Those of us old enough to remember, will tell you that today’s topsy-turvy world of Simon Busuttil’s Nationalist Party has all the symptoms of George Borg Olivier’s Nationalist Party in 1976, during which it simply could not decide whether it was coming or going anywhere.
It is not a cosy situation for any political party to find itself in, though it must be admitted it is an experience no party can, at some time or another in the natural course of everyday politics, avoid. People’s aspirations everywhere change with every generation, leaders come and go and politicians have to be clever enough to accept change or face the consequences.
This is exactly what the PN after 1976 finally realised, and though the cloak-and-dagger method used to remove Borg Olivier on what has since been known as Malta’s “Night of the Long Knives” can hardly be described as politically ethical, it showed that the time had come for drastic decisions. At the time, the PN had been going round in circles, first hoping against hope the one-seat majority after the 1971 general election would not last (a Gozitan Labour MP had in fact been unsuccessfully tempted with instant good money to become a turncoat), then thinking the dispute with Britain over the military base would overwhelm the Mintoff administration, then splitting clumsily on the Republican constitution, then praying hopelessly that the civil marriage issue would lead to another politico-religious face-off, and then losing the 1976 general election heavily.
Nationalist Opposition MPs of the time knew they were fighting a losing battle, conscious that the nation had finally come out of its sixties stupor resulting from an overdose of corruption, lethargy and frustration. Is Busuttil’s PN caravan caught in the same stranglehold today? The resemblance can hardly be avoided.
At this moment in time, most people still cannot fathom what the “new” PN leader stands for. To be fair, he has inherited a party that had been for far too long in power and recharging its expired batteries is not a matter of a few months. Most of the protagonists in the party’s last government had ended up taking voters for granted, relying mostly on people’s fast-fading perception of Labour during its worst years in power. In the meantime, however, new generations were growing up, oblivious of the old political standpoints and highly receptive to the idea of a new way to do politics in a country where no one party can always be right and the other always wrong. It is why Joseph Muscat’s notion of “a movement” padding his revamped Labour Party eventually proved to be so catching.
The new Civil Union law has again caught the Opposition leader with his pants down. Fully aware of the divergence of opinion around him, and rather than asserting his view and pushing it the way every strong leader would in any organisation, Busuttil chose to go for no decision at all. This was, in many ways, even worse than 1974 when Borg Olivier, already resigned to a choreography of back-stabbings in store for him, had chosen to give his MPs a free vote on the Republic question. A decision is a decision, at least. No decision is a state of limbo, something not even its religious version is considered credible anymore.
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Alienation and division
It looks like that attempts to turn the civil union issue into yet another politico-religious showdown have happily been quickly watered down by down-to-earth clerics themselves who realise what harm such episodes in our history have inflicted on a divided people. Separation of Church and State is a reality in modern Maltese society and such attempts, as the Opposition leader’s not-so-subtle bemoaning the other day of Church inaction over the Civil Union Act, can only founder. There have been enough alienation and division in the past.
It seems, however, that all conservative minds actually tick the same, which is why a group of leading UK public figures – writers, scientists, broadcasters and academics – recently warned that comments made by Prime Minister David Cameron about the UK being a Christian country could have “negative consequences”. They objected to Cameron’s assertion in a country “where most people do not describe themselves as Christian”.
In their open letter, they said Cameron’s comments do not reflect the country as it is today – a plural society with citizens with a range of perspectives and a largely non-religious society. To constantly claim otherwise fosters alienation and division in society. They showed their preoccupation at the fact that politicians have been speaking of the country as ‘a Christian country’ with increasing frequency in the last few years, insisting that not only is this inaccurate, but also a wrong thing to do at a time when it needs to be building a strong shared identity in an increasingly plural and non-religious society.
Backtrack to our local scenario, and you will find we too have politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, who unfortunately still insist on giving a religious label to the State. The nation may have its religion, but the State certainly has not. It is why we still have a religious misnomer in our Constitution, no doubt a compromise reached in the 1974 negotiations. Is it still needed? Should it be there in a 21st century Malta that rightly recognises and allows civil marriage, divorce and civil unions?
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Safekeepers stay away
A workshop was recently held in Malta, on the initiative of the Library Information and Archive Sciences Department of the University of Malta, for professionals, volunteers and personal collectors who want state-of-the-art knowledge on the digital lifecycle of their collections. This of course included broadcasters, librarians and archivists taking care of audio and moving image collections, as well as policymakers and students interested in the domain.
It was expressly announced that the workshop was designed to meet the current needs in Malta and was backed by an international team of resource persons led by the highly motivating force of Milena Dobreva, head of the Department of Library Information and Archive Sciences. The participants included Daniel Teruggi (INA, Paris), Andy O’Dwyer (BBC R&D, London); Richard Wright (Preservation Guide, London, ex-BBC), Toni Sant (University of Hull), Andrew Alamango (University of Malta), Andrew Pace (University of Manchester), and Steve Borg (University of Hull).
Having managed the archives department in my last years at PBS, I can vouch for the many audio-visual treasures that still need discovering and saving there. We did hit on a few during the short EU-funded CapMed project undertaken with partners from a majority of Mediterranean television stations, but so much has sadly been lost over the years to chemical reaction, theft and utter neglect. Even worse, private TV producers have built their own archives with material taken officially and unofficially from PBS archives as if they were their own, not the nation’s.
PBS is the safekeeper of the best chunk of our national audio-visual heritage and as such is responsible for its upkeep by making sure the haemorrhage is stemmed and the process of restoration, digitisation, cataloguing and accessibility is seriously maintained before it really is too late and many of these treasures are lost – forever.
Incredibly, it seems no one was officially appointed by PBS to take part or at least attend the workshop. I know they were alerted to both its importance and automatic invitation to it. Whose absurd decision was it to stay away?