She is so sure she’s right she’ll concede nothing

She is so sure she’s right she’ll concede nothing.”Soft-spoken, honey-blonde and looking younger than her 47 years, Mrs Kennedy rolls her eyes at the suggestion that she came to Guernsey as an international pro-life agent. She is in pain but her predicament brings a smirk to the lips of opponents “She’s a robot,” warns one “Her eyes don’t blink and glaze over when she gets started. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children is training a group advised by Cynthia Kennedy, former leading light in the American Right to Life movement and a wealthy newcomer to Guernsey.In her palatial home on the island, Cynthia Kennedy sits propped up by pillows, rigid in a neck brace after back surgery. But as the local Board of Health prepares a submission on the matter for the States of Deliberation, the 55 elected representatives who draw up the island’s laws, the battle between pro-life and pro-choice groups has started to suck in the big guns from the British mainland.The pro-choice heavyweight Claire Rayner recently addressed a public meeting, larger than any held on the island since the war.

It is pressure to change this law that has shattered the island’s tranquillity.
The law has not been used in a prosecution since 1950. It also still has a statute of 1910 that outlaws abortion and sets down jail terms of three years to life for trangressors and doctors who assist them. This 24-square-mile outcrop, 80 miles from the British mainland and 30 miles from Normandy, still prohibits the purchase of petrol on the Sabbath. The fact that it was also a place treasured by the anti-abortion movement was known to only a few activists. And to the 100 or more Guernsey women a year who make clandestine trips to English south coast resorts for something they cannot get at home – the termination of an unwanted pregnancy. Until this summer, Guernsey was associated with classy seaside holidays, millionaire residents and off-shore banking.

After an interval we would start cranking our clocks back by 15 minutes a week, until we returned to dear old GMT.The time lord was explaining to me the details of how all this would be enforced throughout the EC, when he abruptly rushed off. He had already taken to living by his own Gloritime, getting up 15 minutes earlier every week, and it was for him practically suppertime – although it was only mid-afternoon by my watch Time may have been on his side but no one else was.. Eventually we would find ourselves staggering up at what is now four in the morning, which would leave us an extra 367 hours a year of light evenings in which to recover. I once spoke to a man with a radical scheme called “Gloritime”, which involved putting the clock forward by 15 minutes every Saturday night during the spring and early summer. This benefited children coming home from school in the south of England, but people in the north of Scotland failed to see the point of spending half the morning in complete darkness.Yet it could have been much, much worse.