Mintoff was neither the renegade portrayed by the Anglophile Strickland press, nor was he the cursed anti-clerical maverick who, in alliance with Satan, gave so many a sleepless night to Michael Gonzi. Neither has he made sainthood on his death on 20 August at the venerable age of 96.
However, he is indeed partly responsible for the present sorry state of our democracy. Without doubt, as a seasoned campaigner he served Malta to the best of his ability when he took office in 1971 and negotiated the hard deal for the British Armed Forces’ withdrawal by 31 March 1979. He thus also created really big money to fund the infrastructural work needed at the time. No doubt he was held in high esteem within Socialist International, as well as with leaders of the non-allied group.
On the home front, I would have expected him to do better. He could have worked miracles in improving not only the material conditions of his grass roots but also their general level of education* and discipline. Seen from the outside, they looked a very sorry lot, more akin to a pure distillate of crude gall and possession by the evil spirit of green envy. They seemed fed on third-rate information and only a handful of adherents knew or bothered to be informed about the basic tenets of socialism which, after all, should have been the core and driving force of the movement.
He was ill advised over the establishment of the republic. He would have done better had he gone full throttle adapting real fundamental changes on the French model of a presidential republic with an upper house (senate), rather than substituting, in the Constitution forced on Borg Olivier by the British, the term “Governor General” for “President”, which carried prestige but no power.
He was also ill advised in the adoption of the British model (pound/lira) when it came to decimalisation which, despite all good intentions, effectively saw widespread domestic inflation in the range of 200 per cent in 30 months. This was a disastrous situation that could have been easily avoided, had he gone for the Maltese ‘dollar’, with 100 pence of the day (100d) – that is to say M$2.4 to the £/Lm. This made very good sense as, at the time, domestic affairs were still reckoned in pence!
There are innumerable other instances which could have turned out better but didn’t; these might be the subject of some other writing. Today’s remarks deal with the wisdom of a past leader to realise it is time to move on and make space for fresh blood – for everybody’s benefit, including his own.
When the pendulum swings to the right and then, as the result of some unprecedented machination, swings that little bit further to the right, it is in the natural order of things – as any good clockmaker will tell you – that it will naturally tend to go to the left with just as equal violence and force.
The Nationalists gained from the Church’s controversial intervention in the 1962 elections. In 1966 they tried to increase their lead by fiddling with the electoral boundaries and arranging for new housing estates to be peopled by ‘safe’ imports, and they were generally successful in this. At the time, emigration among Labour’s supporters was still running high, and this factor undoubtedly affected adversely the results obtained by Labour. The Nationalists found it expedient to increase their legislature to a five-year term! They also tried the same trick once again with electoral boundaries but failed, as the tide was clearly against them!
Mintoff enters the scene as a mature politician. Under his leadership, the country made a remarkable recovery. He was not to be outdone in the 1976 election, and he repaid his opponents with interest. He did it again in 1981, but with a hitch. According to the Constitution of the time, he had a parliamentary majority but less than 50 per cent of the valid votes cast! For this stupendous outcome, special thanks must go to the great legal brains that spent so many hours/days/months drafting it, probably while feasting.
Fenech Adami takes the stage with a specific programme and policy. He integrates most, if not all, the voices of dissent and presents himself as the man of the moment. Labour refuses to realise the gravity of the situation. We are all too aware of how things went after May 1987 and how, after the battle was lost, old Labour was in total disarray.
As if this wasn’t disaster enough in itself; Labour had to score yet another own-goal when it simply stood there (it seemed like an eternity to me) in the corner, sulking rather than putting everything behind them and grooming a new leader with a bag of really fresh tricks. This amply explains why we have had to make do with the same soup, now quite cold and insipid, for the past 300 months!
We all have to gain from the adoption of a cultural mentality in respect of our leaders that will make resignation-on-failure-to-deliver the more honourable option.
Thank God things have changed, and I honestly trust that our mind has kept up with the pace!
Ramon Borg-Bartolo
Sliema
*I take the term to mean the full realisation of the person and not the restricted meaning applied to the term today, generally referring to the academic standard