Joseph Muscat’s Labour Party has seen fit to describe as a national crisis the fact that a few hundred African immigrants are penned behind bars or living in open centres while doing the jobs that no Maltese wants to do.

Given that his first contribution to national politics as party leader was the wet declaration that 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote in local council elections (ah, but do they want to?), he must have realised that something a little more dramatic was called for. And nothing is more dramatic than the words “national crisis”. Picture the scene: he calls a meeting with Jason and the Two Ronnies and says that he needs to announce the advent of a national crisis. But what is he to say that the national crisis is? And Jason or one of the Ronnies comes up with Africans, because they don’t have a vote, nobody seems to like them, and it’s always a good idea to jump on a bandwagon when you see one rolling by. It’s a whole lot easier than talking about the number of protected birds being shot right now, in defiance of the clamp-down. You never know, some of those bird-shooters might be Labour voters, but none of the Africans are.

Here’s the thing, though: people are cooling off about the horrors of immigration. I don’t have any opinion polls to hand, but I can get a pretty good sense of the shift from what’s happening on the internet. The comments below the news stories on immigration have vanished – pffffff! – in a puff of smoke. Where up to a few weeks ago there were reams of ire that amply demonstrated the failures of our educational system, now there are maybe one or two remarks by Imperium Europa’s erstwhile treasurer Charles Sammut, and by a couple of other stalwarts from the send-them-back-where-they-came-from brigade.

The hot topic now is abortion, and even that has shifted – from the rights and wrongs of using the Constitution to ban it, to the rights and wrongs of banning it at all.

There are at least two obvious reasons for this perceptible shift. The first is that as soon as Gift of Life marked the end of summer by cranking up its machine once more, it diverted everyone’s attention from the noisome question of whether we should shoot them at sea or go to war with Libya. Put simply, people now have something else to get them agitated. By taking a break for the summer, as they so amusingly put it, Gift of Life allowed the issue to percolate through people’s minds. Because they were given the space to think, people actually thought. Now I’ll bet that a significant number of even those 39,000 who are said to have signed Gift of Life’s petition are sorely regretting it.

To my great astonishment, I have noticed from the comments posted on the internet that large numbers of people now grasp the various permutations of the Gift of Life issue where before they simply thought like this: 1. abortion is bad; 2. we are all agreed that abortion is bad; 3. so if abortion is bad, using the Constitution to make sure it never happens is good; 4. therefore Gift of Life are right, and I must sign their petition.

From what is posted on the internet, it is easily discernible that Gift of Life’s main tranche of support is from people who cannot put a coherent argument together, but instead do the equivalent of shouting and screaming in cyberspace, which involves the use of lots of capital letters and exclamation marks, besides dragging in God, divorce, euthanasia and the imminent demise of the western world. Of course, this leaves out of the equation all those who don’t use the internet, but then you should consider that important shifts in public opinion occur first among just the kind of people who do use it.

The second reason is that the inevitable has happened. Familiarity has bred the opposite of contempt, or if not its opposite, then at least a decrease in the fear-of-the-unknown factor. Malta was unusual in that there were no black people at all here, and so those Maltese who never travel had never seen a black person in the flesh before the recent arrivals. That sentence is a little retrograde at first glance, but it is true. The fear was largely a fear of the unknown and of those who look dramatically different, which is why no number of Russians will ever provoke the same emotion. They may look different, but they’re still recognisably “like us”.

This fear of the unknown is deep-rooted and primitive, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. I can still vividly remember my extreme distress, aged four, when I saw a nun and a Chinese person for the first time, and to make matters worse they were rolled into one. It was my first day at school and my father tried his best to detach me from his ankles as I lay on the floor and howled in panic. No doubt, he thought my behaviour was caused by the bewildering experience of separation from my younger sibling for the first time ever, but it wasn’t.

It was caused by the sight of a human being with facial features that my child’s mind recognised as being distinctly alien, with no hair on view, who was dressed in a most unusual ensemble. And to make matters even scarier, that ensemble was jet black. Poor old Sister Lucy did her best to calm me down, but the more she fussed the more I screamed in terror, until she handed me over to another nun. This one had a moustache, but the most important thing was that she did not have a Chinese face. I remember my sons behaving like this when they were flat on their backs in their prams. Because the main faces in their tiny world were of a bevy of young and good-looking aunts and attractive grannies (even the great-grannies had no wrinkles), they would yell and holler like things possessed whenever a wizened old face hovered into view to coo. They would become overwrought.

The severely adverse reaction to the first-time-ever sight of black people in our midst is that of the child within the adult. The people who are upset would dearly love to lie on the floor and howl in terror until the fearfully alien creatures are removed from view, even if they don’t know it themselves. But adults can’t do this, so instead they resort to adult forms of making their fear known. They write letters to the newspapers. They post comments on the internet. They meet up in groups of like-minded individuals and rant. They derail dinner-party conversations by going on about their fears with an intensity that embarrasses everyone else present. They set fire to the homes of those they perceive to be aiding and abetting the threateningly different creatures who are coming in from the outside.

Now the fear has begun to ease off. The die-hards have remained entrenched in their opinion but everyone else is beginning to move on. If I can pinpoint the moment when things began to shift, it was the day those two babies were plucked from a sinking boat as their mother died beside it. There was a slew of comments beneath that news story, some of them suggesting that babies are being packed deliberately into unseaworthy vessels to tug at our heart-strings – you know, because African people have no feeling for their young and are quite content to let them die to serve as emotional decoys. Those remarks hit rock-bottom and after that, things began to change. Then Paul Vincenti came along with his planned assault on the Constitution, and the anti-immigrant comments dried up.

So I’m interested to see that the politicians are out of touch with the public mood. Those on the government side have been unnaturally silent in general. It is almost as though they have sent us to Coventry. Those on the Labour Party side, on the other hand, have stayed true to their tradition of not knowing what people are thinking or what they want to hear.

I don’t think anyone wanted to hear about giving the vote to 16-year-olds as a debut statement by the leader of the Labour Party. And coming off the Super One stage, after a painfully embarrassing ceremony in which Joseph Cuschieri handed over his seat (I’m surprised they didn’t use a symbolic chair), to announce that we have a national crisis on our hands, Muscat so badly misses the mark that it is almost funny.

National crises don’t have to be announced by the leader of a political party that is not in government. National crises make themselves felt. Nobody announces their presence. If you have to announce a national crisis, then quite clearly it is not a crisis at all. But there’s more to it than that: if you are an opposition politician who wishes to create the sense of a national crisis – panic, hysteria, pressure on the government to ‘do something’ followed by resentment against the government for ‘doing nothing’ – you must take great care to announce this national crisis when the public mood is perfectly attuned to chime with it. There has never been any such public mood, just some very loud and vociferous people. But it is particularly hilarious that Muscat chose to make his announcement now, precisely at the point where public interest in this issue is meandering off and towards other things.

The astonishing thing about one Labour leader after another is that, outside the narrow confines of the party machine, they are incapable of sensing the public mood, or knowing what they should do about it. Alfred Sant got it right once, with Valued Added Tax and ‘barunijiet’ in 1996, but though his tactics were effective, his strategy was doomed to failure.

We have entered a new age in which it is the people who are setting the agenda for politicians, and not the other way round. The internet and generally improved methods of communication and of raising awareness have made this possible, where it wasn’t possible before.

When communication is as efficient and immediate as it is on the internet, public opinion is formed much more quickly, and shifts and changes with alarming speed. But our politicians haven’t cottoned on to what’s happening yet.