Back to the Future V (at least)
- Fear & Loathing IOM
- Feb 25, 2023
- 2 min read
It seems that at least every decade since this withering assessment of the IOMs then new resident policy was published in the Free Manx Press fifty years ago we've had a fairly regular rinse and repeat cycle of the same doomed strategy every 10 years or so the point that our current Chief Minister, Sandhurst-educated Alfred Cannan, now fires the latest volley across the bow of the generally confused Manx public in true Lord Melchett style when it appears that, like our predecessors, many of us simply aren't able to visualise how our increasingly broken Island with its impoverished and almost non-existent public services, its snowballing cost of living, and our glaringly apparent housing crisis is going to provide any sort of platform to grow our population by 15,000 people over the next 10 years.
From Manx Radio critics of the population plan are missing the point according to Mr Cannan:
Yes history shows that almost the exact same message was attributed to J B Bolton, former Chairman of the IOM Finance Board [effectively Head of Treasury], in 1973 regarding Tynwald's then new resident policy which also actively seemed to favour alienating locals in an attempt to attract wealthy speculators and various other new residents across to inject much needed cash into an Island whose infrastructure was literally disintegrating around them after a decade or so of stagnant revenue and neglect. Times were hard in 1973 and even by the middle of the 1980s it was said that the IOM had only the princely sum of £1,000,000 in cash in reserves - so readers might assume that if they hadn't have stumbled on the finance sector around that time then its probably safe to say that little tangibly would have been salvaged via such a desperate new resident policy in the overall scheme of things. In short, like the finance sector springing up almost out of nowhere in the mid 1980s, our history suggests that first we have to create or discover unique things that will bring people here. Not aimlessly ask people to come over and then hope something will miraculously happen when they get here.
Which leads us to where we are now in an Island where seemingly nothing, and increasingly no body, seems to work. An Island that is now only looking for economically active people to relocate here to co-mingle with our heady mix of pensioners (nearly 16,000 IOM residents, or close to 20% of the total population, are currently over the age of 65), and low-income migrant workers who can seemingly no longer afford to live here. So we respectfully ask is it really us rather than IOM Government and its labyrinthine and punitively expensive navel-gazing departments who are missing the point when government still can't seem to define, after almost two decades at least of allegedly trying, what the Island's USP actually is to catalyse job creation and if we don't have one why will the current sad and impoverished state of almost everything residents daily interact with bring any of these new residents across to create employment?
The Free Manx Press No 7 1973
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