If there’s one thing that rings really hollow about the last stages of Labour’s campaign it’s the false step into the world of Martin Luther King and Stevie Wonder.
Because you should be in no doubt at all that this is where the inspiration came from for those pseudo-emotional speeches, read in a crescendo off a teleprompter, about how it’s not a matter of whether you’re red or you’re blue.
But this isn’t ebony or ivory, is it – it’s not about black or white and the colour of our skin, things we can’t help because we were born that way. It’s not about ethnic groups or even religions, which are so much more than a straightforward free choice and can’t be treated as one.
This is about political choices. It’s about our personal decision to vote for this party or that one, our decision to choose Nationalist policies and politicians over Labour policies (such as they are) and politicians (ditto), or vice versa. It’s not about something we can’t help, but about something we’ve chosen for ourselves.
As adults, we are responsible for our choices and their consequences, and we should also expect to be assessed and judged by them, if only for the very obvious reason that we reach our decisions, or are supposed to do so, by a rational process of thought and analysis. All of that says a great deal about us, which the colour of our skin never will.
When I hear Joseph Muscat and his ragtag assembly of faux switchers and multi-million-euro-campaign managers labour the message about how they want unity not ‘red and blue’, I just laugh. How foolish can they be? I picture a sea of red and blue people walking around Valletta or driving past me in their cars. I picture a couple of red people giving birth to a blue baby and the father shrieking, “He’s blue! My God, he’s blue! You’ve cheated on me! Who’s the father?”
Two tribes? Hardly. It suits Joseph Muscat and his party to talk in those terms because it helps him bolster his message that the only reason lots of us don’t like Labour (and that’s putting it mildly) is because they’re a different tribe and we don’t like the colour of their red skin. The real reason, of course, is that we don’t like their policies, their attitude, way of doing things and their odd mix of politicians from another era we’d rather not have lived through. In other words, our decision not to vote Labour is a rational one. We have looked at Labour and found it not so much red as wanting and unfit for purpose.
A Labour supporter sent in a comment to my website yesterday: “Please don’t judge us by our colour.” My response is that nobody is judging anybody by colour because nobody is actually coloured either way, and that she should not Hoover up the swamp of hogwash churned out by the Labour Party and its ebony-and-ivory-Stevie-Wonder theme. Labour supporters are not looked at askance because they are ‘red’, but because – in the eyes of people who took the rational decision to vote Nationalist – they have questionable judgement.
They are not criticised because they are ‘red’ (because they are quite evidently not red at all) but because they voted for Sant, voted against EU membership, voted for Switzerland in the Mediterranean, voted Labour again in 1998 after the mess of 1996-1998, voted Labour in 1992 to bring back Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici as prime minister when we had had five years of freedom under Eddie Fenech Adami, and even voted for Mintoff in 1971, 1976 and 1981.
I really don’t know why Labour supporters who sing the ebony-and-ivory theme really cannot understand that they deserve to have their judgement questioned for voting Labour in all those scenarios. I mean, what sort of person would have voted Labour in 1981? In 1987? In 1992? In 1996? In 1998? In 2003? In 2008? I avoid mentioning 1996 because the motivating factor was avarice and the desire to get rid of VAT (and that went well under Leo Brincat, didn’t it?).
What sort of person is planning to vote for this greasy, slippery ship of fools in a couple of weeks? Well, we know what sort of person because they’re all busy telling us about it. They don’t seem to realise that it’s absolutely nothing to boast about, that it shows very, very poor judgement, and that they should expect to be assessed by their choice – certainly not by their colour.
By their fruits shall ye know them. Equally, by our choices shall we be assessed and judged. To suggest, as Joseph Muscat does, that politics are tribal and that people like me vote Nationalist out of habit, tradition or group instinct is offensive, patronising, cheap and ridiculous. But then I suppose it’s easier for him to think and say that than to admit, even to himself, that somebody with a brain, who grew up neither Nationalist nor Labour, has looked at him and his sorry party and thought, “No way. I’d have to be mad or stupid to switch this lot for that bunch.”