How Bureaucracy Is Killing Community Spirit – and What We Can Learn from the U.S.
The recent cancellation of Guernsey’s Vintage Agricultural Show 1 should set off alarm bells far beyond the showground. What we’re witnessing is not just the loss of a beloved local event — it’s the suffocation of Guernsey’s community life by a civil service that has forgotten who it serves.
Once a joyous August tradition, drawing 4,000–5,000 visitors to St Peter’s, the show has now been axed for 2025 due to an avalanche of paperwork, permits, and red tape. The organisers, all volunteers, were defeated not by lack of enthusiasm or community interest – but by the unrelenting and growing demands of States bureaucracy. That is: the bureaucracy that we are paying for – that ostensibly works for us!
The Bureaucracy That Ate the Island
From Traffic & Highways forms for every single steam tractor to excessive health and safety hurdles, the experience described by organiser Ron Le Cras is depressingly familiar: “It’s just got ridiculous… it’s everything. And it just takes too long.”
In short, it’s not about public safety or order – it’s about control. The civil service in Guernsey has become a bloated, risk-averse monolith, more interested in its own processes than in enabling public life. Worse still, the response from officials is often tone-deaf: empty offers to “guide people through the process” rather than simplifying, rethinking or canning it altogether.
This kind of bureaucratic sclerosis not only kills events – it kills morale. It sends a clear message to volunteers and community organisers: “Don’t bother. You’ll get no help, and every hurdle will be yours alone to jump.”
Government should be limited to providing only those essential services that individuals or communities cannot reasonably provide on their own – nothing beyond that.
Enter DOGE: A Model for Reform
In the United States, President Donald Trump has launched a revolutionary new body — the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – to slice through the federal bureaucracy. With the strategic guidance of Elon Musk, DOGE is already tearing down waste, terminating needless contracts, and streamlining operations across the board.
This isn’t just political theatre. DOGE has a clear mandate: eliminate waste, remove duplication, and ensure public servants are accountable to the public again. Trillions in projected savings are being sought without touching essential services – by targeting bureaucratic sprawl, not public benefit.
Guernsey could do well to take note. If an empire of red tape in Washington can be challenged, surely our island’s comparatively small administration can, too.
Time for a Guernsey DOGE
We need our own Department of Government Efficiency – a Guernsey DOGE – to:
- Audit every layer of paperwork demanded of private citizens and community groups.
- Eliminate duplication and dead-weight rules designed for empire-building, not efficiency.
- Enforce accountability among departments that slow down, rather than speed up, civic activity.
- Empower volunteers, businesses, and ordinary islanders to get on with life without interference.
- Hold the civil service to account for its failures, rather than letting it mark its own homework.
Most importantly, this local DOGE must be independent of the civil service itself. You cannot expect an entrenched system to reform itself willingly – especially one that sees oversight and obstruction as its primary mission.
Furthermore, too often, departments whose staff make poor decisions are allowed to internally investigate themselves – and then declare themselves blameless. This circular logic protects incompetence, punishes transparency, and damages public trust.
It’s time for Guernsey to establish an independent public ombudsman – someone with the authority to investigate complaints, expose dysfunction, and call out failure when the machinery of government lets people down. Civil servants must be made to own their mistakes, not bury them behind layers of procedure and in-house whitewashing: the self review of the ‘blameless’.
Without an impartial external oversight, any call for ‘efficiency’ is just a slogan. With one, it becomes a force for genuine change.
The Choice Is Ours
Guernsey is proud of its independence, heritage, and community spirit. But we cannot preserve those values under a regime of unchecked bureaucracy. Civil servants must be reminded: they are not our masters – they are our staff. And it’s time they started acting like it.
Until we confront this imbalance, we will see more cherished events vanish, more volunteers walk away, and more public frustration mount. The Vintage Agricultural Show is not the first casualty, and it will not be the last – unless we take meaningful action now.
Guernsey doesn’t just need efficiency. It needs a revolution in public service accountability.
🗣️ Public Reaction: Unanimous Outrage
If the States of Guernsey ever doubted the public mood, a glance at the comments under the Guernsey Press article “Vintage Agricultural Show cancelled over red tape” should dispel any illusion of support.
(GP took down a link to this piece you are reading)
At the time of writing (50 comments , 4 hours after the GP published), not a single comment defends the conduct of the civil service. Instead, the thread is filled with frustration, sarcasm, and outright condemnation. A selection of verbatim highlights follows:
“All hail the mighty bureaucracy protecting us from our freedoms.”
— 7 Zark 7
“Guernsey is a bureaucratic nightmare. How can any of these events survive anymore?”
— Oh my Gaché
“Rules and regulations are the condom on the tool of progress!”
— GuernseyBloke
“The civil service is a millstone around our neck… the more we employ, the more interference in our daily lives.”
— Weewilly
“Got to keep the civil service employed after all.”
— Progress
“Experience tells me that as a States event, there won’t be the same form-filling exercise… nor will you be required to have a bell on your occupation tricycle.”
— ConcernedGuern – 2
“Perhaps this could be the ideal time for green ribbons to be flown as a show of public opposition to red tape.”
— 7 Zark 7
“The GEP photo of Boley firing the noon-day gun with the headline ‘Chief executive carries out his first firing’ was brilliant… Start ‘releasing’ 100 civil servants a month until Christmas.”
— Build Upwards not Outwards
“These Turkeys won’t vote for Christmas — just keep on the gravy train.”
— travellingman
“As one with personal experience of needless bureaucratic over-reach… this is for those who make a career out of wrapping us in cotton wool.”
— Airbiscuit
📊 Sentiment Breakdown (as of 28 March 2025):
| Sentiment | Number of Comments |
|---|---|
| Critical of civil service | 35+ |
| Supportive of civil service | 0 |
| Neutral or unrelated | 3 |
The overwhelming sentiment is clear: Guernsey’s civil service is no longer seen as a servant of the public, but as a self-serving burden.
In the absence of even a token defence from within government ranks, one might conclude the States communications team hadn’t clocked in yet this morning — or perhaps, they too are buried under forms in triplicate. Or is it…possibly…that they have a new boss?
