The Labour Party, The Times and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando have picked up Robert Arrigo’s metaphor of a government with a slow puncture. They are wrong to do so, because he is not the brightest crayon in the box and will not have tested the metaphor, as one must, to see whether it holds up.
When you have a slow puncture, you don’t change your car. You change the wheel. Those who demand a general election as the solution to the difficulties created by two MPs – Pullicino Orlando and Franco Debono – are the sort who would buy a new car rather than replace the wheel. In this situation, it is Pullicino Orlando and Debono who are in the metaphoric role of the wheel with the slow puncture. They are the ones who are halting the car’s progress or making it difficult to drive. They are the wheel that has to be replaced.
We are all accustomed by now to the brass neck and lack of self-knowledge of both these two. It is on parade all the time, all over our television screens, newspapers and the internet. So nobody will have been surprised that Pullicino Orlando was the first one out on Facebook – very appropriate, for a Member of Parliament pushing 50 – with talk of an early election because of a slow puncture. And The Times, not realising that his credibility rating is now close to zero (they should have a look at the comments beneath their online report, from Labour and Nationalist supporters alike) thought it would be a good idea to dedicate a story to what Jeffrey thinks. All well and good: they gave him some of the limelight he has craved since Debono stole the show.
Nobody will have been surprised, either, to see Pullicino Orlando on Super One on Friday night, talking about slow punctures and early elections. There was nobody there to tell him straight and plain, to his face: ‘Jeffrey, you’re the damned slow puncture. So let’s change the wheel, right? Resign your seat and let a new wheel without a slow puncture take your place. And while you’re about it, persuade that other slow puncture, Franco Debono, that we need a new wheel there too.’
The discussion was surreal. One of the men who has been a main cause of the hold-ups and disruption which his own government has suffered over the last four years, sitting there and talking as though the problem was caused by something that had absolutely nothing to do with him. Or better still, by something or someone that he was fighting against.
Why does the government have problems? Why is there pressure for calling an election now and not next year? One reason only: there is no accounting for what Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, whose second-wife-to-be is now back with the Labour Party along with his first, and Franco Debono will do next. They are loose cannon who cannot be relied upon to behave decently, or not to pull yet another self-serving stunt. Yet they are the ones who have the ruddy nerve to call for an election because of the uncertainty – when they are the very ones causing that uncertainty. Are they thinking straight, or is their self-delusional so very great?
Then there’s the Labour Party, hyping it up. Two years ago, they were talking about ‘incertezza’, with posters and banners to match. Now they’ve reworked the posters and banners and catch phrases with ‘instability’. We are told that there is much instability in this country. My teeth are on edge with irritation, as clearly, what they mean here is uncertainty. They are too careless with words − but we saw that in their misinterpretation of what Franco Debono meant about his voting plans − to bother.
An unstable country is one which the economy or rule of law (or both) has collapsed, leading to widespread riots, chaos and even civil war. Libya, for example, is an unstable country. A country in which there is uncertainty is something else altogether. It could be economic uncertainty, caused by the collapse of banks or the breakdown of financial institutions and the introduction of austerity programmes, or it could be another kind of uncertainty.
What we are seeing now in Malta is the other kind (economically, as we know through the facts and figures, we are fine). It is the uncertainty that always rears its head and stops people spending or taking decisions when there is a real risk that Labour will be elected to government. The Labour Party, like Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Franco Debono, completely lacks insight if it cannot see this, or if it can pick up the general feeling without working out what’s causing it.
Businesses and individuals do not draw in their horns and slow down or freeze into inaction because one Member of Parliament or another throws a giant wobbly. But when the giant wobbly leads to talk of early elections, and worse, signs that the Labour Party already feels itself victorious, then the uncertainty turns to a wary fear that Labour is going to be running the country.
The uncertainty, which is the direct result of fear that Labour will be in government sooner than expected, is entirely the Labour Party’s fault. Almost four years after the last general election, it has still not put forward any policies before the people. Nobody knows what Joseph Muscat’s party stands for. A vague assertion that it will be ‘safe for business’ (while still magically slashing water and electricity rates as oil prices escalate in the face of Iranian troubles) is not enough. Labour not only lacks the insight to see that it is the cause of all this uncertainty. It also lacks the brains to see that this is the direct consequence of telling electors to choose a closed box which will be opened for them only when the closed box is in government and cannot be dislodged for five years if the contents are a shock.
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