The Nationalist Party is to close down its printing-press, which has been operating for 40 years, starting out when Mintoff’s Malta Labour Party was elected to government at the start of what would turn out to be a long haul of 16 destructive years.

In those years the printing-press was the party, so much so that a couple of generations of supporters, stalwarts, politicians and employees knew the PN headquarters by the cipher l-istamperija – the printing-press. The significance of its role in a rapidly eroding democracy cannot really be understood now, in the age of the internet and information coming at us from all directions, whether we want it to or not. Back then, we wanted information but had little way of getting it other than via the bush telegraph and the Nationalist Party’s newspapers, The Democrat, In-Nazzjon Taghna and Il-Mument. L-istamperija  in those days symbolised not so much freedom of speech, for there was little of that, but the revolutionary raising of a reverse victory salute in the face of an oppressive government that worked hard and viciously to silence dissent and criticism.

 

Buying those newspapers, too, was an act of defiance towards Mintoff and his men and women - some of whom, tragically for Malta, are back in government today. The Times of Malta and its sister Sunday just didn’t cut it in terms of telling us what was going on, framing things in context and raising the alarm about corrupt practices and acts of violence. We were supposed to read between the lines, rely on talk for the real information to fill in the blanks and get our news through word of mouth. To this day, I can’t understand why it was burned down when it put up so little opposition to what was going on –imagine if it had really been doing its proper job of investigating and reporting on all the real horrors of the time.

And yet it was burned down. That gives you some idea – if you weren’t alive and kicking then – of how important the Nationalist Party newspapers were, and how crucial its press: when Progress Press – The Times of Malta’s printing arm – was burnt to a cinder by Mintoff’s mob, it was the Nationalist Party’s stamperija which saved the day until new machinery could be brought in.

Yet that was then and this is now. As the 1990s edged towards the year 2000, the financial and administrative justification for owning its own press began to diminish. The changes this industry has seen over the last 20 years, and most particularly over the last 10, have been massive. It is no longer recognisable: everything about production methods has changed, requiring continuous investment and a huge amount of work to keep the machines going and the press from going bankrupt. The result has been consolidation across the board, with streamlining and outsourcing.

The days of a printing-press as a means to a single end – the printing of one particular newspaper or stable newspapers – have been gone for many years. Printing has long since become a stand-alone business. A press must make a profit in and of itself, and be operated separately, rather than being an adjunct to the main business of producing a newspaper. Newspapers and printing presses: the revolution in this sector, over the last couple of decades, has meant those two are now entirely separate businesses and have to be kept separate. You can run a newspaper as a business – or, if you are a political party, as the means to a political end – and print it at any one of the printers which exist solely because printing is their business.

Basically, the Nationalist Party’s printing press should have been closed down years ago, when the industry began to change dramatically and it became obvious there was no going back to the days of having to own a printing-press because you published a newspaper. It had the perfect illustration in that this newspaper was for years printed at the PN press: it never owned its own press, because that was already pointless 22 years ago when The Malta Independent was launched.

 

It didn’t help that between 1987 and this year, the very period when the major shifts happened in newspaper production, pre-press and printing, the Nationalist Party’s newspapers completely lost their democratic purpose and their fundamental raison d’etre. A newspaper that keeps a close watch on the government and exercises the democratic precaution of scrutiny has a grand purpose. A newspaper that is in bed with the government has no purpose at all. Its readership fell to bits. Advertising followed.  With the Nationalist Party newspapers having lost their reason for being, how much less sense, then, did it make to run a printing-press?

There is no risk to democracy in the PN printing-press closing down. The Nationalist Party can still produce a newspaper and have it printed elsewhere. That might well make the newspaper stronger, as more resources can be dedicated to it, the burden of the press having gone. The sole casualties of this far-too-late decision are the employees. To say that there are only eight is to treat human beings as mere numbers. Each one of those has his dignity, needs a sense of purpose and self-worth, and has bills to pay. They are at an age when retraining will be difficult, but certainly not impossible. May they quickly find their feet in what has become a very difficult and ever-shifting industry.