Roamer's column

We have been hearing from Dr Sant about the paradise on earth that Malta will be under his partnership thing, the hell on earth that membership will create. As everybody has remarked, what the Labour Party is trying to peddle is a jejune wish-list.

Reason 35 for joining the EU: partnership is, as the EU ambassador to Malta put it, "not based on reality". Where the government has negotiated a comprehensive package with 77 special arrangements and derogations (even these were sarcastically referred to by Dr Sant's deputy as "77 bitter pills we have to swallow") the Opposition presents no tangible package at all. Reason 36. For that we will have to wait oh, another five, six, ten years. Dr Sant is "relaxed" about this. Bully for him. For the country it means another period of uncertainty, a death-knell for investment. Reasons 37 and 38.

Dr Sant has in mind partnerships with everyone. This promiscuity requires separate negotiations with dozens of countries. The EU has already carried them out. Malta, as an integral member of the EU, will automatically benefit from this. We will have a ready-made partnership with the United States, Russia and China that Dr Sant still has to work out. Reason 39.

It is now crucial for the Nationalist Party campaign to home in exclusively on the sectoral vote. There are the farming and fishing communities to keep on board. There are the self-employed, now formally encouraged to vote Yes by the in-favour resolution of the GRTU, which joins the procession of bodies, institutes, authorities, unions, associations, federations, economists, experts and the report-makers commissioned by the GWU.

There are the workers in those firms and industries that have been plucked out of the air by Dr Sant to instil in their employees a sense of fear about a future that is planned, a future that is known, a future that has been mapped out, a future in which those enterprises have invested, and are investing, heavily, a future that these enterprises welcome. Reason 40. Why any worker should be encouraged to worry about the loss of their job when, in the same breath Dr Sant warns of hordes of Europeans hell-bent on seeking work in Malta, is unfathomable. Each of the former should be sent 101 one-line reasons for voting Yes.

The future is now

Malta has waited 32 years for it. On Saturday it is likely that the Yes vote will carry the day handsomely and so it should, but wise counsel demands prudence in optimism. There still remain pockets that could, and should, be persuaded to vote in favour.

Too much good and solid work has gone into the membership enterprise during the past three years for it to fail and precious little in what voters are being offered by Dr Sant for his failed Switzerland-in-the-Med to succeed. Reason 41. The country has prepared itself and will continue to prepare itself so that by May the First, 2004 Malta will take its rightful place in a continent unencumbered by war, or the potential for war, within it. Reason 42.

No doubt, even as they enter the polling both to cast the most important vote in their life, there will still be moaners going on about roads that are lousy, about this or that minister who has not shaped up, about the government getting this right and that wrong. On Saturday it is not about that. At this remarkable point in the country's history nothing compares with the challenge that lies before us. In a sense, it beggars belief that a little island, all of 315 sq km, has kept its appointment with a future that has arrived. Reason 43.

For this, the government generally deserves praise and within the government the prime minister, the foreign minister, Dr Joe Borg, and his ministry, Richard Cachia Caruana, the chief negotiator, and his team, our man in Brussels, Victor Camilleri, the relevant civil service component and all those who applied themselves with such assiduity to accomplish what has been achieved.

With an Opposition that could hear but would not hear, participate but would not take part, contribute but would not lift a finger; with the council of the General Workers Union that is actually split right down the middle over the union's response to membership; with the campaign against membership embracing the lie and the half-truth more easily than the truth - more merit to the government's steadfastness. Reason 44.

And as if those approaches were not enough, how cynical that on an issue as fundamental to the future of Malta as membership of the EU the combined intellectual might of the Labour Party concluded that those against membership should show this by voting No, by not voting at all, or by invalidating their vote; what political bankruptcy; what contempt for a process it has taken the West centuries to refine so that every man and woman of age could agree or disagree with its government and do so with the power that a vote has over the political establishment in government or in opposition. Reason 45.

Banishing uncertainty

Between 1995 and 1998, when VAT was introduced over Labour's live body and removed by Dr Sant (in 1997), a general sense of uncertainty prevailed. The commercial, industrial and services communities lived on their nerves and wits. With the application, in 1990, to join the EU frozen by the Labour government in 1996, the same communities lived through a surreal experience rarely given to a country that just wished to get on with life.

A return to power of the Nationalist Party in 1998 reintroduced VAT, revitalised the application and settled those jitters. Reason 46. No island is an island was Dr Fenech Adami's appreciation of the situation, it forms 'part of the continent'. Objective Europe was back on course. But up sprang Dr Sant, who reinvented Switzerland as the answer to Malta's problems and latterly partnership, for more uncertainty to break out. Only a Yes vote will lay this uncertainty to rest. Reason 47.

The past four and a half years have been back-breaking years. Maghtab, now 30 years in construction if a day, continued to grow monstrously, is about to be consigned to, ooops! the dustbin of history. For those who beat their small 'n' nationalist chests and holler that we did not need to join the EU to do that, let them look back over the past four decades and tell us why nobody controlled a monster that fed upon itself. Funding from the EU will help enormously to lay this Frankenstein to rest. Reason 48. For his part, Dr Sant has claimed that "we will close down Maghtab in 21 months". Did the marines hear that? He had 22 months in 1996 to do that.

For the last time

It has been one of the less attractive features of the Opposition's opposition to membership that it reduced Lm81 million of EU funding to Lm1.5 million a year without batting an abacus. It is not so much that this shrinkage is so startling as the fact that the minimisation process involved is so dishonestly crude. Reason 49 - for batting without an abacus.

Most people know that during the next three years agriculture will receive Lm12.08 million. Reason 49. Infrastructure projects to do with transport and the environment are somehow going to land us Lm32.92 million. Reasons 50 and 51. For EU programmes and institution building plus pre-accession aid we have Lm12.50 million. Reasons 52 and 53. We are receiving a further Lm97.21 million for what is called budgetary compensation. Reason 54.

It seems that Labour's failed mathematicians dismiss the idea that money given to us and allocated by the donors for vital areas of our development (transport and environment, waste management and sewage, to take but four) is money. Nurtured by Mr Mintoff, they look upon money as a blank cheque for us to do with it as we please. This method of argument is impeccably flawed.

Lm81 million to help with the removal of Maghtab, for starters, create new landfills, rationalise waste management, improve roads we are forever swearing about, promote training programmes for the unemployed and disadvantaged, beautify our rural areas, modernise our fishing fleet and fishing port facilities - Lm81 million are not to be scoffed at, still less made the object of a disappearing act. They will only vanish if Malta loses its senses and votes against membership. Reasons 55 to 62.

The simple fact is that Malta has been granted an Lm81 million perk that is to do with particular programmes. Here is EU family silver helping poorer relations with capital expenses. Every respectable father tells his daughter when he hands over a cheque to help with, say, the purchase of a car: "This is for that souped-up Topolino you want; not for gadding about Paceville".

In like manner, the EU is telling Malta and every candidate country what it told its member countries when they were still applicants on the outside looking in: "Here's Lm81 million (or whatever). Some of it has to go into this, a proportion must be spent on that and you are not to use any of it on bits and pieces of which we do not approve, like balancing your budget, for example. Do you hear me, son"? If this is interference in the way we spend the money, so be it. If this impinges on our sovereignty, so be it. In fact, it does nothing of the sort.

What flexibility?

But, I hear a whingeing voice cry, what about our flexibility? What, indeed?

It seems to me that flexibility can be too elastic in meaning and in fact. Is it flexible to campaign for NOVAT in 1996, acknowledge the fiscal mechanism and still insist, as Dr Sant did outside VAT headquarters, that CET remains his preferred system of indirect taxation? No; it is opportunistic because he knows that he cannot go into a general election with CET slung over his shoulder. Is it flexible to say one day that liberalisation is a bad thing and on another that it is not such a bad thing, after all? No; the benefits of liberalisation cannot be denied. Harrumphing against it was inchoate in the first place. Is it flexible to woo, in 1996, the business community and its leadership, which is in favour of membership, and to harangue both in 2003? No; it is immature. Reasons 63 to 66.

Dr Sant claims that his partnership romp will grant him flexibility. He now knows that Switzerland has had to knuckle under a pretty hefty number of EU demands and impositions. Partnership was bloodlessly, if not seamlessly, midwifed from the slogan 'Switzerland in the Mediterranean'. The latter opened itself too much to empirical questioning. As everybody lampooned that slogan out went poor old, rich old Switzerland, which Dr Sant was reported as claiming had followed his 1998 plan to bring about partnership with the EU. Copyright, anybody? Was it flexible to dump the vision of Switzerland in the Med or was it a recognition that the vision had failed to motivate the country?

Nor is there a great deal of evidence to show that North African countries hammering out some form of association with the EU are gleefully jumping up and down with the flexibility at their disposal. Pared down to its correct meaning as opposed to the political implications in which Dr Sant dresses up the word, flexibility is a buzzword of no significance. It lacks the first and essential element in the expression and articulation of any mature political belief - a credible and creditable sense of policy. Dr Fenech Adami's answer to all this has been a formidable resilience born of truthful and sincere conviction. Reason 67.

What partnership?

And policy is precisely what is lacking in the partnership game. Reason 68. The concept has been turned into just that, a game, a sort of blind man's bluff. You cannot see anything. Its proponents can only say that it is better than membership. As to why it is a superior choice for a country to make, the answer is plucked out of some hat in which a slip of paper has been placed bearing the one word: flexibility. Reason 69.

Partnership is a three-syllable word that can be made to mean whatever you wish it to signify. So, inevitably, it came to be used in a universal sense, to embrace not only the original implication of a partnership with the EU where Labour could pick and choose the flowers it liked in the European meadows while discarding those that lacked scent and grace. It clasped into its arms everybody and everything: business (business?), local councils, farmers and fishermen, developers and every ngo under the Maltese sun. Bliss all round as every problem was solved by the power and magic of partnership, a bit like the UBS advertisement where everything dissolves into one, endless, tranquillised moment.

And we, who recognise an opiate policy when we see one, know that life is not like that at all.

We more than suspect, we are convinced that we are being sold a gynormous whopper. Reason 70. Like that business of shrinkage we have already discussed; like the secretary general of the GWU refusing to publish independent reports, their authors commissioned by the union itself, no less, and in nine cases out of ten, coming down on the side of membership; like a piddling report swiftly drawn up by Labour (in 20 days, one newspaper reported) to counter, unsuccessfully, the professional MHRA report on the benefits of joining the EU for the tourism sector; like so much else about Labour's referendum campaign.

There are 101 reasons for making Saturday Malta's Europe Day. There is every rational, economic, social, cultural, political reason, not forgetting for a moment a vital one, our security, why this should happen, why Malta should make it happen.

We have arrived, with another 460 million people, at a defining moment in history. When comes such another?