What we’re known for — and what we leave behind.

My foremost point on all of this: our politics should deliver an Island for our future generations, while staying rooted in our own community, culture and history. Most of this site is about what lands on Middle’s doorstep — money, homes, health. But an MHK also votes on how the Island presents itself to the world, and that standing is what ultimately pays for everything else on this site. This page is that argument: not a list of day-one promises, but a direction of travel for a five-year Parliament, paid for out of growth that’s actually landed — because our cost base is higher than most of the places we compete with, and pretending otherwise would undo the rest of this page.

1 · A clean capital strategy — known for the best regulated

We’re not starting from zero. Moody’s reaffirmed the Island’s Aa3 credit rating — the same band as the UK — in December 2025, citing our economic diversity, proactive policy-making and substantial reserves, and it has separately praised our regulation of financial services and e-gaming. That reputation took decades to build. It’s also taken a recent knock: the King Gaming affair, where a licensed e-gaming operator turned out to have links to major criminal networks, and the Financial Times raised real questions about how much due diligence Government actually did before licensing it. The Gambling Supervision Commission caught it and shut it down — after the fact, which is better than not catching it at all, but the real failure was at licensing, not enforcement, and that’s exactly what needs fixing: what happens when the pursuit of inward investment gets ahead of the checking. I don’t think the answer is more paperwork. I think it’s better tools: more regtech, and regulators trained to work with the data and the numbers directly, rather than checking runbooks against practice by hand — lighter on both sides of the ledger, Government’s and business’s, and it should catch the next one faster.

My starting position is “defend what independent raters already say about us, and make sure the substance behind it keeps growing.” That means building something clearly defensible, and constructive toward London and the EU rather than adversarial with them — not over-regulated, not over-exposed, and at least as well-regulated as London, ideally better. It also means loosening rules that aren’t earning their keep, and regulating hard where it counts, ahead of external scrutiny rather than in reaction to it — knowing where that scrutiny actually comes from, and managing deliberately within it. That direction already has a name and a start: the Crown Dependencies’ economic substance regime since 2019, and Pillar Two’s global minimum tax now in force since January 2025 — both reward real jobs and real premises over brass-plate presence. We know the direction of travel here, and we need to be out ahead of it, not just compliant with it.

What I’d push for:

• Support quantitative, data-led regulation and drive digitised compliance across financial services — regulating and complying with tools, not paperwork; it would have caught something like King Gaming at licensing, not after the raids.
• Let compliance itself be outsourced or shared between firms, so smaller Manx businesses aren’t priced out of high standards by having to prove them alone.
• Direct more of Government’s own spend and department access towards organisations that are based here on the Island and co-developing towards an export sector — mutual development, not just a postal address.
• Report our regulatory standing the way we already report a credit rating — enforcement record, regulator staffing and budget, how we compare with Jersey and Guernsey — so “clean capital” is demonstrated on a public page, not just asserted on a leaflet.

2 · Getting ahead of the EU on data privacy

The European Commission reaffirmed the Island’s EU data-adequacy status in January 2024 — personal data can keep moving between the Island and the EU under “clear, precise and accessible rules,” without extra contractual safeguards. That’s rare for a jurisdiction outside the EU/EEA, and it won’t look after itself: adequacy decisions get reviewed, and even the UK’s own has faced scrutiny in Europe. Getting there once proves it’s possible; the same quantitative, regtech-led regulation I want to see on financial services above — regulating on the data directly, not just the paperwork — is what would actually let us get ahead of the EU on privacy, rather than just keeping pace with it. I’d match the EU on AI regulation and NIS2, as we already have on GDPR — then go further on privacy itself. It’s a direction the EU wants to go and is visibly struggling to deliver; a jurisdiction our size can move faster, provided the regulation behind it is genuinely rigorous rather than just early. Done properly, this isn’t just a compliance exercise — this will attract business where privacy legitimately matters.

What I’d push for:

• Match the EU on AI regulation and NIS2, and go beyond GDPR on privacy specifically — get there before Brussels does, not after.
• Treat EU adequacy as a named, monitored asset — reported on, not assumed — the same discipline as the credit rating above.
• Get ahead of AI and biometric data rules before the coming facial-recognition legislation goes further (see the border-security work on Local Issues), rather than importing a framework wholesale once everyone else has one.
• No new digital or AI legislation reaches Tynwald without a plain-English data-protection impact assessment published alongside it.

3 · Keeping our costs competitive enough to export

If we’re going to export, we can only do so while our costs are competitive. We have to drive out market-concentrated inefficiencies — less contention over workers and homes as the finance and tech sectors grow, and better access to lower-cost, more reliable energy and telecoms, both covered on the Economy page. My target here isn’t growth for its own sake — it’s cohesion and stability: controlling our tax and cost position so it doesn’t crowd out the rest of the economy. That said, I don’t think we’re actually at productive capacity: the Chamber of Commerce puts job losses at roughly 1,000, yet those people don’t show up in Government’s own unemployment figures — which tells you we’re not measuring this properly. We can’t manage what we don’t measure, and that has to come before any levy or growth target.

What I’d push for:

• A strategy to make the Island genuinely investible — not just attractive to footloose capital.
• Real unemployment and underemployment statistics, so we actually know whether we’re at capacity or not.
• Lighter-touch regulation and compliance for the finance sector, backed by quantitative checks and balances — not less scrutiny, better-targeted scrutiny.

4 · A constitutional guardrail against our own distortions

I want an Island our children can grow up in and be proud of — with real opportunity to live and work here. Part of that, for me, is independence: I’d like to see the Island with more of it. But the only way we’re ever given more independence is by proving, convincingly, that we can govern ourselves well as part of this world — not apart from it. That’s not the same as stepping away from the arrangements that fund us today — FERSA (see the Economy page) chief among them. Independence, for me, is earned through demonstrated competence, not won by cutting the ties that pay for everything else on this site.

Everything above only means something if the next generation can rely on it outlasting one Parliament. We’re still living with the effects of the last time the Island had a genuine boom: the anomalous VAT revenue-sharing agreement with the UK (to 2009) and the growth of e-gaming through the 2010s, both of which shaped the Island well beyond their own decade. Protecting the next generation isn’t only about the Constitution surviving this Parliament — it’s about protecting the Island’s future from whatever the equivalent distortion turns out to be this time.

Tynwald’s own Constitutional and Legal Affairs and Justice Committee has a live inquiry into the Constitution running right now, and I think it needs to move more carefully than Tynwald has just shown it can. The Bill removing the Bishop of Sodor and Man’s vote in the Legislative Council passed this January despite a Select Committee report in which the Archbishop of York warned, in written evidence, that the change would mean Sodor and Man becomes part of an English diocese, rather than a distinctively Manx one. Getting the Ministry of Justice and everyone else involved to work through a change of that significance, to what is otherwise a generally inert role, carries an implied cost as well as a distraction, on top of what it does to our history. That’s not a precedent to build on; it’s a warning about deciding constitutional questions on a parliamentary timetable rather than the evidence timetable. I won’t promise a single MHK can hand you a brand-new written constitution — changes of that scale have historically needed engagement well beyond a Tynwald vote — but I will commit to pushing for a proper brake on economic policy, one that protects our economic health from political weight and decisions: a statutory “future generations” test, in the spirit of Wales’ Well-being of Future Generations Act, applied to major fiscal and constitutional decisions — so the same discipline behind the pension and reserves figures on the Fiscal page becomes a standing requirement, not a one-off analysis this campaign happened to publish.

What I’d push for:

• Seek a seat on, or submit direct evidence to, the CLAJ constitutional inquiry already under way — use the process that exists rather than starting a new one from scratch.
• Push for a statutory future-generations test on major fiscal and constitutional decisions, so debt, pensions and reserves are assessed against who inherits them, not just who’s voting next.
• Back the citizens’-jury approach originally proposed for the Bishop’s vote question — properly resourced and completed before a vote, not offered as a delaying amendment and then bypassed.
• More independence for oversight bodies, real legal protection for whistleblowers, and more openness from the Civil Service — accountability that doesn’t depend on a leak or a Select Committee report to surface.

5 · Why our cost base is higher than most competitors

None of this works if I pretend the Island competes on price. Moody’s own commentary flags labour shortages as the biggest constraint on the Manx economy — unemployment at roughly 0.7% and persistent job vacancies — and the Economy page already sets out why electricity, freight and housing cost more here than in the UK or in jurisdictions we compete with directly, like Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and Gibraltar. At heart, this is competition for scarce labour, and it has to be balanced against building enough homes to keep labour costs sustainable, not just weighed against the cost of living on its own — the Observatory’s The Island That Didn’t Grow covers this in more depth. Part of the problem is that we don’t actually measure the labour market properly: the Chamber of Commerce says roughly 1,000 jobs have been lost, but not where those people went — early retirement, underemployment, somewhere else entirely. Are wages actually keeping pace? I don’t think anyone can currently say for certain, and that’s the point — you can’t fix a constraint you haven’t properly measured. So this page isn’t five free promises. It’s a direction to push for, sequenced over a Parliament, through mechanisms that already exist — Tynwald committees, department policy, the CLAJ inquiry.

Check my working — the Observatory

Every figure above comes from a public source — Moody’s own commentary and gov.im’s own press releases among them — and sits alongside the fuller picture at observatory.coalfinch.com. This page is newer and less tested than the rest of the site, and I’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.