Usually these days would see a flurry of activities on the Floriana Granaries as different party sectors set up their stalls while party supporters mill around and attend the various activities that lead up to Independence Day and the mass meeting.

Instead this time there’s nothing. The party is dead. Maybe it has long been dead but nobody noticed. This time it’s clear and certifiable.

There is a party structure of sorts and the remaining party leader still has the dead cat bounce and sometimes issues statements that nobody reads.

Otherwise the pretty ladies who found themselves elected to Parliament flounce around lost for ideas and words, left waiting for Parliament to reconvene and maybe give them back an ounce of respect they think they are owed.

The party is dead, unwept, unsung and already forgotten. Its place in the national conversation and debate has been taken over by the various NGOs and individuals.

There was a time when the print media reigned supreme but today this era is over and an explosion of blogs has taken its place. The print media could be kept under control by the libel laws, which are still there, but the blogs, the comment spaces on websites and elsewhere are impossible to monitor and control. Daphne kept trying till the very end to monitor and check all that people wrote on her blog, even to the point of correcting their grammar, but after her nobody seems doing that.

People on such occasions as Independence Day remember that once there was such a thing as the Nationalist Party which in its lifetime brought to the nation such historic steps as Independence, membership of the European Union and the Euro plus a tradition of serious and selfless administration so lacking today.

And people ask themselves if such a comatose party on life support could ever regain vitality or should we look around for something else?  

Now if there was a time when the real Nationalist Party was needed considering the corruption-prone gang at the top today this is now. But the party is missing in (non-) action with a party leader absent for most of the summer (the usual bad whisperers said he was on a long caravan tour, maybe to emulate his counterpart’s travels with his yacht to Ibiza and the environs). With a television station that should have started to make money (the party leader’s commitment) already but which seems engrossed in giving favourites choice programmes.

The party has no policy that sets it apart from the party in government which keeps running circles around it, from gays to other social issues, dipping its toes in the abortion debate and refusing to condemn hunting, nor to condemn the vast environmental depredations occasioned by the Labour (mal-) administration.

People at ground level have a variety of concerns – from the high cost of living to immigration – but the party in its wisdom skirts round them all and leaves the people without succour and support.

The entire world is missing the English Queen who has died after a reign of 70 years. Now, as happens to all of us, she has died and will be buried tomorrow. The Nationalist Party, I’m saying, has likewise died and must be buried before a substitute can be found.

 

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