States of Guernsey: stop presuming to pick winners, granting monopolies and throwing money at transport operators

The governments of Guernsey and Jersey are currently in the process of tendering a multi-year "contract" to run ferry services around the Channel Islands and to England.  This amounts to selecting a winner, who will then be granted a monopoly, and have millions of pounds thrown at it, in order that it can provide a shit service to islanders.

Meanwhile my visitors, coming over for two nights, are now arriving at 15:30 instead of 10:00 because of "tides".  Tides are predictable to the minute, decades in advance.  I have received the tides excuse before, and I spoke to a member of the crew about it, and they mumbled.  Everyone I have spoken to has received the tides excuse, and everyone I have spoken to spotted that it was a silly excuse.  One person I spoke to knew someone in Condor, who said it was a fake excuse.

No one seems to question whether the Guernsey government should be throwing vast sums of money at a company in order to severely degrade the quality of transport links.  Aviation has the same issue, with Aurigny being selected as the low-quality, unreliable quasi-monopoly. 

Back to ferries, imagine just two operators competing on routes, with somewhat smaller, all-weather boats on regular, daily, direct schedules.  One of them could decide they are not going to asphyxiate passengers with traffic fumes, and.. boom! competitive advantage!  Maybe it would be more expensive, but surely it would be higher quality.

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