After they removed the flag and the hymn, changed around the name, they have now dismantled what was left of the Malta Labour Party.

The MLP is no more. Instead, we have a chimerical invention called the Moviment which is not a party, has no structure, and is directly linked to the man at the top, whose every command is law, and has no checks and balances as any party should have.

The party, PL, is still there, somehow. It still has its structures, its kazini, its committees, the MPs who represent it.

But the men at the top – we have to speak of men in the plural now, as it’s a diarchy – do not represent a lifestyle the grass roots can identify with. The ordinary grass roots, workers, members of the Partit tal-Haddiema do not rent their cars to the State. They don’t get their wives employed by the State for an astronomical salary. They don’t dabble in trusts or such financial vehicles.

One does expect the party leaders to share the lifestyle of their followers but the last one who did that was Alfred Sant, before him Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and before him Paul Boffa. Dom Mintoff had his own lifestyle but made up for it by his tremendous fights against the British, against the Church…

The new diarchy does not share the lifestyle. Even if both come from middle-class families, their present lifestyles are far above that of the haddiema.

There is some sense of all this among the grass roots but they still do not get it. They have very sporadic, and hurtful, clashes with the tax people but they have no idea of succession planning, tax evasion, or rather tax planning. For them, Panama is famous for its canal, not for its relaxed attitude to tax matters.

It may seem that the concerns of the haddiema are still the focus of the PL and its government, but I have my doubts. One important and vital part of the electoral appeal spoke of cutting n electricity rates and that indeed has been done. But that was when oil was still around $100 a barrel. It has now come down to the $20s but the rates haven’t.

The government makes a lot of fuss about the increase in jobs, and this is true. But what about the other side of the coin – the government’s relentless push to bring the number of registered unemployed down?

The reports I am hearing is that this is being done in a very draconian way and there have been some news reports of the government offloading the registered unemployed on to a training scheme, which is not a bad idea, as long as it is not just an exercise to get the number down.

As for the rest of the haddiema, those in employment, this government, like its predecessor, has kept wage rises under control. Until a few years ago, Malta and Germany had the dubious honour of registering the lowest wage increases in Europe.

Minister Edward Scicluna himself has said the government avoided seeing the economy heating up by allowing foreigners in. In other words, the incoming foreigners took the heat off pressure for wage rises. Now one would expect this of a centre-right government, but which other centre-left government in Europe boasts about this?

The government keeps making the right noises when it speaks of eradicating the prekarjat (people with fixed term contracts, etc). But that’s not what is happening, I gather. The prekarjat is everywhere. In a way it’s a sign of the times not just in Malta but everywhere in Europe – which makes this government’s claim it is tackling it just empty words.

This government also claims it is pro-business. All Socialist governments keep saying that but I wonder what the haddiem and his family think of all this hobnobbing with constructors, developers, employers and businessmen. The government keeps trying to straddle the divide but which side of the fence will it fall when the chips are down?

One hears an awful lot of complaints from the Labour grass roots that they have been overlooked in this government’s recruiting. I strongly disagree with this for I hold (nobody else seems to agree with me) that employment should be on merit, not on party affiliation. Nor do I agree with mass sackings every time there is a change of government. There have been many, many people taken on in positions of trust, but many people intimately connected with the previous government seem to have found comfortable jobs with the government or its agencies for themselves.

What I know for sure is that the amount of complaints on promotions under the old regime is still outstanding, and to this one must add the complaints by people as regards the new regime.

This is all music to the Opposition’s ears. In fact, it was the main theme in Simon Busuttil’s speech in Parliament last week when he compared the Konrad Mizzi affair to the plight of the haddiema on a miserly minimum wage.

This was a new direction for the Opposition and the polls seem to bear it out, at least as regards Labour voters deciding to abstain if not downright vote PN (hardly the case, I would think – Labour supporters are more tribal-conscious than PN, see the Konrad vote).

But one speech is hardly a policy move. The PN’s track record in government is still fresh with its neo-Liberal approach. And the barunijiet, who so flourish today, saw their beginnings under the PN. In this, Labour is lamely trying to imitate the PN without the controls.

However, the origins of the PN were not that of a Liberal party: on the contrary it had strong populist roots and its main figures died poor, like il-Gross and others. Until they were snuffed out by the neo-liberals in the Fenech Adami – Gonzi years, there were still many politicians who had come from the small business sector and who had no contact with big business. The cohabitation between them, as I recall, was quite strained.

The polls do not show a strong identifiable trend line so far and this is a new scenario anyway.

To break into Labour strongholds like Cottonera will take rather more than one speech to needle the Prime Minister. But after all, the afore-mentioned il-Gross was quite popular in his time in Cottonera.

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