Do you think that if we all sat down at once and wrote letters to Father Christmas (Christmas Fader, in Labourspeak), asking nicely for the Labour Party’s electoral programme, or at least some proposals for discussion, we’d wake up to find them in our stocking on 25 December?
The situation has become so desperate that the jolly bearded man dressed appropriately in red is probably our only hope and last resort, though I know a couple of people who swear by the efficacious powers of the Redentur, and – whisper it gently – St Anthony has never let me down in the search for objects that have gone AWOL. But he’s not going to help me out with the Labour manifesto, because it’s not technically lost. It just hasn’t come into being yet. Perhaps we should be petitioning whichever saint is the patron of unborn children. Or maybe St Jude – my paternal grandmother was very keen on him − for lost causes.
On second thoughts, forget bribing St Jude for sight of the Labour electoral programme. Having a quiet word with him about seeing to it that a former Super One reporter, a former police inspector and a former Mintoff cabinet minister are not running the show by March seems more appropriate when we’re talking lost causes. Will a hundred votive candles in those – oh dear – red plastic containers be sufficient? But no – I seem to recall that what St Jude demanded in return was not candles but publication of an advertisement of thanks in The Times of Malta, a small price to pay to avert the ghastliness of a Super One prime minister with Anglu Farrugia as his vici and Il-Guy as ministru tal-finanzi.
No, I’m not really joking. It’s got to that stage. We’re weeks away from the dissolution of Parliament and a full-blown election campaign, and we still don’t know what Labour plans to do with the five years the electorate is going to give it to play with. So fine, Labour’s going to reduce the consumer price of electricity (it says, without explaining how – another VAT/CET fiasco, I suspect). But is that going to eat up the whole five years? We know that gang are a little out of practice by now, and need to learn how to govern all over again – scratch that, they need to learn how to govern, full stop, given that the last few attempts were catastrophic – but surely five years to do nothing but give us artificially cheaper electricity bills is pushing it a little?
There are now almost as many jokes about the Labour Party’s total lack of proposals and plans as there are about Franco Debono’s notable school report. First Labour said that it will not make its proposals known because the government will only steal its fabulous ideas – and this gave rise to the accusation that it does not have the country’s best interests at heart, because if those ideas are so wonderful that the present government will feel the need to implement them immediately, then why deprive the people of them by putting Labour’s electoral interests first?
The new excuse, the Labour Party having perhaps understood that the “we don’t want the government/Nationalist Party to copy us” justification is quite ridiculous, is “we will publish our proposals when the Nationalists publish theirs”. Very grown up, don’t you think? That’s really adult, progressive and liberal, and ever so respectful of the benighted electorate. The point the Labour Party misses here is that nobody at all is gagging to hear what the Nationalist Party has planned. By now, we know the Nationalist Party in government pretty much inside out. We know how it ticks. We know how it does things. We know its attitudes and motivation, the way it looks at business, education, employment, the works. The Nationalist Party in government is, for better or worse, a familiar spouse. We know how it operates and how it thinks. We know its parameters, its strengths and its weaknesses.
It’s Joseph Muscat and his Skip Party who are the source of concern for us minority voters, and I use that description advisedly, being old enough (thank heavens) to remember most of them in government, either in the God-awful and seemingly endless period 1971 to 1987, or in the absolutely disastrous 1996-1998 Sant sink-pit. It’s not so much that we don’t know what they’re going to do, but that we have a gnawing dread, born of experience, that needs to be partially exorcised by a nice, sensible manifesto.
The trouble is that people in their majority have decided to vote Labour even without knowing what Labour will (or won’t) do. With all the polls showing that Labour has something like a 12-point lead over the Nationalist Party, there is no reason on earth why Labour need bother even writing an electoral programme at all. With or without it, it’s going to win. That’s why Karmenu Il-Guy Vella, the man in charge of the manifesto, hasn’t bothered coming up with anything, and why Aaron Farrugia, the Chief Elf roped in to help him (because, poor thing, Il-Guy is getting on a bit, having first been spotted with Mintoff in China in 1972) appears to be spending most of his time chasing Likes on Facebook and free Obama campaign T-shirts in Florida, at the expense of the American taxpayer.
The Labour Party is now so confident of victory that an electoral programme and proposals for government are just details, the way they look at them. Of course, to a serious party, even if that party were certain of victory, they would not be details at all, but absolutely of the essence. A political party has to show the electorate some respect by telling us what it plans to do, and for its own sake, it had best have a plan anyway.
But let’s face it: if Labour electors respect themselves so little that they do not demand to know what they are voting for, then Labour (being Labour) is not going to bother. With or without an electoral programme, it’s home and dry – and quite frankly, an electoral programme runs the risk of sabotaging Joseph-and-Michelle’s victory run up the steps of the Auberge de Castille. We can’t react badly to Labour’s plans unless we know what those plans are.
But then I don’t think that Labour has any plans at all, beyond charging into the sweetshop, shouting “Yippee!”, stuffing itself silly and then being sick all over the rest of us.
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