The myth of Labour's new beginning

As the preparations for Labour's general conference in the beginning of February gather pace, there is no doubt that the main message the party will want to pass on to the electorate henceforth is that this country needs a new beginning. No surprises there. The electorate needs to evaluate whether, first of all, Labour's mantra is a meaningful one.

Labour has a history of promising new starts. Remember New Labour? That in reality meant turning the clock back. And facts prove that they are still living in a time warp. They yearn for the old manufacturing industries, hinting that if it were in their power they would have subsidised some, if not all of them in order to have kept them going. They still show a predilection for subsidies to support lame ducks. They even suggest the setting up of ventures that anyone with an elementary grasp of today's global economic realities knows cannot compete in today's market place. They yearn for the old-fashioned trade schools when the past experience of some of these institutions proved to be disastrous both on the economy and on worker mobility. Trade schools at secondary level mean in effect making life-long decisions too early. They crave for more government and not less. All this hardly fits in with the new beginning ideal.

The electorate has to be careful. The call for a new beginning may in fact be a recipe for going backwards. Most of us remember how in 1996 the Labour Party promised a new beginning on the fiscal front. And what did we get? A tax system that was anachronistic, unworkable and more expensive than the one it replaced. We also got a government that was unable to communicate with its own people and with the people at large. Decisions were taken without proper assessments as to their effects on the economy and also on the most vulnerable sections of the community. No wonder that New Labour was labelled as a government without social conscience by no other than Labour's own erstwhile icon Dom Mintoff.

One might add that Labour has a history also of not believing in its own mantras. The Switzerland in the Med turned out to be just a figment of their imagination. They dropped it unceremoniously. The overnight change from the old mantra to the Partnership one brought a nebulous and fuzzy slogan, which the people decided to bury, not once but twice.

It is worthwhile looking back at when a new beginning would have made sense for Labour. When the Maltese electorate decided to vote in favour of Malta's membership of the European Union, that should have been the time for Labour to accept the people's verdict and then faced the ensuing election with a programme promising to make a success of the people's choice. But Labour blew it. Alfred Sant's comi-tragic postures after the announcement of the referendum result condemned Labour to a sure defeat at the polls.

A call for a new beginning now or after the next election shows that Labour understands very little about the huge changes that are being made in every aspect of our economy and our political, social and educational environment. These changes occurred because we have joined the EU.

Everything around us points out that a new beginning has already been made through our EU membership and that this new beginning is being translated into everyday restructurings, reforms, adaptations and so forth.

Why have we managed to cut our deficit so drastically? Why have we managed to attract record sums of foreign investments? Why have we managed to create thousands of jobs? Why have we managed to start a road-building programme of unprecedented proportions? Why are we seeing projects that are improving our environment being implemented now? Why the tremendous success of the MCAST?

The answer is clear for all to see. Malta's EU membership has opened up opportunities everywhere. We would have been deprived of all this had Labour succeeded in persuading the Maltese electorate to shun EU membership. The new beginning is happening here and now.

And it is this government, written off by politically-motivated Jeremiahs, as tired, an ancient regime, visionless, lazy... that has proved to its people it is still capable of coming up with exciting new agendas every day.

We should be proud of being the first member state to have the 2007-2013 funding programme formally approved by the EU. The claim that a new beginning is needed for Malta now or in the near future implies that Malta has not reached the successes recognised by international bodies. It would give the lie to our recognised preparedness to adopt the euro as our currency this time next year, barring any unforeseen hiccups. A new beginning now would give the wrong message to those who are eager to invest in our growing economy. What Malta needs is a consolidation of what we have achieved through hard work and many sacrifices.

The new beginning mantra is nothing else than Labour's smokescreen for gaining political power at all costs. In the same way that the promise to abolish VAT was used in 1996. The realisation that the same people who failed in 1996-98 are now offering a new beginning should send shivers down people's spines. These are same people who were incapable of governing. The same people who have declared that their supporters must be looked after and must be put in positions of responsibility. Some of these politicians are the same who participated in Malta's darkest period of political history and still look back at that time as a golden age. Trust them with Malta's new beginning, whatever that might mean, and you are likely to get a new nightmare.