Bailiwick of Jersey

The Bailiwick of Jersey is the largest of the Channel Islands and a self-governing dependency of the British Crown. It lies about twenty kilometres off the Norman coast and about a hundred and sixty from England, covers 118 square kilometres and has some 110,000 people, of whom about 35,000 live in the capital, St Helier. 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 Jersey, its own States Assembly, its own courts and a customary law that descends from the Duchy of Normandy.

The island is governed by arrangements that are older than most of the Realm’s institutions and have been left largely unrevised. The Bailiff presides over both the Royal Court and the States. Twelve lay Jurats sit with him as judges of fact. Twelve parishes, each led by an elected Connétable, run local government and keep a volunteer honorary police. A landowner can still halt a trespass by kneeling and crying Haro. A committee of Britain’s Privy Council advises the King on Jersey’s laws, which makes Jersey and Guernsey the only places in the union where the advice rule is set aside for a whole legislature.

Jersey was under siege for five years during the Second Great War and was never occupied. It has no occupation to remember and a public holiday, Relief Day, on the day the siege broke. Its economy rests on a financial centre that accounts for about two fifths of output, and on a status that Britain, the Realm and the European Concert could change and have so far chosen not to. The island’s arguments are about housing, the Bailiff’s office, the financial standards it has opted out of, and whether its Crown follows Britain’s in every particular.

Etymology

The island’s name is recorded as Caesarea in the Roman and early medieval sources and as Gersui and Jersui in the Norse and Norman ones, the second element being the Norse ey, island, and the first a matter on which the philologists disagree. The English form Jersey has been used since the twelfth century. The name has travelled: Sir George Carteret, who had held the island for the Crown in the Civil War and was later a proprietor in America, named the colony that became the Province of New Jersey after it, and the island remembers the connection each year.

The word Bailiwick means the territory of a bailiff, and the Bailiwick of Jersey is the island and its dependent reefs, Les Écréhous and Les Minquiers. The Bailiwick of Guernsey, with Alderney and Sark, is a separate jurisdiction. The two have never been united and are not alike.

History

The Norman island

The Channel Islands passed from Brittany to the Duchy of Normandy in 933, and their story is Normandy’s story until 1204. When King John lost mainland Normandy to the French Crown in that year the islands stayed with the English Crown. The Treaty of Paris in 1259 confirmed the division, and the islands have been held of the King of England, in right of his ancient dukedom, ever since. Mont Orgueil, the castle on the east coast at Gorey, was begun soon after 1204 to guard the island against France, and it remained the island’s principal fortress until the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth Castle on its tidal rock was built to command the harbour.

The island’s institutions took shape in the medieval centuries and have kept their shape. The Bailiff, first recorded in the thirteenth century, was the King’s officer and became the island’s chief magistrate. The Royal Court, with its Jurats, grew out of the duke’s justice. The States, the island’s assembly, appear in the records by the fifteenth century. A Charter of King Edward III in 1341 confirmed the island’s liberties, and later sovereigns confirmed it in turn. The customary law of Normandy, written in the Grand Coutumier, remained the island’s law long after Normandy itself had been absorbed into France, and it is still the island’s law of land.

The English Civil War and the sea

Jersey was Royalist in the English Civil War. The Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, took refuge in the island in 1646 and again in 1649, and was proclaimed King in the Royal Square at St Helier in 1649, within weeks of his father’s execution. The island’s loyalty gave it a reputation that it still draws on, and the sovereign’s special position in the island, which the toast to “the Duke” records, was renewed after the Restoration.

The island lived by the sea. Its merchants and privateers traded and fought across the Channel and beyond, and from the seventeenth century Jersey houses ran the cod trade of Newfoundland and the Gaspé, the connection that gives the island a lasting tie to the Atlantic coast of New Albion. Methodism reached the island in the late eighteenth century, taken there by islanders who had heard it preached, and it became the island’s second tradition beside the established church.

The Battle of Jersey

The island’s national hero is Major Francis Peirson, killed on 6 January 1781 in the Royal Square at St Helier in the last minutes of a French landing. A mercenary baron, Philippe de Rullecourt, had crossed the strait with several hundred men on a private venture that the French government disowned, taken the Lieutenant-Governor prisoner by surprise and forced him to sign a surrender. The island’s militia and the garrison refused to obey it. Peirson, aged twenty-four, led the counter-attack, was shot dead at its head, and the French were beaten in a morning. The battle is the island’s founding national memory and is commemorated each January.

The nineteenth century

Jersey grew in the nineteenth century as a harbour, a resort and a place of residence for people who wished to live cheaply under the Crown. A railway opened in 1870 and closed in 1936. Ernest College, the island’s boys’ school, was founded in 1852 in the early years of the reign of Ernest II, with the red and white colours and the Latin motto it has kept. The island’s tourist trade came with the steamers, and the first of the great flower parades, the Battle of Flowers, was held in 1902 to mark a visit by Ernest III.

The island was neutral in the quarrels of the powers until it was not. France was the country across the water, and the island’s relations with it were those of neighbours who have fought and traded for a thousand years. When France became a fascist state in the 1930s the island knew what its neighbour was becoming before London did.

The siege, 1939 to 1944

When fascist France invaded the Low Countries in 1939, Jersey became a frontier fortress. France had built no battle fleet and its navy of submarines and raiders could not land an army across the strait while the British and American navies held the sea, but it had a large air force and the Norman coast was twenty kilometres from the island’s east side. In the first winter of the war about five thousand of the island’s children, mostly to Britain and some to the Realm and Newfoundland, were sent away for safety. The British garrison was reinforced, the Royal Jersey Militia was embodied alongside it, and the coastal batteries, the old Martello towers and the new concrete lines were manned.

The island was bombed for most of five years. French aircraft hit the airport, the harbour and the coast batteries, and the raids on St Helier killed about a thousand islanders and ruined the harbour and the streets about it. The island was never invaded and never occupied. It held, and its war memory is the memory of the siege: the alarms, the rationing, the shelters, the children who came home in 1944 as strangers, and the long wait to be told that the danger had passed. The Counter-Invasion landed in Brittany on 6 June 1944, and the siege broke that day.

The island’s war had a second part that it is proud of. Jersey sits between Normandy and Britain, and its fishing boats carried couriers, airmen and the Norman declarations that proclaimed Ernest IV provisional Duke across the strait. The Norman resistance used the island as a lifeline, and the tie it created between the island and the Norman cause is part of why the island’s own toast to “the Duke” is now awkward. No spy network was uncovered in the island and the rumour that some fishermen were disloyal is a story that outlived the war.

After the war

The island was rebuilt with money from the Realm and Britain, and its harbour and the heart of St Helier were laid out anew in the 1950s. It had come out of the war poor and tired, and its recovery was made by two things: a tourism that returned with the steamers and then the aeroplane, and, from the 1960s, a financial centre that grew from a handful of trust companies and banks that found the island’s low taxes and its stable law to their taste. By the 1980s finance was the island’s largest industry. The Royal Court’s records, the States’ minutes and the balance sheets of the island’s trust houses are, in different ways, the island’s autobiography.

The island’s constitution was changed by a series of reforms rather than by one settlement. In the 1990s the island’s Court of Appeal became the final court for Jersey’s law. In 2022 the voting age was lowered to sixteen. The Concert’s financial standards, adopted in the Treaty of Straßburg in 2027, brought the island’s status into question once more, and the island’s answer, an opt-out that Straßburg wants removed, is the argument of the present.

Geography

Jersey lies in the Gulf of Saint-Malo, the largest of the islands, about fourteen miles from the Cotentin coast of Normandy at its nearest point. It measures about eight miles by five, with high cliffs on the north coast, wide sandy bays on the south and a gentle slope between. Its highest point is Les Platons, at 143 metres. The tidal range is one of the greatest in the world, reaching twelve metres at the springs, and exposes at low water a belt of rock and sand that more than doubles the island’s visible area and that the old islanders worked for ormers and seaweed.

The island is warm for its latitude, with long hours of sunshine. The south-facing slopes on which the Jersey Royal potato is grown are the island’s best land, and the narrow lanes sunk between high banks are its most characteristic feature. Corbière lighthouse stands on its tidal rock at the south-west corner, and the dolmen of La Hougue Bie, about six thousand years old, stands in the east.

Beyond the island lie Les Écréhous and Les Minquiers, two groups of reefs and islets closer to the French coast than to Jersey. They were disputed between Britain and France for centuries, and the League’s court awarded them to Britain and Jersey in 1953. The decision closed the question, and the islets are now the one place the Norman Duchy and Brittany still look at with something like regret. The islands’ fishermen shelter there and a handful of holiday huts stand on the largest of the Minquiers.

St Helier is the only town, a port and a market on the south coast beneath the hill that Elizabeth Castle’s rock and Fort Regent guard, and the island’s population lives mostly in the south and the south-east. The twelve parishes are Grouville, St Brelade, St Clement, St Helier, St John, St Lawrence, St Martin, St Mary, St Ouen, St Peter, St Saviour and Trinity, and each has its parish church, its parish hall and its Connétable.

The twelve parishes

Each parish has its own parish church, its own parish hall, its own Connétable and its own rates, and each takes pride in a distinction the others dispute. Parish loyalties are older than the island’s loyalty to the States, and an election to the Connétable’s office is the one election in the island that is fought on character and not on policy.

Government and politics

The Crown in right of Jersey

The Crown in Right article treats Jersey as one of the Crowns below the realm. The King is represented in the island, and he holds a Crown in right of Jersey that is a separate legal person from the Crown in right of Great Britain. The island’s land, its contracts, its prosecutions and its public property belong to that Crown and not to Britain’s. A case against the island’s government is reported by the island’s name, and the Crown’s name appears on the writ and the indictment.

Jersey and Guernsey are the only places in the union where the advice rule is set aside for a whole legislature. The King acts on Jersey’s affairs on the advice of the island’s ministers 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 States’ laws. The States pass a law, the Chief Minister forwards it, and the committee advises the King in Council whether to give assent. The arrangement is the oldest in the island’s constitution, it is a named exception to the doctrine, and the island defends it without enthusiasm and without wishing it changed.

The committee has not refused a Jersey law in living memory. It last did so in the eighteenth century, and the fact that it could is what the island points to when it is asked why it keeps the arrangement. The King’s Jersey acts are otherwise done on the advice of the Chief Minister, and the Lieutenant-Governor is appointed on that advice.

The Lieutenant-Governor

The King is represented by a Lieutenant-Governor, at present Vice-Admiral Sir Rupert Hallam, a retired senior officer of the Royal Navy. The King appoints on the Chief Minister’s advice, after a recommendation from the States, for a term of about five years. The office is ceremonial. The Lieutenant-Governor receives the island’s visitors, represents the Crown at its occasions and carries the island’s communications with British defence and with the Privy Council committee. He has no vote in the States, no executive power and no part in the island’s government.

The office had more weight when the island was a fortress. Lieutenant-Governors commanded the garrison, and one of them, in 1781, was taken prisoner in his bed by the French and forced to sign the island’s surrender, an episode the island does not let its governors forget. Since the siege the office has been held by naval officers more often than by soldiers or civilians, and the choice has reflected the memory that the island’s last war was fought by the sea.

The Bailiff

The Bailiff is the island’s chief judge and its civic head. He presides over the Royal Court and over the States Assembly, and in that double office he stands at the head of both the island’s judiciary and its legislature. The King appoints him on the Chief Minister’s advice, from a panel that recommends candidates, and he holds office until he retires at seventy. The present Bailiff is Sir Philip de Gruchy.

The combination of the two roles is the island’s best-known argument about the separation of powers. The island’s lawyers have urged for decades that a judge should not preside over a legislature, and the island has declined to change it, on the ground that the Bailiff’s authority in both places rests on his belonging to neither party and that the office has worked. Critics reply that an arrangement that survives on the personal quality of its holders is not an arrangement.

The States Assembly

The States Assembly has 49 members: thirty-seven Deputies, elected from nine districts, and the twelve Connétables, who are the heads of the parishes and sit by right of that office. The Assembly is unicameral and sits for four years. The voting age is sixteen. The Dean of Jersey sits without a vote, as do the Attorney General and the Solicitor General, who advise the Assembly on the law.

The States make the island’s laws, vote its budget and elect its Chief Minister. Its committees do much of the scrutiny that a larger legislature would give to an opposition. The Assembly has a reputation for being hard to read: there are no parties of the kind that make a Commons, the majorities are formed issue by issue, and a measure that has passed on one day can fail on the next.

The Chief Minister and the ministers

The Chief Minister, at present Marguerite Le Quesne, an independent Deputy for the east of the island, is elected by the States and proposes the ministers for the Assembly’s approval. She has a fragile majority built after the last election from independents of different views. There is no formal collective responsibility: a minister may be outvoted and stay in office, and the Chief Minister has no power to dismiss a minister who commands the States’ confidence. The system works because it has had to.

Parties

Almost everyone in the States is an independent. Members form loose groupings after each election, and one small organised party, the Island Reform Party, which stands for housing controls and a minimum wage, holds a handful of seats. A Chief Minister is chosen by bargaining and not by a majority, and a government’s life depends on the temper of independents who have promised their voters that they will not be whipped.

The parishes

The island is divided into twelve parishes, each with its own assembly, its own rates and its own officers. The Connétable is the elected head of the parish, its chief magistrate and its member of the States. Under him serve the Centeniers, who lead the parish’s honorary police, and the Vingteniers, who look after its districts. The parish assembly sets the parish rate, and the parish hall is where the ordinary business of the island, from road repair to the burial of the dead, is done.

The honorary police are the island’s most distinctive institution. Volunteers elected by their parishes, they charge and prosecute minor offences, hold suspects pending charge and sit with the Royal Court at its opening, and a professional States police force works beside them. The honorary police are cheap, local and occasionally overruled by their own professional colleagues, and the island has declined to reduce their powers.

The toast to the Duke

At loyal dinners in the island the toast is not to the King. It is to “the Duke”, and the sovereign is meant: he is the heir of the medieval dukes of Normandy, who held the island before the English Crown did, and the island has never altered the form. Since 1945 the toast has had a complication. The sovereign, since 31 October 2028 George V, is Duke of Normandy in his own right, one of his fourteen capacities, in the mainland duchy across the strait that Ernest IV was confirmed in by the Norman Constitution of 1948.

The Royal Court insists that the Duke of the islands and the Duke of the mainland duchy are two dukedoms held by one man. The island’s toast, it argues, is older than the mainland duchy’s restoration by seven centuries and has nothing to do with it, and the mainland Duke is the one who borrowed the title. Normandy does not dispute this in public and disputes it in private, and the argument is held again each year at the meeting of the Norman cultural compact, where it is among the most courteous occasions in the compact’s calendar.

The King and the island

Ernest V came to Jersey often, privately as well as formally, and was there several times in each decade of his reign. He liked the island’s quiet and its Norman toast, and was said to prefer the island’s small formal occasions to the larger ones he attends elsewhere. His grandfather Ernest III came in 1902, the year of the first Battle of Flowers, and the island regards the royal house as an old acquaintance.

When Queen Christina became Regent in the autumn of 2028, the island’s Crown followed Britain’s. The British Regency Act covers the dependencies, since Jersey’s Crown is held under the British King, and the States passed a resolution of acknowledgement that has no legal force. Jersey is one of the Crowns below a realm that needed no Act of its own. Since Ernest V’s abdication on 31 October 2028 the island’s Crown has been held by George V, with his mother acting as Regent until 2 May 2029, again following Britain’s.

The Seigneurs

A handful of manors survive from the medieval fiefs, among them Rozel and Samarès. Their lords, the Seigneurs, hold no legal power. They carry the ceremonial staves of the Royal Court on the days when the court sits in state, and each pays a token rent in kind to the Crown on one day each year, a custom that the Crown in right of Jersey receives, records and returns.

Church and state

The Dean of Jersey is the island’s senior Anglican priest, and the island’s parishes form part of the Church of England’s diocese of Winchester. The Dean sits in the States without a vote, a survival of the days when the church sat in the assembly of the island. Methodism, which came to the island in the late eighteenth century, is its second tradition, and the island’s chapels outnumber its churches in some parishes.

Britain’s power to legislate

The British Parliament has the power to legislate for Jersey, and a convention of consent restrains it: it does not do so without the island’s agreement. The convention has never been tested in court and Jersey’s lawyers say it never will be. It is the island’s real constitution, in the sense that the island’s whole autonomy rests on a restraint that Westminster has chosen to observe, and the island has been careful never to ask what would happen if it did not.

Law

The Royal Court and the Jurats

The Royal Court sits with the Bailiff and two or more of the island’s twelve Jurats, who are lay judges elected by an electoral college of the island’s officials and parishes and who sit as judges of fact in the more serious cases. The Royal Court and its counterpart in Guernsey are the only courts in the Realm and Britain where a magistrate and a lay panel try the facts together. It has a Samedi, or Saturday, sitting on which the old business of the island, from property conveyances to the registration of contracts, is done in public. A Magistrate’s Court deals with minor offences and a Youth Court with young defendants.

The Court of Appeal, which has been the final court for Jersey’s law since a reform of the 1990s, hears appeals from the Royal Court, and Jersey’s senior judges sit on the Judicial Committee in London when Guernsey’s cases are heard. The Attorney General and the Solicitor General, who are the Crown’s law officers in the island, prosecute the serious cases and advise the States.

Norman customary law

Jersey’s law of land and succession is the customary law of Normandy as it stood in the sixteenth century, set down in the Grand Coutumier and the later commentaries, and the Royal Court’s records of property are kept in Norman French. The island’s law of contract and crime has come to resemble English law, and the island’s lawyers are trained in both.

The most famous survival is the Clameur de Haro. A landowner whose land is being trespassed on or built on may kneel before witnesses on the land, and cry “Haro, Haro, Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!” and recite the Lord’s Prayer in French, and the trespass must stop until the Royal Court has decided the matter. The Clameur is raised a few times in a decade and is honoured by the court, which has refused to treat it as a quaint survival and has held it good law.

External relations and defence

Britain and the island

Britain is responsible for Jersey’s defence and external relations, and the Crown in right of Great Britain acts for the island in both. The island is not a member of any international body in its own right. It has, however, been entrusted by Britain with the power to sign its own tax, regulatory and cultural agreements, and it has its own representatives in Brittany and at Brussels, where it is looked on as a country by its neighbours and as a dependency by its sovereign. Britain’s Ministry of Justice is the department that deals with the island.

The island has no representation in Britain’s Parliament and does not pay British taxes. Britain does not tax the island and does not support it, and the arrangement, which has been in place for centuries, has two sides: the island is free to set its own taxes and is bound to accept Britain’s defence and diplomacy, and the island’s politics are the politics of knowing how far the second can be pressed before the first is questioned.

The Concert

Britain is a founding power of the European Concert, and Jersey is inside it through Britain’s treaty. The Concert’s financial standards are another matter. The island has opted out of them, and the opt-out is the thing Straßburg most wants removed. The Concert inspects the island’s regulation and publishes its findings, and the island’s answer has been to reform what it can and to keep the opt-out. The argument is not settled and is the island’s chief diplomatic concern.

The Norman compact

Jersey is one party to the cultural compact among Normandy, Brittany and the Channel Islands, which covers language, archives, fisheries, ports, emergency response and education. The compact’s Norman Language Commission sits in St Helier, in the island’s hall, since the island has the strongest surviving speech tradition and since Rouen could not be seen to own it. The Commission works beside the Norman Language Academy at Rouen without being under it, and it supports the dictionaries, the recordings and the teachers that have brought Jèrriais back to about ten thousand speakers.

Guernsey

The two Bailiwicks are separate governments that have refused to unite since 1204; see the Bailiwick of Guernsey. They share a joint office in London and Brussels and a Channel Islands commission on shared policy, and they are rivals in everything else, from the football pitch to the finance centre.

The Realm and New Albion

The Realm’s view of the island is the view of a country that keeps a good deal of money there. A standing committee of the American House of Commons complains periodically about American assets held in the islands and has never passed anything, because the assets belong to people who sit in both Houses. The island’s older tie with the Realm is the Province of New Jersey, which the island remembers: the Province’s Lieutenant-Governor visits the island each year for the anniversary of Carteret’s service, and the island’s flag flies at Perth Amboy that day.

The island’s tie with New Albion is older and larger. Jersey houses ran the cod coast of Newfoundland and the Gaspé from the seventeenth century into the twentieth, and the island’s families, its surnames and its dialect are found in the fishing coves of the northern coast. The cod trade is the island’s overseas history and the reason that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador regard the island as a distant cousin.

Defence

Defence is Britain’s responsibility, and Britain keeps a small garrison in the island and an offshore patrol vessel in its waters. The island’s own force is the Royal Jersey Militia, a reserve of about five hundred under the Lieutenant-Governor, which served in the siege alongside the British garrison and survives as a small reserve with ceremonial duties. The island’s coastal defences, from Martello towers to the concrete lines of the siege, are preserved as monuments, and the batteries at Corbière and on the east coast are among the island’s museums.

Economy

Jersey is rich. Its output is about A£5.5 billion, some A£50,000 a head, and about two fifths of it comes from finance: funds, trusts and banking, with a growing trade in specialist insurance. The island is the Realm’s and Britain’s favourite place to hold things quietly. Its taxes are low. A standard rate applies to most firms, personal income is taxed at twenty per cent, a goods tax of five per cent applies, and there is no capital gains tax and no inheritance tax. Britain tolerates the system, and the American Parliament periodically threatens to look into it.

The finance industry grew from the 1960s out of a handful of trust companies and banks, and it is now the island’s largest employer of graduates and its largest source of public revenue. Its dependence on a status that others could change is the island’s permanent political fact, and the island’s governments spend most of their time on it.

Tourism, once the island’s mainstay, is now second. The island’s beaches, its castles, its food and its siege museums bring visitors from Britain and Normandy and a smaller number from the Realm, and the island’s hotels and its seasonal workforce depend on them. Agriculture is third. The Jersey Royal potato, grown on the south-facing slopes and sold early in the season to Britain and the Concert, is the island’s best-known product, and the Jersey cow, a small fawn breed, is its other. The island has banned the import of live cattle for more than two centuries to keep the breed pure, and exports it as semen and embryos to dairy herds in the Realm and New Zealand.

The island uses the British pound, issued by Britain’s bank, and carries its own scenes on a special series of notes that the island commissions. The island’s housing is the dearest in the Bailiwick world, and its housing licences and residence categories, which decide who may buy, rent and settle, are the island’s standing grievance. Visitors reach the island by ferry from Poole and from St-Malo in Brittany, or by air from London. There is no direct service to the Realm, which has to be reached through London or Dublin.

Public finance

The States raise their revenue from income tax, the goods tax and a handful of duties and fees, and they keep a large strategic reserve, built from the surpluses of the finance years, that the island treats as its guarantee against a change in its status. The reserve has been drawn on once, to carry the island through the Concert’s first inspections of its regulation, and the States voted to restore it. The island’s public spending is modest by the standard of the wider union and most of it goes on health, schooling and the roads.

Revenue is the island’s weakness, because it depends on a single industry that depends on a single status. The Treasury Minister and the Chief Minister both make the same speech each year: that the reserve is not a savings account but a defence, and that the first rule of the island’s finances is not to let the States spend what would be needed to survive a change.

Health and welfare

The island has a general hospital at St Helier, funded from taxation and contributions, with a primary-care system of private general practices and an insurance scheme that tops it up. Waiting times are short by British standards and the waiting list for specialist care is the island’s most frequent grievance, since many treatments are available only in Britain and the island pays for patients to travel. The social security system is contributory and covers pensions, unemployment and sickness, with benefits that are generous to the islanders who have been resident long enough and meagre to those who have not.

The care of children and the elderly is the area where the island’s record is most criticised. The care inquiry of 2017 led to a children’s commissioner and a new inspectorate, and the island’s welfare system has been reformed since, at a cost that the States have found hard to meet.

Environment

The island’s coast is its great natural asset and its great problem. The twelve-metre tides expose a vast intertidal zone that is among the richest marine habitats in the Channel, a Ramsar wetland of international importance, and the home of oystercatchers, ringed plovers and the migrant waders that feed on the flats. The cliffs of the north coast are a nature reserve, and the sand-dunes of St Ouen’s Bay in the west are the island’s largest area of wild country, with a protected status and a long-running argument about how much of it may be built on.

The pressure on the island’s land is severe. Roughly one acre in four is built on, the road network is narrow and the speed limit is forty miles an hour everywhere, and the housing licences exist partly to control the numbers. The island’s governments have debated for decades a tidal-power scheme that would use the tide’s range, and have not built it, because the cost is high and the local opposition fierce.

Transport and media

The island is reached by sea from Poole and from St-Malo in Brittany, the ferry crossing taking about four hours from Poole and about an hour and a half from the Breton coast, and by air from London and regional British airports. There is no direct air service to the Realm, which has to be reached through London or Dublin. The harbours at St Helier and Gorey handle the island’s goods and the airport at St Peter handles its passengers. A bus network covers the island and a bicycle network is under construction.

The island’s newspaper is the Jersey Evening Post, founded in 1890, and it remains the island’s paper of record. The island has a local radio service and a regional television service on the British networks, and its public broadcasting is a branch of the British service. The island’s politics are conducted in the Evening Post’s letter columns and in the bars of St Helier, and a well-placed letter can end a minister’s career.

Demographics and society

The island has about 110,000 people, of whom some half were born there. Its society is divided, in the island’s own account, between the “Jerseymen”, who trace their families to the island, and the people who have come since, and the division has been hardened by the housing licences, which sort residents into categories with different rights.

Daily life

The island’s week is organised around its parishes and its harbour. The Central Market in St Helier, built in the nineteenth century, sells fish, flowers and farm produce six days a week, and the Royal Square in front of the Royal Court is where the island meets, protests and is proclaimed to. On Saturday the old business of the Royal Court is done in public. In summer the beaches fill with islanders and visitors and the south coast’s low tide draws walkers and ormer-gatherers on to the sand.

The island is small enough that its people know each other’s families, and its public life has the intimacy and the pettiness that go with it. A Deputy who has a quarrel with a neighbour will meet him in the street the next morning, and a Chief Minister cannot go shopping without being addressed. The effect is a politics of unusual civility and unusual memory: nothing is forgotten, and not much is said.

Population and work

The island’s workforce is about sixty thousand, of whom a quarter work in finance, a tenth in hospitality and a twentieth in farming. A seasonal labour force comes each year for the potato harvest and the tourist summer, mostly Portuguese-speaking and Filipino, under a permit system that ties the worker to an employer and a residence to a licence. The island’s unemployment is low and its skills shortages are permanent, and the island has made importing labour a condition of its prosperity and a source of its grievance.

Schools

Schooling is free, compulsory and administered by the States through a mix of parish primary schools and island-wide secondary schools, with a fee-paying sector that educates about a fifth of the island’s children. Ernest College for boys and its counterpart for girls hold the island’s academic reputation, and Highlands College provides vocational and further education. The children who were evacuated in 1939 and 1940 and returned in 1944 are the island’s last living generation to have known the siege, and its schools teach their memory as a part of the island’s history.

Language

English and French are the official languages of the States and the Royal Court, and the island’s own language, Jèrriais, a dialect of Norman, has official standing beside them. In the early twentieth century the language was dying: it was despised in school and spoken at home by a generation that did not teach it to its children. It has been revived, by the cultural compact with Normandy and Brittany and by the island’s own schools, to about ten thousand speakers. Immersion schooling, road signs in Jèrriais and a place in the States’ proceedings have brought it back. The Norman Language Commission, which sits in St Helier, supports it.

The Portuguese-speaking community

About one islander in ten is Portuguese-speaking, mostly Madeiran, a community that has come since the 1960s to work in hospitality and farming. Portuguese is the island’s second street language. The community’s position is the subject of the island’s most persistent grievance, since many of its members have lived in the island for decades without a vote or a right to buy a house.

Religion and education

The Church of England and Methodism are the island’s two traditions, and the Roman Catholic Church, enlarged by the Portuguese-speaking and Breton communities, is the third. Ernest College, founded in 1852, is the island’s boys’ school, with the red and white colours and the Latin motto it has kept, and Highlands College is its further-education institution. The island has no university, and its young people go to Britain, Normandy and the Realm to study, a good many of them to return.

Culture and daily life

The island’s year is marked by a few fixed occasions. The Battle of Flowers, a parade of floats covered in flowers, has been held each August since 1902, when it was begun for a visit by Ernest III, and is the island’s largest public event. Relief Day on 6 June is the island’s public holiday, with a service at the memorial in St Helier and a flotilla of fishing boats on the east coast. The Battle of Jersey is commemorated each January.

The island’s best-known names are two. Lillie Langtry, the Jersey Lily, born in the island in 1853, was a famous actress and a friend of the royal house. Gerald Durrell, born in the Raj, founded the island’s zoo in 1959 and the Wildlife Trust that grew from it, whose work on the conservation of endangered species is among the island’s best-known exports.

The island eats seafood, Jersey Royals and the island’s own butter, cream and cider, and a few dishes of its own: the bean crock, a slow stew of beans and pork, and nièr beurre, a black spread of apples and sugar boiled for days. Sport is local and fierce. The Muratti, a football match against Guernsey played since 1905, is the island’s most-watched fixture. The island sends its own team to the Commonwealth Games and hosts the Island Games, which the small islands founded in 1985 and hold in turn, and its sailors and surfers use its twelve-metre tides.

The other Crown dependencies

Guernsey, with Alderney and Sark, is a separate Bailiwick with its own States and its own Bailiff. Alderney and Sark have their own parliaments. Sark is the last feudal state in Europe: its Seigneur still holds the island by a grant of the sixteenth century, and its constitution has resisted reform because the Privy Council committee has refused to advise the King to change it.

The Isle of Man is the third dependency, and it differs from the Channel Islands in having its own ancient parliament, Tynwald, which meets on Tynwald Hill each July and has met continuously for a thousand years. The King holds it as Lord of Mann, a lordship and not a Crown in right of the island: the style is a style of the British Crown and not a capacity of the King. He is represented by a Lieutenant-Governor, who gives assent to most of Tynwald’s Acts himself on Manx advice, so that no Privy Council committee stands between Tynwald and the King. The Manx language has been revived by a cultural compact of the same kind as Jèrriais’s.

What is argued about

Housing and the Portuguese-speaking workforce. The housing licences are the island’s standing grievance. They protect the island’s own people from being priced out by wealthy incomers and they tie the workforce that serves the island to a status without a vote or a right to buy. Neither side has found a rule that serves both.

The Concert’s financial standards. The island has opted out of the standards, and the opt-out keeps the finance centre as it is and keeps the island in conflict with Straßburg. Many Jersey politicians would drop it if they thought the centre could survive, and none will say so.

The Bailiff’s double office. A judge presiding over a legislature has no counterpart elsewhere in the union, and the island has defended it against every criticism.

The Privy Council committee. It is the island’s only exception to the advice rule and the one place where another realm’s ministers decide whether the island’s laws take effect. The island does not wish to lose the arrangement and does not wish to be seen to depend on it.

The minority bill and the island’s Crown. Until the autumn of 2028 a British bill that would have allowed the heir to act as Regent from sixteen sat in committee, and Jersey’s lawyers dreaded being asked whether the island’s Crown would follow a change in age. The common terms of 30 October 2028 set sixteen in every Compact realm, and Jersey’s Crown followed Britain’s without the question being put.

Independence is a marginal question. A States report on it in the 2010s and a debate ended without a vote, and no party campaigns for it.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly.

The finance centre’s secrecy. The island has let the Realm’s and Britain’s wealthy hold property quietly, and the standards that would have exposed it are the ones the island has opted out of. It has been a servant of the privacy of the powerful for sixty years.

The housing licences and the long-term residents with no vote. The island’s housing controls have kept the island’s own people housed and have left the Portuguese-speaking and other residents of decades without the vote, the house or the security that the rest of the island has.

The Bailiff’s double office. An office that combines the chief judge and the president of the legislature has survived because the island has not been asked to defend it against anything but argument.

The exception to the advice rule. A committee of another realm’s Privy Council decides whether Jersey’s laws take effect. The island has not been harmed by it. It has relied, for centuries, on the committee’s restraint.

The care of children. The island failed children in its care. The home at Haut de la Garenne in Trinity, which closed in 1986, and other homes were the scene of abuse of children that the island’s authorities failed to prevent, failed to investigate and for years failed to acknowledge. The Independent Jersey Care Inquiry, which sat from 2014 and reported in 2017, found failures of care and of oversight over decades. The States apologised and established a redress scheme, and the island’s reputation for the care of its children has not recovered.

Assessment

Jersey’s arrangements work because nobody has tested them. A convention of consent restrains a Parliament that has the power to legislate for the island. A committee of another realm’s Privy Council has not refused a law in living memory. A Court that combines the chief judge with the president of the legislature has not been reformed. An island that has opted out of the Concert’s standards has not been compelled to withdraw the opt-out. Each of these is an arrangement that rests on a restraint, and the restraint is observed because the one who would break it is also the one who would be blamed.

The island’s economy is the reason it has been careful. Finance rests on a status that Britain, the Realm or the Concert could change, and the island’s politics are the politics of not asking. It has the institutions of a country, a Crown of its own and a law older than most of the Realm’s, and it has no way of acting as a country that its sovereign would not allow. The bargain has lasted for more than seven centuries, and its durability is not evidence that it is secure.

Symbols

The flag is a red saltire on a white field, with the island’s arms, three gold lions passant guardant on a red shield, ensigned with a crown, in the upper white quarter above the crossing of the saltire. The arms have been used since the Middle Ages and are among the oldest in the Register. The island’s colours are red and white. Its anthem is Island Home, and the Royal Anthem is played on state occasions. Its public holiday is Relief Day, 6 June, and the flower of the island is the Jersey lily.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Crown in Right, including the Crowns below the realm and Jersey’s 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
• The European Concert, whose financial standards the island has opted out of
• Province of New Jersey, named for the island
• New Albion, whose cod coast the island’s merchants ran
• Bailiwick of Guernsey, the other Bailiwick
• Gibraltar and Malta, the other territories of Great Britain
• The Second Great War

Categories

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