by the island’s lord who also presides over its parliament is the feature of Sark’s constitution its critics find hardest to defend.

The petition

In the 2000s residents who held no tenement, and who had twelve Deputies to the tenants’ forty, petitioned the King to impose an elected Chief Pleas. The Privy Council committee advised against it. Its advice was that the Seigneurie is a grant of the Crown and not a creature of Parliament, that the island’s constitution may be changed by Chief Pleas, and that the King should not change it over Chief Pleas’s head. Chief Pleas has never voted to change it, since the tenants who would lose their seats are the majority of the house that would have to vote, and the petitioners have not tried again.

Life on Sark

Sark has no cars. Its people and its visitors go on foot, by bicycle, by horse carriage or by tractor, which the island’s ordinances license and limit, and its roads are unmade lanes. It was declared a dark-sky island for the clarity of its night. Its economy is tourism, a little farming and fishing, and the property taxes that a few wealthy residents pay. Its own Norman language, Sercquiais, brought from Jersey by de Carteret’s settlers, has almost gone, with a handful of elderly speakers left.

Law

The Royal Court and the Jurats

The Royal Court of Guernsey sits with the Bailiff or the Deputy Bailiff and the Jurats, twelve lay judges elected by the States of Election, who decide the facts in the more serious cases and fix sentences with the presiding judge. The Royal Court and its counterpart in Jersey are the only courts in the Realm and Britain where a magistrate and a panel of lay Jurats try the facts together. A Magistrate’s Court hears minor cases. His Majesty’s Procureur and His Majesty’s Comptroller prosecute and advise the States.

The Court of Appeal and London

The Guernsey Court of Appeal, whose judges are mostly senior lawyers from Britain and Jersey, hears appeals from the Royal Court. Beyond it, unlike Jersey’s, the Bailiwick’s last appeal still lies to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. Jersey made its own Court of Appeal final in the 1990s. Guernsey considered the same reform and declined it, on the ground that a small jurisdiction is better served by a final court that none of its own judges sits on, and Jersey’s senior judges now sit on the Judicial Committee when Guernsey’s cases are heard. The arrangement is one of the few in which Guernsey has chosen to be less independent than Jersey.

Norman customary law

The Bailiwick’s law of land, inheritance and family descends from the customary law of Normandy, set down in the Grand Coutumier and the island’s own Approbation des Lois of 1583. Its records of property are kept in French. The Clameur de Haro is good law in Guernsey and Sark as in Jersey: a person whose land is being wronged may kneel before witnesses, cry “Haro, Haro, Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!”, say the Lord’s Prayer in French, and the wrong must stop until the Royal Court has heard the matter.

External relations and defence

Britain and the Bailiwick

Britain is responsible for the Bailiwick’s defence and external relations, and the Crown in right of Great Britain acts for it in both. The Bailiwick is not a member of any international body in its own right, and it has been entrusted by Britain with the power to sign its own tax and regulatory agreements. Britain does not tax it and does not support it, and the Bailiwick is not represented in Britain’s Parliament. Britain’s Ministry of Justice is the department that deals with it.

The Concert

The Bailiwick is inside the European Concert through Britain’s treaty and has opted out of the Concert’s financial standards alongside Jersey. Straßburg inspects its regulation, publishes its findings and wants the opt-out removed, and the Bailiwick, like Jersey, reforms what it can and keeps the opt-out. The two islands speak together on it through their joint office in Straßburg.

The Norman compact

Guernsey is a party to the cultural compact among Normandy, Brittany and the Channel Islands. Jersey hosts its Norman Language Commission, and Guernsey hosts its archives secretariat, at the Priaulx Library in St Peter Port, since the island’s records survived the siege intact. The secretariat catalogues the islands’ and the duchies’ records of the Norman centuries and lends them to each other.

The compact’s Norman-language festival is held each summer in turn at St Peter Port and at Cherbourg, with Jersey and Sark taking part. It is the largest gathering of speakers of the Norman languages in the year, and the one occasion on which Guernésiais, Jèrriais and the mainland Cotentinais are heard on one stage.

Jersey

The two Bailiwicks share a joint office in London and Brussels, a Channel Islands commission on shared policy and a great many families, and they are rivals in everything else. The Muratti, the football match played between them since 1905, is the year’s most-watched fixture in both. The finance centres compete for the same business. The single ferry operator that serves both islands is a standing quarrel over timetables, fares and which island it favours, and Guernsey’s airline and Jersey’s travellers have never been reconciled. Since the tidal station was built, power runs the other way on the cable through which the Bailiwick once drew its electricity by way of Jersey, a reversal Guernsey enjoys although the station is Alderney’s.

The Realm and New Albion

The Realm keeps a good deal of money in Guernsey. A standing committee of the American House of Commons complains periodically about American assets in the islands, and it has complained about Guernsey as well as Jersey. Guernsey’s particular business is captive insurance, the insurance companies that large firms set up to insure themselves, and most of the Bailiwick’s captives belong to American companies. That is why the committee’s complaints go nowhere.

The island’s older tie with the Realm walks on four legs. The Guernsey cow, a fawn and white dairy breed, is the breed of the Realm’s eastern dairy country, from Pennsylvania to the Bay, and the island’s breed society keeps the herd book that certifies it. The island has banned the import of live cattle since 1819 to keep the breed pure. Its tie with New Albion is the smaller share it had in the cod trade of the Gaspé and Newfoundland, where Guernsey names are found among Jersey’s in the fishing coves.

Defence

Defence is Britain’s responsibility. The Bailiwick’s own force is the Royal Guernsey Militia, which was embodied through the siege and survives as a small reserve with ceremonial duties under the Lieutenant-Governor. The forts and batteries of the siege, the radar station’s concrete on the west coast and Castle Cornet itself are preserved, and Castle Cornet keeps the Militia’s museum.

Economy

The Bailiwick’s output is about A£3.5 billion, some A£53,000 a head, and finance is the largest part of it: investment funds, fiduciary business, banking and insurance, with captive insurance its speciality. The industry grew from the 1960s and employs about a fifth of the island’s workers. Its dependence on a status that Britain, the Realm or the Concert could change is the Bailiwick’s permanent political fact, as it is Jersey’s.

The States issue the Guernsey pound, in notes and coins of their own that circulate at par with the British pound, and British money is accepted beside it. The glasshouse industry that made the island’s fortune in the century before 1980 survives only as a few growers of flowers and specialist crops, and the derelict vineries are a planning argument that has outlasted every States. Tourism is second to finance, with visitors from Britain, Normandy and the Realm drawn to the coast, the castles and the small islands, and the Guernsey cow, its milk, butter and the herd book, is the island’s best-known product after its money.

Alderney’s economy is the tidal station, a small tourism and a population too small for most businesses. Sark’s is visitors and property.

Public finance

Guernsey taxes personal income at a flat twenty per cent and has no sales tax, no capital gains tax and no inheritance tax. Companies pay nothing on most profits and a higher rate on a few kinds of business. The States have argued since the 2000s over introducing a goods and services tax to close a structural deficit, and have rejected it every time it has been put. The deficit is the live question of the island’s politics: the pensions and the health service of an ageing island cost more each year than the island’s narrow tax base raises, and every President of the Policy and Resources Committee has said so and none has carried a remedy.

Transport and media

The island is reached by sea, by the ferries that run from Poole and Portsmouth in England and from St-Malo in Brittany and that serve Jersey as well, and by air. Aurigny, the airline the States own, flies to London, to regional British airports, to Alderney and to Normandy, and its losses, which the States make good each year, are an argument at every budget. There is no direct service to the Realm, which is reached through London. The airport is in the parish of Forest, the harbours are at St Peter Port and St Sampson, and a bus network covers the island.

The island’s newspaper is the Guernsey Press, which is the island’s paper of record. Its local radio and television are branches of the British public service.

Demographics and society

Population and housing

Guernsey has about 64,000 people, Alderney about 2,000 and Sark about 500. The island’s older families are Norman in name and in law, and its newer communities include a Portuguese one, mostly Madeiran, and a Latvian one, both of which came to work in hospitality, farming and the care homes.

The island’s housing is divided into two markets. The local market, the great majority of the houses, may be occupied only by people with a residence qualification, and the open market, a small register of larger houses, may be bought by anyone. The arrangement keeps the island’s own people from being priced out of their island and leaves long-term residents without the right to buy a local-market home. It is the island’s standing grievance, as housing licences are Jersey’s.

Language

English is the language of the island’s life and government. French remains in the law, in the oaths of office, in the names of the island’s institutions and in its property records. The island’s own language, Guernésiais, a Norman language close to Jèrriais and to the speech of the Cotentin, was spoken by most of the island until the nineteenth century and was dying by the middle of the twentieth. Under the Norman compact it has been revived modestly, in evening classes, a primary-school programme and a place in the States’ ceremonies, to a few thousand speakers, fewer than Jèrriais’s ten thousand.

Schools

Schooling is free and compulsory, run by the States through primary schools in the parishes and secondary schools for the island, beside a fee-paying sector. Elizabeth College, founded in 1563, and the Ladies’ College hold the island’s academic reputation. Selection for secondary school at eleven was ended after a decade of argument in the States, and the reorganisation of the island’s secondary schools that followed is still disputed. The island has no university, and its young people go to Britain, Normandy and the Realm to study.

Culture and daily life

The island’s year turns on a few fixed occasions. Relief Day, 6 June, is the public holiday, with a service at the memorial in St Peter Port and the harbour dressed. The North Show, the island’s agricultural show at Saumarez Park, is held each August, with the battle of flowers and the judging of the island’s cattle, and the Viaer Marchi, an evening market of old island food and dress, is held each summer in Guernésiais. The Norman-language festival comes to St Peter Port every other year.

The island eats seafood, Guernsey butter and cream, the bean jar, a stew of beans and pork cooked overnight, and gâche, a fruit loaf, and its ormers are taken under strict rules at the spring tides. Sport is local and fierce: the Muratti against Jersey, the Island Games, in which the island competes as a team of its own, and sailing and swimming in its tides. The island’s best-known visitors are two, Hugo and Renoir, and Hauteville House and the bay at Moulin Huet are the island’s places of pilgrimage.

What is argued about

The Bailiff’s double office. As in Jersey, a judge presides over the legislature, and as in Jersey the island has defended it against every criticism.

The Privy Council committee. It advises on whether the Bailiwick’s laws take effect. The island does not wish to lose the arrangement and does not wish to be seen to depend on it.

Independence. A marginal question. A States report examined it, a debate ended without a vote, and nobody campaigns for it, since there are no parties to campaign.

Merging services with Jersey. Proposals to merge the two islands’ regulators, airlines or health services are made every few years and resisted by both, each of which suspects the other of wanting to run the merged service.

What Alderney pays. The price Guernsey charges Alderney for its services under the 1948 agreement is argued at every budget. Alderney is content to pay and disputes the bill.

The deficit and the goods and services tax. The States know they must raise more or spend less and have repeatedly refused both.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly.

The finance centre’s secrecy. The island has let the Realm’s and Britain’s wealthy, and their companies, hold money and risk quietly, and the standards that would have exposed it are the ones the Bailiwick has opted out of. It has been a servant of the privacy of the powerful since the 1960s.

The two-tier housing market. The local market keeps the island’s own people housed, and it has left residents of decades, many of them the Portuguese and Latvian workers who staff the island’s hotels and care homes, without the right to buy a local-market home in the island they live in.

Sark’s franchise. On Sark the holders of forty tenements outnumber the elected representatives of everyone else by forty to twelve, and the residents who hold no land have almost no voice in the government of their island. They asked the King to change it, and the King’s ministers declined, leaving the change to the people whose seats it would abolish.

Alderney’s neglect. Since 1948 Alderney has been governed in most of what matters from Guernsey, which runs its schools, its hospital and its police and collects its taxes. Its population fell for half a century, its services have been run to Guernsey’s priorities and at Guernsey’s convenience, and it has paid more into Guernsey’s revenue than it has been given back, before the tidal station and more so since.

Assessment

The Bailiwick works by dispersing power so thoroughly that nobody can be blamed for anything. Guernsey has no Chief Minister, no cabinet, no parties and no majority, and its committees and their Presidents answer to a States that forms its majorities afresh on every vote. The arrangement keeps the island’s government close to its people and makes it almost incapable of doing anything they would not like, which is why the deficit has been argued over since the 2000s and never remedied.

The Bailiwick’s three islands are an argument against the idea that small places must be alike. Guernsey governs itself by committee, Alderney is governed by Guernsey and pays for the privilege, and Sark is governed by its tenants under a sixteenth-century grant that the Crown has declined to disturb. Each arrangement survives because the people who could change it benefit from it, and the Privy Council committee, which could disturb any of them, has chosen to disturb none. The Bailiwick has the institutions of a country and the habits of a parish, and it has kept both for eight centuries by never asking which it is.

Symbols

The flag of Guernsey is the red cross of St George on a white field, with a gold cross of the Norman dukes laid upon the red. The island’s arms are three gold leopards on a red shield, the arms of the Norman dukes and of England, with a sprig of laurel above. Alderney and Sark have flags of their own: Alderney’s a gold lion holding a sprig on a green roundel at the centre of a red cross, Sark’s two gold leopards on red in the canton of a red cross. The anthem is Sarnia Cherie, written in 1911, and the Royal Anthem is played on state occasions. The loyal toast is to “the King, our Duke”. The public holiday is Relief Day, 6 June.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Bailiwick of Jersey, the other Bailiwick
• Isle of Man, the third Crown dependency, a lordship rather than a Crown
• The Crown in Right, including the Crowns below the realm and the Channel Islands’ exception to the advice rule
• United Kingdom of Great Britain, whose Crown dependency this is
• Duchy of Normandy and Duchy of Brittany, the neighbours across the strait and parties to the Norman compact
• The European Concert, whose financial standards the Bailiwick has opted out of
• New Albion, whose cod coast the island’s merchants shared
• The Second Great War

Categories

Nations · Great Britain and its territories · Crown Dependencies · Channel Islands