In the recent Debono debacle, the Labour party lost a golden opportunity. With only at most a year to go before the next general election, they failed to grasp an opportunity that had landed on their lap. This was to show the nation that they were capable of demonstrating their true mettle in statesmanship. It has long been established in political circles that one does not win an election by being partisan. One’s party votes are never enough to go it alone. One always needs uncommitted votes and those of the disgruntled members of other parties. The agenda must therefore always be national, not partisan.

With only a year to go before an election, I had expected Labour to play their cards more wisely. I expected them to show that they are ready to lead the nation. Instead, by failing to show that they cared for the nation, they showed that they were ready to lead it in a partisan manner and this is the worse message they could have put across.

There were several routes that could have been followed, even offering to support the government until the end of its term, if they so wished. However, putting forward a no-confidence vote was not their best option, as it gave the impression that they were hungry for power. Hungry for power for power’s own sake, that is. This is not what people want at the moment. With a democratically-elected government with a clear mandate to lead for five years, with the world economic situation being what it is, people want parties to exhibit statesmanship. People want to see a mature Labour Party return to talks to improve the Constitution. People want to see Labour honouring its mandate by respecting the government’s constraints and providing pairing agreements to allow government ministers and MPs to do the work they were elected to do. People can now see through the excuses, but excuses do not provide a shield for a lack of statesmanship.

A Gozitan acquaintance of mine, who is not completely literate or enamoured of any particular party – as he sees them all as an intrusion into his own personal finances and economics – once described the difference between the two parties and the reason he votes PN, in a most eloquent way. He said that if one has a bag of birdseed (skalora) both the PN and the PL end up emptying a good proportion of it. However he said, the PL will take a knife and slash it open, emptying it on the pavement in an angry manner, while the PN will peck at it slowly like a bird and smile, making you feel good all the way. The moral of the story is that the PL is not statesmanlike and lacks a savoir faire. The expression he used in Maltese is “mhumiex fini bizzejjed” – they are not sensitive enough to encompass national sensitivities. I think that recent events confirm that this wise man is correct. People sense that the PL lacks the proper sensitivity to lead the country on a national scale!

On a different note, something else of interest that I read this week was a letter from Mr Lino Spiteri in which he passed judgement on the 1981-1987 years of government, in a very incomplete way, to say the least. Respect him though I may, he is of course not well placed to best make this judgement as he was a Cabinet Minister during those years. That he is accepting that those years constituted a form of immoral government is a step forward, but his article did not do justice to the realities of the time. He has still to explain to the nation why most of us had to pay a substantial Lm50 (€115) extra, above the price of the television at the time, to obtain a colour TV and where this money went. Why was a monopoly instituted? His judgement on the gerrymandering that led to the perverse 1981 general election is also not as benign as he puts it. The effort to gerrymander was malignant and it was malignantly done to the point of producing a very perverse result. That it did not repeat itself in the 1987 election was only due to the constitutional changes carried out on the eve of that election. I have not started on the institutionalised violence. History cannot be undone and I suggest that we leave historians to write about what actually happened in a constructive and unpartisan manner. The MLP of the time was good at rewriting history and maybe it would be better to close that chapter altogether now.

I was invited by the Malta-China Friendship Society to attend an exhibition on the anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Malta and China to be held at the PL’s general headquarters in Hamrun. Now I respect China and its people greatly for their contribution to culture and the world economy, among other things, but I hardly think that that was the best place to set up such an exhibition celebrating the friendship between two peoples. I wrote to the President of this organisation, Mr Reno Calleja, to complain about this. He courteously replied that he was asked to set up this exhibition by the PL (International Office?) and that he would set it up wherever anybody asked him to – even in a PN club. The point is, however, that where foreign matters are concerned, I would have expected a better, more statesmanlike, judgement. Again is this a case of insensitivity to the necessities of today’s politics? Proper political sensitivity today, seems to be the name of the game.