After a recent column I wrote about the Consumer Association’s suggestion for a price freeze, I received the following e-mail. “An association which claims that it looks after the interests of the consumer should concern itself with one thing: value for money. I spent five ‘work-phases’ of my university course with the Department of Trade in the good old days of import restrictions, xiri bil-kbir and price freezes. The bottom line was that the consumer was short-changed; the millions saved at the expense of quality and channelled into the Price Stabilisation Fund were used for purposes that had nothing to do with subsidising the importation of better-quality products. This was the time when, in order to import a computer, you had to declare that it was solely for personal use or sign an undertaking that no employees would lose their job as a result of your purchase. But then again, this was a time when the people running the Education Department did not consider computers as anything more than glorified typewriters. I recall someone from the MLP or GWU proposing that the bulk-buying system be entrenched in the Constitution. It gives you the shivers.”
This man must be my age, I guess. We are the children of bulk rice and monopoly tea.
The unfortunate thing is that the legacy of Mintoffian thinking remains with us today, so firmly entrenched did it become in our society. A friend who runs a small business was chatting to me the other day about the difficulties he has with his employees – about how, instead of pulling together and doing their best to keep the fairly new business steady and thriving, they behave in a way that undermines it. Can they not have the imagination and insight to see that anything they do to hold the business back will also affect their job, we wondered out loud. My friend remarked hesitantly, apologising for saying it and suggesting that it might just be a coincidence, that the ones he has trouble with are all Labour supporters. Well, no, I said, you’re not imagining it and it’s not a coincidence.
The culture that makes certain people vote Labour is the very same culture that makes them resentful of the person who keeps them in work and gives them their pay-packet at the end of the week. Dom Mintoff taught whole generations of people that bosses are there to be exploited, that employees have rights but not necessarily any obligations, and that all businesses make money by turning on a tap in the back room – oh, and that “businessmen” are rich by definition and that taking from the rich is a Robin Hood crime, or not a crime at all.
It is my observation that go-getting people who want to improve themselves and better their lot are naturally attracted to the Nationalist Party – or at least, to what the party stands for – however much they may be bored of it from time to time. On the other hand, those who are simmering with resentment, who have a sense of entitlement, and who think they are owed a living are naturally attracted to the Labour Party, which seems to be a contradiction in terms but isn’t. The Labour Party and the greater part of its electorate seem to be locked into a vicious cycle of mutual dependency – the one saying that it is owed a living, and the other saying that when it is in government it will hand out livings.
This is a gross generalisation, of course. There are plenty of go-getters with initiative who vote Labour, and plenty of gopp mal-gvern types who vote Nationalist. But you get the gist. The Labour Party is afflicted by the Frankenstein’s monster of its own making: a vast mass of people who believe that somebody else “owes them”, and who have such a poor work culture that they will undermine their employer and the company they work for, because in their way of thinking, why should they do their work properly to make more money for their boss, when all they have is a pay-packet?
The present Labour Party does little or nothing to discourage this line of thinking. Its leader is torn between wishing to seem pro-active and businesslike with the wheel-turners of Malta’s commercial sector, and his apparent need to address mass meetings in a cringe-making mimicry of Mintoffian rhetoric (“Gooooooonzi! Viva l-Lejber, viva l-lejber!”). I never hear any speeches or read any prolapsed columns in which he encourages people to take initiative, study harder, improve their chances in life by their own endeavours, aim higher, to make sure their children’s lives are better than their own, and that their own improve before they pop it.
Yet that’s the constant, relentless refrain – in various forms – coming out of the Nationalist Party and the successive governments it has formed. Even joining the European Union was put forward to us as an exercise in improving our lot and giving the upcoming generation much better chances. The Labour Party, meanwhile, seems to have retained the point of view that those who are born working-class are going to stay that way, struggling on a tight wage until they are pensioned off. Instead of adopting and proposing policies that will make life better for thousands of people by improving their earning power and their standard of living, they speak about introducing policies that will help people to cope on a minimum wage. We have even heard some unspeakable nonsense about a “family wage” – a minimum wage on which it is possible for two adults and three children to live well. That’s part of it, but it’s not the only thing.
While the Labour Party has been ranting and raving about the working-class, the Nationalist government has gone and done it. Over the last 20 years, thousands of young people from working-class homes have been to university and out the other end. They have jobs, homes, cars, clothes and holidays that their parents only dreamed of, and their grandparents thought were only for the sinjuri in Sliema and Valletta. Indeed, the sons and daughters of working-class parents today have much better lives and greater opportunities that the sons and daughters of those sinjuri in my generation and older.
The policies of the last 20 years have made it possible for the sons of labourers to become whiz-kids working in high-paying ICT, and for the daughters of cleaners to take their place in the world as beautifully dressed, coiffed and housed young women with university degrees, interesting jobs and an independent life. Twenty years ago, the son of a labourer would have ended up a labourer too, and the daughter of a cleaner would have wound up married with children at 18, after a brief stint in one of those factories that Alfred Sant likes to talk about. Their only chance of having a home was by getting all the men in the family to build it themselves on weekends and after work, on a plot tal-gvern, an unsustainable policy if ever there was one. Instead of improving the lot of the working-class, the old Labour government adopted a series of pea-brained strategies that succeeded only in dragging everybody down to a piteous level. New Labour, if a party who has had the same failed leader for 15 years can be called new, is hamstrung by the same unimaginative approach. Where his predecessors were fixated on the price of canned mackerel, he appears to have developed an obsession with the prices of school atlases. Perhaps when he is prime minister, he might consider having the price of atlases frozen and announced in the budget speech. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
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The government is wrong to succumb to Mintoffian thinking by harrying businesses to pledge formally that they will not raise prices in the immediate aftermath of the euro changeover. It might seem like good political strategy, but really it’s dangerous rubbish. There are enough people already out there who have been encouraged by the ranting of successive Labour leaders to think of people in business as thieving knaves who won’t miss an opportunity to cheat or steal.
We are no longer living in an environment where imports are restricted and people are dependent on a very small variety of consumables in the shops, so this “voluntary freezing” is utter tosh. Anybody can import anything as long as it isn’t an illegal product. There are masses of stuff out there in the shops. It’s so competitive that the prices of things that were unaffordable 10, 15, 20 years ago are now cheap to the point of being disposable. You can kit yourself out in an entire pretty outfit for Lm15, and you can buy a washing-machine for Lm70. Who would have thought it, back in the days when new outfits were only for special occasions, and washing-machines cost the equivalent of two months’ salary?
As one importer pointed out in a letter to a newspaper some days ago, a company will only “freeze” a price if it pays it to do so. If it signs that government undertaking and then discovers that freezing a price will make a product unprofitable, it will stop importing the product for the duration, or import a substitute. What it will not do is sell its products with an unsustainable profit margin. I suppose it’s a case of people not having thought this thing through properly before they acted on it. And hence we have a January of frozen prices on pink mohair jumpers to look forward to – or not, given that it’s sale time.