Alfred Sant says that healthcare is high on his agenda. What’s he going to do – build a new hospital? When complaining about waiting-lists for operations, he omitted to mention that every country with free healthcare has waiting-lists, and that Malta is no exception – that, indeed, Malta is better than most. A hospital without a waiting-list for operations is called a private hospital.
I really don’t like the way that he has moved from not telling us what’s wrong with his health to mentioning it whenever the subject of health comes up. In private conversation, that’s fine. In public speeches, it rings like a cheap trick for the sympathy vote. The Labour elves are spreading the rumour that Sant was booed at the University when he brought up the subject of his cancer at a wholly inappropriate moment and in a still more inappropriate forum. Of course he wasn’t.
I was there – as the entire country now knows – and I should know. He was booed several times, and booed loudest of all when he said that he doesn’t believe in referendums (what did he expect – applause or silence?), but not when he spoke about health or cancer. Instead his words were greeted with an air of bemusement: cancer and healthcare are not issues for teenagers and 20-year-olds, who are at the stage where they believe they’re immortal, the blissfully lucky things. Sant just showed himself unable to adapt his song to his audience, and behaved towards them as he would to a coffee morning organised by a Labour Party club.
Sant brought up the subject of health yet again a few days ago, and cited the example of “a woman with breast cancer” who told him that she was expected to wait three months for an operation at the state hospital, or go private and pay fees. I tut-tutted ever so loudly when I read that report. Sant should know through experience that it is only non-urgent or elective operations that are put on a waiting-list in order of priority. Urgent cases get seen to immediately, and this includes cancer. Malignant tumours are obviously not left to languish on a waiting-list as they are fatal and time makes some of the difference between life and death. I found this spurious attempt at misleading his audience particularly irritating because Sant should know this through direct experience.
As he himself told us at a press conference, he was operated on as soon as his tumour was discovered. Are we to conclude, therefore, that he was given preferential treatment and sent right to the top of the list because he is the Opposition Leader? Of course not: he was given the same treatment as everybody else who needs to be operated on for the removal of a tumour, and taken in for surgery at once. I don’t for a moment believe that Labour Party candidate and surgeon Anthony Zammit whizzed him through the improper channels.
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I was reading an interview with Labour’s Evarist Bartolo and getting very irritated. This is a quote from the man who joined forces with Alfred Sant in the battle to keep young people (and their parents and grandparents) out of the European Union: “It is something I would recommend to all young people even today: get out there and get those life skills that you can only learn by meeting with people of all races and nationalities, and which can’t be learned through a sheltered life.” Bartolo was talking about his experience, in his early 20s, of living in Scotland and working his way around. So that would be why he thought it was such a bad idea to let young Maltese have the freedom to roam all over Europe, right? Or was he a closet Iva person?
There was something else in that interview which really annoyed me about this syrupy talker: the attempt to smooth-talk his way out of any association with the dreadful Labour government pre-1987. Evarist Bartolo claimed in the interview (maybe it was another “misprint”, like Charlie Mangion’s?) that he first became associated with the Labour Party “in the late 1980s”, when he was “asked to be editor of the new weekly party newspaper.” That’s utter twaddle. I first met Evarist Bartolo in 1985, and he had already been involved with the Labour Party for some time. Another misprint followed: that he first “came into contact with Alfred Sant” when helping set up the Labour Party’s broadcast media. The political TV and radio stations came on stream in the run-up to the 1992 elections, so according to this misprint, Evarist hung around the Labour Party for about five years without ever coming into contact with Alfred Sant.
Well, what tosh. When I first met Evarist in 1985 he was tight as two peas in a pod with Alfred Sant, who was then president of the Labour Party, and the Labour Party was already bouncing along the bottom of the barrel in terms of violence and corruption, and dealing with widespread civil unrest in Malta. They had already known each other for years before that. I’m not saying that Sant and Bartolo are corrupt here. I’m just saying that Bartolo’s claims in that interview were a misprint. I’m also saying that if it had been me in that position, I would have packed my bags and left the party for good, never to return.
The members of Sant’s shadow cabinet seem prone to misprints of this kind, so let’s hear the party’s official excuse: “Sometimes we are so inundated with work that we don’t have time to read the transcript of an interview.” Oh, so that would be why they didn’t check their electoral programme before publishing it, then, for proposals that have been implemented by this government already. There were 14 at the last count. When a reporter asked Charlie Mangion and Gozo candidate Justyne Caruana why Labour is proposing the decommissioning of the Gozo hospital incinerator, when it has been decommissioned already, Mangion turned quizzically to Caruana for help, and Caruana turned to the reporter and said on camera: “Mur xommu.” May heaven and electors deliver us from these people and their bumbling tomfoolery.
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The entertainment in this campaign is being provided by Azzjoni Nazzjonali. Josie Muscat, yet another man who never smiles, preferring the apoplectic look, said that AN is the only political party not backed by businessmen. So what are the party leaders, then? We had the shock-horror billboard, and after that a television rant against single mothers, which involved our Josie being careless with words and describing those on social services as people with a very particular sexual preference. There was a moment of shocked silence as the moderator tried to decide whether she had really heard what she heard, and then decided to let it pass. And now I see that they’ve decided “there should be no fixed quota in recruitment in terms of a person’s sexuality”. What, no quotas for homos? Come on, AN, you’re losing your touch. Or perhaps they meant gender, and got the word wrong. The one thing this campaign has taught me is just how many people need to consult a dictionary.
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And here’s another lovely quote from Josie Muscat, made in an interview to a Sunday newspaper: “Let’s be honest here: Malta is not a normal migratory route for birds. Any bird that passes over Malta must be a crazy bird that loses its way. Still, I am not saying that a protected bird should be shot at, just because it gets lost and ends up over Malta by mistake. But everybody knows that Malta is not really a migratory route.” Altogether now: sigh.
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I see the Labour Party’s campaign as a metaphor for the party and what it will be like in government (again). Its newspaper ads exhort us to vote Labour because of the Regional Road bridge, because Jesmond Mugliett had lunch with Robert Sant, and because Labour is the only party that can ensure “Scandinavian” EU standards, whatever those might be. Cue loud laughter here. They tried their damnedest to keep us out of Europe and now they’re trying to tell us that they stand for EU standards. “It’s a long way to go to European standards,” the advert reads, “it’s a long way to go. Nothing short of government change will get us there.” Well, what can I say? At least they put an apostrophe in “it’s”. What I love most of all about these inept messages is the fact that the two words highlighted in the strap-line are “Labour” and “out”. I couldn’t agree more.
Then there are the upended containers used for a road campaign that was so obviously planned for billboards. They kept the same design format, though a billboard and an upended container are not the same shape or size. So when you approached the container from one side, what you got was the arm of that aspirational ballerina girl, waving desperately in isolation like the limb of a drowning person. Yes, a really good metaphor. Then you have the happy family unit, the kind beloved of Azzjoni Nazzjonali, wrapped around the 45-degree angle of the two sides of the container, so that the mother’s face and chest are split down the middle (a clear candidate for some plastic surgery, Jason).
A friend was particularly scathing about the ballerina, which came from a stock-shot library. “Even if they trawled the length and breadth of the islands, they probably wouldn’t find a single kid at ballet lessons whose parents vote Labour,” she said. Ballet lessons are a sign of aspiration, and aspiration tends to move people away from Labour and towards something perceived as smarter. So who was the Labour Party addressing, exactly, with its ballerina? Not boys, that’s for sure.
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Alfred Sant has taken to wearing blue ties instead of his usual red – EU blue, what’s more. It could be because red drains colour from the face, which is why I rarely wear it, or it could be because he’s trying to steal the clothes of the Nationalist Party and convince us that he is a true-blue European, despite not believing in people’s right to a referendum, disapproving of our entry into the Eurozone, and gearing up to pick a fight with the European Commission if made prime minister. A family member messaged me when we were watching him on television the other night: “Ara, anke l-folder huwa EU blue”. We’re that kind of person; we like inspecting the details – but you know what they say, the devil is in the detail.
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The Labour Party thinks that choosing a government is like choosing a football team. Are you going to side with Juventus or Milan? Chelsea or Man. United? Lejber or Nationalist? Deputy leader Michael Falzon, who is hardly “new” Labour with his fireworks and festas and his santa tal-Madonna fil-but (for good luck), got up on the stage at a mass meeting and asked the cheering crowd to vote for “Labour United”. It’s a team, apparently. They have a team but the Nationalist Party only has Lawrence Gonzi. The only reason they have to present a team is because when they present the leader he makes a hash of things, like he did at the University (about which, read my column on Sunday). So if Labour is elected to government, Malta will be the only country in the world run by a football team made up of people who don’t play football. There’s a first time for everything.
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Vote Harry, get Freddie. Until Sunday...
