It has been well said that the distance between law-and-order socialism with a social conscience and conservatism is not very great.

After all, capital and labour are children of the same industrial revolution and the offspring of the same subject of history.

It is a history whose results are being ossified at great speed, as the information revolution takes over, and the world economy is reduced into a global village. In this village, the onrush of technology and the ruthlessness of competition make life all the more precarious, even though it may be, at times, exciting.

Capital and labour rose together and together they ruled, initially by conducting a tug-of-war. As they matured, they learned the lesson of co-existence. They will decline or, at least, stagnate together, and they will lose their relevance in the society of tomorrow.

Where is the competing elite and what is the potential of tomorrow’s decision makers?

Top-most objective

Tomorrow’s topmost objective will be survival in a world of cut throat competition, besieged by a growing army of idle senior citizens, afflicted by persistent unemployment, and under pressure to contain social welfare costs.

The challenge will call for the maintenance and stimulation of productivity levels and finding new employment openings – and to do so without exposing liberty to new threats.

In fact, there is a growing feeling that the forces of the ancient regime are now worrying more about survival than about liberty.

Such concern surfaces with increasing frequency in the media. Potentially, the media represent the missing link between the emergent elite of tomorrow’s society, bent on improvement, and the forces which are out to conserve their vested interests.

Vital role

In this scenario, the media has a vital and decisive role to play. It can inject objectivity and sanity in the emerging debate, or it can sell the pass and take sides to obfuscate and even mislead public opinion.

Today, enlightened forces of electors have emerged to claim the right of civic participation and to aspire to self-determination. These forces are fed up of manifestations of authoritarianism and arrogance by powerful organisations.

These organisations may have helped people to get where they find themselves today. Some of them have developed their own inertia and imperialism to the point of defending their functionaries, rather than the new liberties of their members.

Tomorrow’s generation will be concerned with the task of confronting entrenched interests embedded in public and private bureaucracies. The emergence of this generation is like a rainbow in the sky and Malta’s ultimate hope.

Once this new force comes into its own, the old order will tend to develop a further set of common interests.

It will clamour for support in the shape of protective measures. The ‘thalidomide of protectionism’ has spread to quangos that are fuelled by monopoly, and to weak enterprises struggling for survival on the margins of the economy.

Protecting the status quo is progressively a common interest of the old order.

New order aspirations

The new order is outward-looking, enterprising and anxious to reach out and seek its rightful place in the sun.

In the modern economic scenario, the pursuit of survival amounts to government by consent, with the consumers forming part of the equation that goes well beyond the circle of the local social partners -and the most important consumers are not the ones at home, but those in far-away markets.

It remains to be seen whether the emerging new order in Malta has the necessary clout to break out into the wide-open spaces of opportunity. Initiative and enterprise are not enough. .

The new order needs enlightened political back-up springing from the electoral grassroots.

With that impetus, democracy will be the hammer and market economics the chisel.

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