Does the Labour Party really have any need to get its act together (difficult) and come up with some policies on something other than suicide (the latest from Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, now firmly back in the fold and resigned to divorce)?

I would think not. Its supporters are gagging to have their team in Castille − which is how they see it – and would vote Labour even if the party were led by a shop clerk whipped from behind his counter and turned into the Labour Moses, which is getting pretty close.

They would vote quite literally for anything as long as it is branded Labour, as we found to our astonishment in 1992, when almost half the electorate voted for the return of crackpot KMB as prime minister after five years of what seemed like heaven following 16 years of Labour hell and all-round deprivation.

They’re not interested in policies. They’re interested in Team Labour winning the cup. Go to any Labour supporter’s Facebook wall and you’ll see exactly what I mean. There’s lots of bitching about gONzipN and absolutely no discussion about what Labour will or will not do.

It’s fascinating. They’re prepared to drop this show but have absolutely no curiosity as to what the next show will be like.

They’re prepared to take Labour on trust as a five-year government, yet they are the sort of people who will not buy even a saucepan without driving the salesman nuts with pernickety questions about price, quality, guarantee, whether they can return it and so on. I see them in shops all the time, examining even a €5 potential purchase as though they are buying an Aston Martin and parting with a lifetime’s savings. I think it’s so strange.

I’m the other way round. I will buy things without bothering to check them, but will examine every nuance of policy – and more so, the people who will implement that policy – when it comes to choosing a government. Even the thought of voting Labour makes me laugh when I look at the people involved – ancient fossil from my childhood, Karmenu Vella, writing policy, for crying out loud – and what makes it all so much worse is that these policies Vella is meant to be writing seem to have got him in a tangle. He has yet to come up with anything we can get our teeth into.

But Labour doesn’t feel the need to write policy ahead of an election. Its supporters will vote for it no matter what, and the pseudo-liberals who can’t see a totalitarian heading their way even if he’s wearing day-glo pink are determined to hang themselves and the rest of the country by not voting or by voting ‘for Joseph’.

It’s all so much a dim echo of 1996 that I am almost inclined to yawn with tedium. “Don’t worry, we’ll be OK. This will be good for the country,” a couple of my acquaintances said back then, thinking they were so hip and avant-garde in having voted for the new Prime Minister Sant. Twenty-two months later they were letting off sirens on the Sliema front while festooned with balloons.

But there you go.

The Labour Party, impaled on this catastrophic absence of policies and ideas, is seeking to turn a setback to its advantage by pretending that it’s all a deliberate ploy. Like Baldrick and Blackadder, it has cunningly devised a plan by which its wealth of thrilling policies is held back from the public so that its political rivals don’t steal a march on it or twist those policies out of recognition.

And here’s the amusing bit: its supporters, though they have been told nothing of these policies, presumably because there is nothing to tell, are at the same time made to feel in on the plot. They feel they are part of the conspiracy to hide Karmenu Vella’s brilliant schemes for post-2013 Malta from the evil, scheming Nationalists. “Hahahaha,” they say on the Internet. “You’ll have to wait until Labour is in government to find out what Joseph has planned for Malta, because we’re not telling you.”

Ho-hum.

Well, even if they wanted to tell – say, under water-boarding circumstances or facing torture by a hundred reruns of Ir-Rok Opra Gensna – they couldn’t, because they don’t know. What’s worse is that they don’t care. Their feudal serf mentality is so complete that they trust their political master implicitly and will not ask him what his policies are, still less question or challenge them when one or two are finally wrung out of him. I find this deeply disturbing. How can you not care what a political party plans to do when it is in government? How can you take a political party purely on trust, and then end up with something like CET?

This comment on the Internet, in response to somebody who questioned Labour’s lack of policies as late as 18 months before hitting the seat of government, is descriptive of the prevalent mentality:

“Mr J. Borg

You and others like you seem to be VERY eager to know what the PL will be presenting in it’s electoral manifesto........but you must have to wait!!!!!!”

‘You must have to wait’. Mr Borg seems unable to understand that he has to wait too, and that it’s a problem. His comment makes it apparent that he feels himself in on the conspiracy to hide things from the Nationalists, but his sense of self-esteem is so poor that he is not angry about the fact that he, too, is kept in the dark and that he is insulted by being expected to vote for an unknown quantity.

Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, no longer applies in the consumer world where we are protected by laws against the falsehoods of merchants, but it continues to apply in general elections. We buy, and then we are stymied for five years.

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