Government by Super One
I think I’ve worked out why things haven’t been going too well for Labour, and they’ve ended up painted into several consecutive corners. The key decision-makers in the party are ex Super One or Maltastar hacks, like the big boss himself, Joseph Muscat, and his sidekick Kurt Farrugia, or still heavily involved in the Labour media machine, like Evarist Bartolo. Or they have been completely sucked into the netherworld of Facebook announcements, like Anglu Farrugia and Luciano Busuttil.
This means that rather than thinking strategically and mapping out contingency plans for the various possible consequences of what they say and do, or even working out why they should do something and whether their eyes are still on the ball, they think in terms of tonight’s headlines. I’ve noticed that their actions appear to have been conceived with a view to having a high-impact news item for that night and several subsequent nights, but with no solid aim beyond that.
Worse still, the desire for what they think is a good news item sometimes overwhelms what I hope are their better political instincts and ends up getting them into messes, extrication from which is rather difficult. Real politicians don’t think like party media-machine hacks and propagandists. Their job is different. They have to think long term, map out a strategic course of action and repeatedly ask themselves questions like, “If we do X, will the consequences be Y, Z or W, and in all three scenarios, where do we go from there?” and “Will doing this help us achieve our aim of getting to X? Will it make things worse, or will it be irrelevant and not worth the effort?” or “Doing X might appear to damage our opponents, but will it rebound and damage us more?” and even “Will we have a Plan B if Plan A goes haywire?”
From where I’m sitting, it looks like nobody in the Labour Party is asking these questions or considering the myriad possible consequences of their actions and statements. They’re like a bunch of Super One hacks – well, they were a bunch of Super One hacks – getting all excited because they’ve set somebody up for a fantastic attack story on the evening news. But the Super One hacks can move on to a new story the next day, and the ex Super One hacks who are now the Labour leader and his sidekicks are stuck with the fall-out of what they do.
Take the stupidity of this Richard Cachia Caruana/Partnership for Peace motion, for instance. It is quite obvious that nobody in the Labour Party was actually thinking about the various ramifications or where it might lead them (which is, right now, up the proverbial creek). It has resurrected the Chinese Cultural Revolution overtones for which the Labour Party of the past was renowned: persecuting by the heaviest means possible individuals who are not to the Labour Party’s liking. Public servants, bureaucrats and ambassadors do not make policy or take political decisions. Their bosses do that, and the buck stops with them. So if you persecute the underling rather than the boss, you wind up coming across as somebody who trained at Mao Tse Tung’s feet – which is, considering the names and ideological preferences of some of the party dinosaurs, not entirely inaccurate.
Nobody in the Labour Party seemed to have bothered to work out how their actions are perceived, whether or not they now come across as desperate. This was a case in point. Franco Debono begins foaming at the mouth about Cachia Caruana, and the barely coherent Luciano Busuttil and rabidly anti-PfP (he was the man who pulled us out) George Vella decide that now would be a great time to suddenly remember something they read in a Wikileaked cable almost a year ago. Seizing the day with Debono’s agitation, they bring a motion before parliament and then panic because what at first seemed like a smart move now looks stupid, the ftira is cooling and they don’t quite know how to deal with the mess they’ve made.
Then today Evarist Bartolo, the man who would be our education minister if our collective common-sense suffers a major lapse, went on radio to say that people are frightened of Richard Cachia Caruana because he uses the secret service against them. You have to be nuts to say that about anyone – life is not a John Le Carre novel. So how much more nuts do you have to be to say something like that when you were once minister of education, are trying your damnedest to become minister of education again, and are on radio to represent the government-in-waiting? That sort of thing is not just a Wayne’s World fantasy. It is a major libel. But the Labour Party has gone so far down the spout that its politicians are now behaving as though they’re working in the Super One news room with Charlon Gouder and the bouncy mayor of Qormi.
If this is the way the Labour Party is taking its decisions now, a few months away from being in government, then it follows that this is how it will be taking its decisions still when those months have flown past. We shall have Joseph, Kurt and Evarist deciding what to do about any possible fall-out for Malta in the Greek drachma mess based on what tonight’s headline will sound like.
What scares me most is that I know for a fact – because this is basic human psychology – that people who cannot map out simple strategies and risk assessments and contingency and consequences even for something as straightforward as whether to bring a motion before parliament or not will, in a few months’ time, be mapping out what should be major strategies for Malta in the eurozone, for education, for health, and for economic policy.
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com