Sometimes, the power of incumbency – to borrow one of the favourite phrases of Labour politicians (those who can speak properly) – is positive. When you’re the incumbent, you’ve got a track record to be getting on with. People can see what the party in government is worth, or as the much better Maltese expression has it, xi jsarrfu dawn.
Lots of people won’t like the way they’re doing things, and lots of people will. But the point is that everyone can see the way things are done, how they get on with the job, the standards they keep or don’t, the motivation and the outlook of the people involved, the general overriding framework of priorities and goals.
The Nationalist Party is under assessment in action, in government, and has a track record that can be examined closely or carelessly, depending on our inclinations. Some people will analyse that track record rationally, others through the jaundiced eyes of prejudice, but at least there is something to analyse. There is, in fact, a great deal.
At a press conference a couple of days ago, deputy leadership contender Simon Busuttil was asked why Nationalist politicians harp on at Labour for not telling the electorate what even just a few of its proposals are while Labour expects that same electorate to form an opinion as to whether it should govern. Quite frankly, at this point the electorate has already formed that opinion quite merrily and with cavalier disregard for any plans that Labour might have, so I’m tempted to say that Muscat is strategically correct in keeping his proposals under wraps - though I suspect this has more to do with his not having any at this stage, Il-Guy having let him down and Retired Chief Elve Aaron Farrugia being far too busy on Facebook to bother with anything so annoying as writing an electoral programme. With Labour doing so well in the polls, how can the publication of any proposals actually help? They’re more likely to sink the ship, or at least hole it badly.
That programme will be torn to shreds, especially if it really is going to be the work of Il-Guy and Aaron L-Ekonomista, a man who can barely write coherently on his Facebook wall. But that also means that Labour will have enough time to deal with the criticism and adjust its plans accordingly. Publishing the programme at the eleventh hour might well be the greater error, because when you dump ideas and plans on electors at that stage, and they react by making an annoying fuss and by threatening not to vote for you because of X or Y, it’s by then far too late to do anything about it. You can’t say, “Oh, OK then, so you don’t like this. Well, in that case, it’s back to the drawing board. We’ll scratch that.” It’s not as though they don’t have the ‘repeater class’ fiasco of 2008 to keep in mind, writ large in warning red.
Something else went wrong with the eleventh-hour publication of Labour’s electoral programme in 2008, didn’t it? Ah yes: those computer malfunctions. Several items in that programme of proposals were immediately identified by the hawks as having been done already. One of the iconic news clips of that campaign was a journalist asking MP Justyne Caruana why closing down the Gozo incinerator was one of Labour’s proposals, when the incinerator had been closed down already, to which her tart response was: “Ehe? Ejja xommu.”
Party leader Sant’s explanation, when all of these were brought up (embarrassingly in front of the television cameras) was that Labour’s computer had malfunctioned. It brought to mind images of Hal, the room-sized computer that starred in Space 2001 in the 1960s.
The journalists who quizzed Simon Busuttil were keen to know why the Nationalist Party thinks Labour should publish its programme now, when Dr Busuttil had said that the Nationalists will be publishing theirs when the campaign begins. His response was: “People know where they stand with us.”
That’s true, and it is also true that we know where we stand with Labour, in the sense that it is all too predictably unpredictable. Labour, too, has a track record both in and out of government. Its track record in government, most recently in 1996 to 1998, has given it a reputation as the party of nasty surprises. Mintoff was spectacularly good at that; his special party trick was reserving some of the nastiest of his surprises for December, a month in which he was particularly keen to cause trouble. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was a nasty surprise in himself, and Alfred Sant – well, the stupendously nasty surprise he sprang on the many thousands who voted for the removal of VAT only to end up with VAT’s drunken distant cousin squatting in their front room, was the reason those same thousands rushed to vote him overwhelmingly out of office.
Labour might have acquired a tactical advantage by not publishing its proposals, planning to spring them on us instead at the last minute. But this kind of cynicism is just what puts so many thinking people right off Labour. We’d like to think that the party of nasty surprises has grown up, that it has laid down some proper plans, that those plans are good, and that Labour intends to stick to them. But the fear and suspicion go beyond the electoral programme. It’s Labour’s behaviour and attitude that have always been the most disturbing. No electoral programme can really allay those worries, though clearly, some blue ties, a razor blade and schmoozing the right people has worked wonders in lieu.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com