You were not elected in 1987, but you were later that year co-opted to Parliament following the death of MP Joseph Sciberras. In that first legislature as an MP, you played a low profile. But had you already set your sights on the party leadership? Were you anticipating a second successive electoral defeat (in 1992) which would have opened the way for you to the Labour Party leadership?

First of all, during this period, I had personal problems about which I needed some time to adapt. They were compounded by financial difficulties. On becoming MLP president (in 1984) I had been eased out (if that is the right phrase) of the chairmanship of the Bortex company. Naturally with the change of government I resigned from government assignments. When the University came under the management of Peter Serracino Inglott my appointment as part-time lecturer in administration there was cancelled.

So as of 1988, I depended on the parliamentary allowance of an MP, which was then less than basic, and remuneration that really amounted to pocket money from the Economist Intelligence Unit for which I served as Malta correspondent. Needing to learn the parliamentary ropes, I concentrated as a backbencher initially on the new government’s financial and development policies (in tandem with Lino Spiteri) and the “mechanics” of its social policies.

The MLP statute barred an MP from being p resident of the party. The national executive did discuss changing the rules but the proposal was shot down basically on Mintoff’s say so.

In 1989, the national executive gave Leo Brincat and me the task of reviewing Labour’s EU approach and drawing up a new draft policy, which we did over a number of months. Eventually published in book form, our conclusions were discussed extensively at the level of party delegates and of the national executive and approved by the party’s general conference. Rather late in the day, this process then gave rise to a series of other policy updates.

Round about this time, I reached an agreement with Jimmy Magro, the new MLP secretary general whom I knew from a long time back, for the party to finance a quarterly “ideas” magazine called Society which I would edit and run in which contributors would discuss policy issues from a left-wing perspective. This entailed much backroom work but was worthwhile for the new perspectives it brought to the surface.

On another front, with friends and colleagues of the Labour Party’s information department, we launched the Mediterranean Nights festival at the Argotti Gardens, which every late summer put up musicals and other entertainment events based on popular culture, but not only. They were extremely successful and still, I believe, remain a unique cultural attraction for those times.

However, my personal priority then – accounting in part for what you call a low profile – became that of getting re-elected, which was going to be a tough job. Work done for a party hardly counts in electoral terms. I spent the best part of two years, if not more, doing house visits, day in day out in the Birkirkara (eighth) district – in those years dominated by the PN – but also in the first district, mainly Valletta and Paola. I can claim to have done practically all houses in the eighth, without skipping any home (though of course not all householders were available or opened at my knock, but all would have been pre-advised of my visit by mail). I did all this by myself including the follow-ups that at times were needed as parliamentary questions or enquiries with government offices. It was very time-consuming, very hard work but deeply rewarding in terms of understanding people in their personal lives, frame problems and expectations. The experience left me with a deep belief in the merits of house visits as an outstanding political tool… but its limits need also to be understood.

You ask whether I anticipated a second Labour defeat. To be honest, I disliked some aspects of how Labour-approaches had developed over the years: the stand-off over the Ark Royal arrival (though again I also believed that if Labour declared it did not want the Ark Royal to enter harbour for constitutional reasons, it could not then back down); the incomprehensible attitude towards the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Malta; the stand over the Delimara power station project; the civil resistance declared by Labour following the appointment of Ċensu Tabone as President, which I believed would lead to a dead-end. These factors were serving to once again harden KMB’s and the party’s image, to no good purpose.

However, I still believed that Labour stood in with a chance of winning the next election. While doing my rounds from house to house, I was impressed by the number of people I met who would claim to be shifting their vote to Labour in the next election. Over the months I kept notes of what I had found at each household I visited and those saying so amounted to close to 1.5 to 2% of my meetings, hardly mind bending, but if extrapolated over the electorate, enough to swing victory back to Labour.

It was of course an illusion. Even assuming that all those one visits tell you the truth and stand by their verdict, the likelihood is that those – much more numerous – who will be swinging against your party will not tell you this or even see you. This limit on the usefulness of house visits has to be kept in mind.

Ironically at the time, Labour had for the first time its own batch of opinion poll results, which were ignored or misunderstood. They had been done by my brother (I did not know about this) and clearly signalled a Labour defeat.

So my priority in the years to 1992 was political survival. I did survive, by the skin of my teeth.

 

Alfred Sant's official photo as a Labour Party candidate for the 1987 general election

In the last years of the 1980s, the country had started to change, from a controlled economy to one that is liberalised. There was huge government investment in infrastructure and telecommunications. We saw new sectors opening up, such as financial services. Foreign policy changed too, and a first step was made when Malta applied to join the EU in 1990 (the battle for membership was to come years later). How did you look at that transformation?

The economy became liberalised only to the extent that the import system reverted to what it had been before the Labour administrations introduced the policies of import substitution and bulk buying, which of course made a big change to consumption patterns. It also generated a feel-good-factor that the government was assiduous in promoting (an approach that has remained the hallmark of all administrations since then, inducing them to evade all reforms that smacked of pain). However certain forms of import controls were retained, or better, many were transformed to high levies to placate the European Commission. The latter still claimed that Malta was in breach of its longstanding commitment under the moribund but still effective EEC-Malta association agreement of 1970 to move towards a customs union with the EU.

Yet already by 1985, as KMB reined in the policies he inherited, private consumption in the economy had begun to grow again. As of that year, tourism started to pick up and continued to improve right through the years of the first Fenech Adami administration.

However in European eyes, relaxation of import controls was hardly liberalisation as I think, the Fenech Adami Cabinet failed to realize, or if it did, believed it could still get credibility as a liberalising government. Hidden and not so hidden subsidies in the economy – which actually a small island economy really needs to stay on its feet, and which rightly were retained in those years – were not the stuff of liberalisation.

You mention the “huge government investment in infrastructure and telecommunications” carried out during those years. Where was it? Most outlays had been programmed under the KMB administration and had been rather stupidly kept on the shelf till it was too late.

Then, I remember how every year, up to 1991, in the budget debate on the Finance Minister’s remit, I would list what a year previously, the then Finance minister, George Bonello Dupuis – whom on a personal basis, I rather liked – had projected as investment outlays for the coming year, and what he reported to have spent. The latter would be consistently well under the previous year’s projections while recurrent expenditures would have overshot in a big way. Bonello Dupuis would call out in his jovial way that I was up to the same tricks to just roll out such figures, but it was he who was playing tricks, confident in the idea that nobody was noticing or caring about the growing imbalance between capital and recurrent commitments. Or that the impressive investments he had announced the previous year had not been done or even started.

The truth was that the PN government was spending the reserve funds accumulated under Mintoff’s austerity programmes and more to accommodate its feel good strategies. When the reserve funds were exhausted, deficit spending was fed by new government borrowing. The whole “money no problem” approach contrasted with the bleak outlook adopted by the Labour government in previous years and naturally was popular.

Meanwhile on the social front, Louis Galea spearheaded a series of social help measures, cleverly micro targeted to specific categories of the population. I monitored each and every one as they were announced and the file that I kept on them soon doubled and tripled in size. All this was underpinned by clientelistic networks operated in the different government ministries that put to shame, with their byzantine sophistication, the clumsy and in your face attitudes that the clientelistic modus operandi had evolved into by today’s date (in the year of grace 2024).

Moreover, I beg to differ with your assessment of the opening towards financial services achieved by the end of the 1980s. Though it did open up a useful, new sector within which our economy could grow, it served to provide a base for activities within which the traditional elite could prosper. Value added was created for the local economy by the provision for monied external corporate and personal entities of a haven within which they could “reorganise” internationally their financial affairs, mainly (though we like to pretend otherwise) for purposes of tax avoidance/evasion and what is now called “aggressive tax planning”. Meanwhile, technical and managerial competences got devalued.

Started as an “offshore” system before 1990, had so-called financial services been promoted as a secondary and profitable line of activity, they would not have been problematic. Instead, they were positioned to become (though still very footloose) a leading motor of the Maltese economy, at the expense of other sectors whose value added, with proper monitoring would have become more deep-rooted.

 

Alfred Sant takes the oath of office as Opposition Leader from then President Censu Tabone in 1992

 

In 1992, the Labour Party lost the election, and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici resigned the leadership. You contested the post, and you were elected. Every internal election leaves scars, and in this case there was some controversy about a letter that had been sent to delegates before the election. The party at the time was also in disarray and with a low morale after losing the popular vote for three elections in a row. How did you deal with these situations?

With party delegates who were the voters in the leadership election, I ran on a ticket that made it clear the party needed to be modernised and my approach would be to get that done. The headquarters “buried” at the Macina under Senglea would be brought somewhere else and party structures would be revitalised. I had credibility in this from my years as president.

Moreover, I believed that the party needed to reconnect with its electoral base. The party radio, which had been opened a few weeks prior to the election and was run as a joint venture with a private company, was taken over. Its role was converted to that of a family station positioned to compete head on with the stations of the national broadcaster and the Church, rather than with that of the PN, which had for some obscure reason decided to define its station as one mainly for young people.

When eventually we moved to acquire the former Radio City theatre and convert it into the heaquarters, we needed to service huge capital requirements. A nation-wide door-to-door collection effort was organised at which all party officials, from the members of the leadership to MPs to local officials participated. Ably-organised by Manwel Cuschieri, apart from getting the funds in, this widespread exercise served to get the party to meet people outside the electoral frame and reconnect with them. Instructions were given as what to say and how to say it. The exercise made a huge impact on the grass roots.

In parallel, the MLP printing press was dismantled and the party weekly Il-Ħelsien ceased publication. As president back in 1986, I had been instrumental in their launching but they were no longer fit for purpose. A new tabloid Sunday KullĦadd was launched, printed at Allied Newspapers. For some, this was a bitter pill to swallow but it made economic sense. Then, the idea of launching a TV station was proposed and implemented over a two-year period, necessitating the mobilisation of further human and financial resources, which needed to be found. Then secretary general Jimmy Magro was a pivotal figure in these projects.

Meanwhile, in the parliamentary group formal positions were assigned to all MPs to cover specific policy areas and be spokespersons for them. Previously, the practice in the party had been to assign speaking roles in a loose informal way on the grounds that MPs should not feel entitled to automatically become ministers for the issues on which they had been speaking when in Opposition.

This time round, spokespersons and main spokespersons (the name of shadow ministers was purposely not used) were encouraged to maintain contacts with NGOs, experts and activists in the areas which they covered and to prepare in-depth policy updates for discussion within the party. The preparation for these reviews soon acquired its own momentum, becoming a staple of the party’s national executive and general conference agendas.

All this generated a lot of work that occupied many party officials and activists. That made for a greater sense of participation all round and allowed less opportunity for grumbling and dissent. I insisted on a full involvement of all concerned independently of who they had canvassed or voted for in the leadership contests and as far as I knew, that was done. Even so, a few withdrew from party affairs but sometimes that is unavoidable in life. Actually a wide group of talented people, many young, assembled to take part in the activities being generated and did sterling work.

One criticism we faced in the early stages, as the impact of projects was still not visible, was that the party had become dormant. Old timers missed the froth and bustle of street protests and demonstrations. I had studied the tactics followed by Dr Fenech Adami and his team and understood that to maintain momentum in Opposition in those days, street mobilisation was also important on salient issues. But first we needed to build for ourselves a positive, constructive image which we did, and which beyond image, I wanted it to be the reality as well.

Regarding the anonymous letter sent to the party’s Vigilance Board about Lino Spiteri on the eve of the voting for the leadership, I learnt about it just before the Labour Party conference launched the vote. The Vigilance Board had been set up in 1988, with draconian powers to weed out unacceptable behaviour and censure those responsible. Lino raised it from the floor and asked to be given the right to explain what had happened. The anonymous letter had made allegations about his integrity; the Board had decided that it would accept his denial of the allegations and not interfere in the leadership election.

At first I thought the whole affair would work to Lino’s advantage since many delegates, myself included, would be/were disgusted with the tactic that had been attempted to dirty his name and image just on the eve of the election. He felt differently about the matter and was sore about it and about the role that the Vigilance Board had played.

We met face to face shortly after the final conference vote had been decided in my favour and insisted there had to be changes in how the Vigilance Board operated. I had no problem to promise reforms in the structure of the Board since, I too had felt, right from its inception that it functioned too much like an unaccountable Star Chamber. In the aftermath I consulted Spiteri thoroughly and followed his suggestions as we introduced an appeal mechanism on top of the Vigilance Board and found nominees to renew the membership of both committees.

 

In the first three parts of the interview, Alfred Sant spoke about his time as president of the Malta Labour Party between 1984 and 1988.

Part 1: The 1981 election and the transition from Mintoff to KMB

Part 2: The 1980s’ bulk-buying system and public sector employment

Part 3: The Church schools battle and the 1987 constitutional amendments

Next week: The new headquarters, the first local council elections and the run-up to the electoral victory of 1996