2021 Manifesto aims – a self assessment

In our current political system with its lack of political parties it is extremely difficult to deliver on specific aims because you have to convince most of 33 “Independent” Tynwald Members to agree with you!

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have aims and aspirations though, and I thought it is only fair to all my constituents to summarise what progress has been made on my aims from the 2021 General Election that were included in my manifesto.

Whilst I can’t take credit for delivering all of these entirely by myself, I have been advocating for my aims, promoting or implementing policy where I can, working with other Tynwald Members and outside organisations as appropriate. Outcomes are what I am more focused on and at the end of the day if I can help improve the Isle of Man that’s the best outcome of all.

As well as this, I’ve been involved in a lot of successful endeavours that weren’t in my manifesto and I’ll touch on these separately.

Overall I think I’ve had more successes than not, and I’ve managed to achieve either directly or indirectly about three quarters of the things I set out to achieve in 2021, even if not in quite the way I might have originally hoped!

There’s still a long way to go, but I believe that I’ve made a lot of progress these last few years. Being a Minister for the first three years of the administration certainly helped me deliver on specific aspects within Health or DfE and certainly gave me more influence over broader government policy. The downside of course was that I didn’t always convince CoMin to follow my lead and being trapped within collective responsibility was often a difficult challenge.

I’ll end with the usual caveat, this is a self-assessment – I’ve tried to approach this in a fair way and I’ve added some explanations next to many items where the outcome might not be obvious.