Joseph Muscat has announced great changes within the Labour Party. It will have a new name. It will have a new emblem. And it will have a new way of electing its leader.
Gosh, I am so impressed. A new logo will really change the party and make it fit for government. A new name will go a long way towards obfuscating the fact that Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela are deputy leaders. A new way of electing the party leader, when Muscat resigns or is ousted, might just about make up for the absence of any policies or ideas. I don’t think.
What stuns me about the Labour Party is that it is obsessed with image and appearance. Content is as nothing to its big cheeses. It is as though they think that the reason Malta has been systematically rejecting Labour at the polls since 1976 is because the party has a poor image. If Lorry Sant had been slimmer or charming, if Dom Mintoff had been tall and handsome, if Joe Debono Grech looked like Daniel Craig (the cinema was full of drooling women the other night) we might have overlooked the violence, the corruption, and the crass ineptitude.
It’s easy for the Labour Party to blame its image for its routine failure at the polls, rather than facing up to its real shortcomings and doing something about them. Let’s put it this way, it’s a whole lot simpler to change an emblem and a name than it is to work out some real policies. And it’s a whole lot simpler than governing, which starts with being fit to govern. A new emblem might bring to an end the Pavlovian response that many of us have to the present Labour flag, but it’s not going to stop me looking at Anglu Farrugia and shaking my head, or looking at Toni Abela and laughing. The day a party emblem can sit in the prime minister’s chair and take decisions on running the country is the day I will vote for a political party on the basis of what its emblem looks like.
The changes are not going to be amazing, in any case. The party will be called the Labour Party, rather than the Malta Labour Party, and in Maltese it will be Il-Partit Laburista. Well, that’s what we’ve been calling it for years, anyway. I have yet to meet anyone who says, with a straight face, “the Malta Labour Party” or “il-Partit tal-Haddiema”. As for that emblem, it appears that the “iconic” torch is being kept on, to remind us that Labour is a trail-blazer – or rather, to remind us that it is not. As for the leader-election system, we might be forgiven a cynical laugh. It is going to bring in the very system suggested by Marlene Pullicino and rejected by the delegates, and which would have almost certainly resulted in the election of George Abela. Having used to old system to get himself elected, Muscat is now going to dispense with it.
In many ways, all this change is about back to the future. Joseph Muscat has got a buzzing bee in his bonnet about being “progressive”. Progressive politics is a dim hangover from the 1960s and 1970s. The things to wear when talking about progressive politics are hip-hugging flares and a Jim Croce moustache, while listening to the cool sounds of Traffic and channelling some really happening vibes.
Muscat’s mentor Mario Vella thought of himself as progressive way back in the days of the OPEC oil crisis. I imagine that he still hasn’t got over himself, and that his protégé Muscat is too uninformed to know about all that. Only somebody who thinks that Armistice Day is xi haga tal-Inglizi, and consequently of no particular importance if you are a Maltese political leader, wouldn’t understand that the term “progressive politics” smacks, and resoundingly so, of the days when Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful were in trouble with the police for lewd acts involving a Mars bar. And so the legend Progressivi is now emblazoned above the party name on the podium from which Joseph Muscat has been addressing the nation of late.
There’s more back-to-the-future with his choice of terminology, which references to the days of Dom Mintoff at every twist and turn. Well, he did tell us what great respect he has for Joe Debono Grech, so much so that he dispatched him to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday is his stead, probably on the understanding that a party veteran is the right choice to stand among war veterans, rather than a thrillingly young person like himself.
“This is the time to discuss change and face challenges, and I need soldiers of steel behind me,” Muscat told his people a few days ago, referencing the suldati tal-azzar of those days we’d prefer to forget. “Let us give people the proof that this is a new Labour Party.” What – with soldiers of steel and a new logo? That’s going to convince only the most chicken-brained or those who are wholly overcome by desperation for an alternative to the Nationalist Party. It would be a bit like telling the fire “Oh, you look nice. And this frying-pan has really had its day.”
Muscat was speaking at the first session of a konferenza generali straordinarja. He described it as “historic”. That didn’t surprise me, as the man seems to think that everything he does is momentous, and has no reservations about telling us so. The conference was called – of course – Progressivi, a word that those of my generation associate with the communist regimes languishing behind the Iron Curtain and not with the liberal movements of northern and western Europe, which were the true agents of social change.
Muscat is keen to appeal to voters beyond Labour’s traditional base. This is an admirable if obvious aim: let’s put it this way, he’s not going to become prime minister with the votes only of those who are still voting Labour because they grew up in Labour-voting households. And though he has a good chance of getting elected on the strength of the pika and hdura vote, in commercial terms this doesn’t count as building a strong customer base, but only as one-off sales. Muscat says he wants to appeal to those have never voted for the Labour Party but who share its principles. First, he has to spell out to us what those principles might possibly be. In 30 years, I haven’t been able to work that one out for myself.
A lover of labels, he keeps telling us that the Labour Party is socio-democratic, or social democratic, having failed to realise that the Nationalist Party pulled this particular rug out from under the Labour Party’s feet way back in 1987. The only stumbling block is divorce, but divorce does not a socio-democratic party make, just as the absence of commitment to divorce legislation does not obviate the Nationalist Party’s socio-democratic credentials and achievements. Malta’s Labour Party is a curious oxymoron, in that it is right wing, ultra-conservative and xenophobic. Joseph Muscat may not be those things himself (he isn’t, at all), but he is not running a one-man band here, and while the leader may have changed, the party has not. It is about as easy to turn a xenophobic, suspicious, conservative right-winger into a progressive liberal as it is to turn a progressive liberal into somebody who thinks like Josie Muscat of the AN, who is currently the political leader closest in sentiment to the real Labour Party.
Mass parties in Malta have the thankless task of reconciling a wide variety of conflicting interests if they wish to get elected to government. Muscat is not going to do this with his back-to-the-future stance on making what he is now calling ‘the new movement’ a haven for those who are struggling to make ends meet. The vast majority of people have a tough time making ends meet, with many of us having to work all the hours God sends. It all depends on the definition of making ends meet. Standards of living have risen enormously over the last 15 years, even over the last 10 years, and making ends meet is no longer just a matter of paying the utilities bills and making sure you aren’t eating bread and cheese at the end of the month. People now expect a whole lot more, and they’re doing whatever they can to make sure they get it. The real problem that Muscat must address, if we are to take him seriously on the “progressive” bit and not conclude that he has succumbed to the right-wing, conservative pressures within his party, is the widespread belief in Malta that a household of four, five or even six people should be able to survive comfortably, thank you very much, on a single average salary brought in by the man of the house, with travel, clothes, cars, meals in restaurants, and presents for the children.
This happens nowhere else that I can think of. I was at the post office on a week-day morning when I overheard two women who were clearly nisa tad-dar grumbling to each other in the queue, about how the paga tar-ragel doesn’t stretch to all the things they want to buy now that they have to pay this kind of money for water and electricity. And my first thought was not “jahasra, msieken”, but “why don’t the lazy so-and-sos get off their butts and bring in some money themselves”. Times have changed in this country and standards of living have risen, but Maltese women’s expectation that they deserve by right to live off their husband’s salary even if they marry a low-level employee has not changed at all.
I admire people with initiative, and I admire even more those who encourage initiative in others. Yet instead of encouraging women to be economically productive, I can see that Joseph Muscat is going to fall into the same old trap of consolidating women’s belief in their right to raise a family of three children, pay all the bills, travel, buy clothes, and run a household and one or two cars comfortably on e1,000 a month. Somebody truly progressive would be encouraging women to help themselves instead of sitting around and kvetching, but I rather suspect this isn’t going to happen, because Muscat sees progressive politics as just another label with no real meaning.