The Labour Party repeats that these most recent local council elections are its “fifth consecutive victory”. Others have taken up the refrain and parrot it ceaselessly, without thinking. These five consecutive victories mean next to nothing. They might as well be victories in arm-wrestling matches on the beach over a beer or two, or victories of one of my dogs over the other one. They are so damned meaningless that I, a political and social commentator for 17 years, don’t even know what they are.

I can only assume that they refer to five rounds of – yawn – local council elections. They certainly don’t refer to the only electoral battles that have counted for anything in the last eight years: two general elections and a referendum on whether we should join the European Union. In those, the Labour Party scored a magnificent total of three consecutive losses, though it rationalised one of those losses as a victory and celebrated it (partnership rebah ir-referendum).

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I keep telling you that I’m a pragmatist, and so I am. If I were a political leader, the only victories I would focus on would be the victories in general elections – in other words, the only ones where I get to be prime minister or not. I also keep telling you that local council elections don’t count for anything on the giant scoreboard of who gets to be in government, and so it has proven to be in their relatively short but telling history.

A political party “wins” the local council elections and then – surprise! – it loses the general election. It’s precisely because local council elections count for nothing in the greater scheme of things that people use them as a way to let off steam and protest-vote or just don’t bother and stay at home, like I’ve always done. As far as I’m concerned, the local council might as well be run by a team of people hired to do the job and paid to do it, like the people who are paid to sweep the streets and those other people who are paid to collect the rubbish. I’m quite certain many others feel the same way. It’s not democracy we want from our local councils; it’s efficiency. I don’t want or need to elect somebody to clean the streets. Similarly, I don’t want or need to elect somebody to change the one-way system every other month. Those things are the trivia of life in which democracy need not play a part.

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It’s crazy to talk of Labour or Nationalist victory when referring to local council elections. I don’t know and don’t care whether the mayor up in Mosta is Nationalist or Labour. I’m told he is Labour, and that his predecessor was Nationalist. Did the Nationalist leanings of Mayor Past affect my life or the life of anyone else in the district? No. Will the Labour leanings of Mayor Present impinge on the way we live in any way at all? No. So there you have it: the reason people play around with their local council votes. It doesn’t make any difference to them who it is who gets to be mayor. It’s only the political parties which care like crazy about this little game they’ve devised. They try to get us to care as badly as they do, but we don’t.

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Those who talk about Labour victories in local council elections have been reading rather too many London broadsheets. In Britain, whether a council is Labour or Conservative counts for much, because councils have lots of power to make and implement policy. They even collect tax. They’re like mini-governments. Here, all local councils get to do is bleed us dry with speed cameras and people in green uniforms, and put shrubs into pink cement planters, where they will struggle without water until they die. Let me tell the government and the opposition exactly what local councils mean to Average Joe and Jane: traffic fines and local wardens, full stop. Why vote for anything that’s going to give you more of those?

I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but the only Labour victory that counts is the Labour victory that puts Alfred Sant into the Auberge de Castille as prime minister. And though there are sufficient indications that he should bring out his plastic flower arrangements and dust them down in readiness, he would do well to remember what happened to Neil Kinnock in 1992, when he popped his champagne at the promising exit polls and woke up to find that John Major was prime minister. It’s called counting your chickens before they’re hatched.

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One tires of seeing politicians stalking about the public stage deluding themselves and seeking to delude others. There has been rather too much talk about how these “five consecutive victories” are the result of Labour having stayed close to the people and listened to them. I should ruddy well hope that the Labour Party stays close to die-hard Labour supporters and listens to them, because those are the only people who voted for it in this fifth victorious engagement.

What Labour should be doing, though, is listening to those who are not its hard-line supporters. The hard-line supporters are becoming more hard-line with every passing day. When you’ve been in opposition for 20 years except for that brief 22-month period, the kind of people who think of governments in terms of “ours” and “theirs” are going to rush out and vote Labour whenever they can – even in a piddling council election.

Labour is victorious by default, and not because it went out and garnered thousands of new votes from people like me. Those who usually vote Nationalist stayed home (like me) or voted Alternattiva Demokratika because they’re angry about birds and divorce, the two crucial matters of the moment, and the very ones on which Labour will give no satisfaction. Labour hasn’t gained a single new vote.

It remains just as stodgily unattractive – repellent, actually – to people from non-Labour backgrounds as it has been for decades. All it has done is to hang on to what it had; the only new Labour voters are the children of old Labour voters who have turned 18. Keeping its voters isn’t a commendation of what the party does, nor a validation of its policies, because Labour hung onto its votes throughout the worst excesses, violence, corruption and general deprivation of the 1970s and 1980s. Yes, it lost the 1981 and 1987 elections, but let’s not forget that in those elections, almost half the population voted to maintain the mess.

It’s the ones who think hard about things who have trouble with their consciences when voting for political parties, and most of the thinkers vote Nationalist. This is unfortunate for the Nationalist Party, and fortunate for the Labour Party, which hangs on to its unthinking mass of voters, while the thinking desert the Nationalist Party en masse and find themselves in limbo – precisely because what they think prevents them from voting Labour. Yes, I know there are lots of thinking persons in the Labour Party, and even many thinking persons who vote for it, but most of them have been raised in Labour homes by Labour families, and that’s why they’re Labour too. They haven’t actually sat down, had a good think about it, and enumerated the reasons why Alfred Sant would make a fantastic prime minister, and why a Labour government would run the country anywhere but into the ground. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to vote Nationalist, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why they would want to vote Labour.

The Nationalist Party has over the past 30 years attracted towards it those people who are interested in voting on issues and on matters of policy. Most of those who are classified by market researchers as ABC1 vote Nationalist and not Labour. This is not because the Nationalist Party is the partit tal-pepe – take it from me, a dyed-in-the-wool tal-pepe, it is the very antithesis of that – but because ABC1 people have had a fairly comprehensive education and tend to think about things rather than voting blindly according to traditional family loyalties or personal fondness for a particular party leader. Inevitably, there are exceptions, but these tend to be conspicuous precisely because they are unusual.

It’s the people who are categorised as ABC1 who are most mightily worked up about – yes, I’m going to point it out again – bird-shooting and divorce. They don’t want to vote for a party that sucks up to hunters and continues to play the ostrich about divorce, because they know that by doing so they will be validating that party’s policies on both those issues. Now these people are caught between a rock and a hard place.

The Labour Party will have reason to celebrate only if all those who cannot bring themselves to vote Nationalist because of these and other issues suddenly decide that it might be rather wonderful to vote for Alfred Sant instead. Well, they won’t. If they are capable of thinking seriously about birds and divorce, then you can bet your last cent that they are also capable of thinking seriously about having Alfred Sant as prime minister. Getting him by default, by not voting Nationalist, is one thing. Getting him by actually going out and voting for him is another. That’s one huge thing to have on your conscience, and on birds and divorce besides, he stands four-square with the Nationalist Party. The result, of course, is the same, though it’s not quite as good for Labour’s ego to be elected by default rather than by popular and general validation.

It’s when Labour’s mass of voters stops voting for the Labour Party no matter how damned awful it is, and stops aiming for a gvern taghna rather than a decent government, that Malta will finally shed its hindering mediocrity. As matters are now, when thinking voters take a stand on issues that count for much, what they get is not the result they want, but a Labour government by default, which is even less likely to deliver on those issues.