The whole national pastime of pointing fingers at one another is just the tragic icing on the cake of a saga that shows up all that is going wrong with us. There are no winners here, just losers everywhere.

This is not something like the recent Denim closure, a process that has long been going on in the world where manufacturing units tend to move to locations with lower wages, something that is expected and accepted as inevitable.

There was nothing inevitable about the sinking of Sea Malta. On the contrary, at each and every turn, it was entirely avoidable, had plain common sense been used and real communication established.

There are two issues, which go back to the creation of Sea Malta. Firstly, did Malta need a national shipping line? This may have been understandable at the time, in the context of the centralised economy and protectionism of those days, but it is an anachronism today: as far as memory can tell only Iran has its own national shipping line, and perhaps China as well. Does Malta need one, even if one were to refuse to accept Minister Austin Gatt’s categorising of Sea Malta as a “part shipping line” (bicca) because he considers it carries just 0.5 per cent of the merchandise that comes into Malta but conveniently takes into consideration not just the trade in Grand Harbour but also that at the Freeport, the bulk of which is not destined for Malta anyway?

Secondly, did it have the critical mass to succeed? Can a shipping line run with just two ships succeed? This can be a generic comment on all the Malta things created by Dom Mintoff which, precisely because they were so insular in genesis and run very much in the Maltese way, could never outlive their creator, especially in a far more globalised world. Many of us have still not twigged that had Malta followed the far more outward-looking macroeconomic plan of George Borg Olivier, rather than the narrower, more obtuse, insular and obstinate model followed by his successor, it would by now have been in the EU for far longer, would have grown much faster and its standard of living would have been far higher.

But having said that, subsequent governments surely have themselves to blame (especially this one, which has been in office for 16 almost continuous years) for neglecting to do anything about Sea Malta. The shareholder was an absentee landlord: it never bothered with the company; it dumped many social and national obligations on it and never paid for them. And, worse, it allowed it, as it did with so many other parastatal companies, to be saddled with in this case an ever-growing number of onshore employees, just as at Malta Shipbuilding, in the end, there were far more people on light duties and pushing pens than actually working.

One must not oppose the present government’s decision to privatise the shipping line, given the context that Malta’s public finances are what they are, and that Malta still has the highest level of state aid in the EU (as reported elsewhere in this issue).

There is clearly no national interest in having a national shipping line for strategic purposes, certainly not when it entails any more forays by the government into commercial business, for which it is clearly not cut out.

But one can ask, and this paper asks, why was there no effort to restructure the company as is being done by the same government at the dockyard? And seeing that one of the main problems that apparently plagued Sea Malta was the burgeoning number of shore-based personnel, while the ships were two and remained two, and given that part of the deal with Grimaldi was going to see the government absorb the shore-based employees, could this not have been tried to see if the company, with a strong hand at the tiller, could make it back into profitability?

It is such short cuts that breed suspicion and ill feeling.

A much-besieged government found solace last week in the public slaps in the face received by the union and by its very visible head. The union, however, was more bumbling than intent on evil, but its recent air of militancy has come home to roost, with a vengeance.

A detailed examination of what went on would seem to show a quite substantial lack of understanding – on the part of the employees, and also of the union – of the grave situation they were in, of what privatisation really means and of what real power the employees and the union have in today’s world. But, equally, there was a significant lack of clear communication between the union and the workers or, to put it another way, between the government and the workers, and between Grimaldi and the workers.

It was the union that seems to have been more interested in its internal politics games and which delayed focusing on the issue time and again. (Conversely, it also seems that there is a sub-plot here, in terms of the recent ousting within the union and its inroads among those who become dissatisfied with the leadership.) It was the union that seems to have misread the signals and thought it could go along with its members and impose conditions on the purchaser and on the government. It has now been served. And workers are suffering as a result. Quite a letdown for a defender of workers’ rights!

And just when everyone was almost ready to start believing again that the Labour leadership had really turned the corner, here it comes, committing itself to setting up a new Sea Malta once it is in government. Will it also bring back Malta Rattan, Deserta, Dirghajn il-Maltin and PAPB? In other words, will it again involve the state in risky ventures into commerce? How can it guarantee that any such ventures will not see repeated the long history of expensive white elephants that may not have brought us to these huge deficits but which have kept us so insular, backwards and plain stupid at most of what we do?

Had Sea Malta still been around when Labour gets back into power, it would have been wonderful to try and salvage it through deep, equally painful, restructuring. But once it is gone, let it rest in peace! It may not have merited its messy end, if for no other reason than for the heroic efforts of the members of its crew, who faced so many storms but went down in this very land-based one. But now that it is dead, let it stay dead.