Up to last week I was holding out against commenting on the election of the Labour Party general secretary. This was partly due to my weariness with the surfeit of pre-election speculation and partly because I was sure that the delegates would ditch the incumbent who had been collared as one of the architects of the party's most bitter defeat.

It seems that the delegates thought otherwise. Rejecting all notions of new beginnings, they decided to baffle the nation and stick to the secretary they knew. We woke up the next morning to the news that Jason Micallef had been re-elected to the post. Michael Falzon's scathing criticism of Micallef, Leo Brincat's pointed remarks and Evarist Bartolo's call for real change had served for nought. The report analysing the MLP's last routing at the polls might just as well not have been commissioned for all the attention that the delegates have paid to it.

Well, to paraphrase Connie Francis, it's their party and they do what they want to. Who are we, non-Labour voters, floaters, or election absentees, to comment? We do not militate for the Labour party, therefore we should have no say in the matter and that is why we should stick to scrutinising the party we vote for. This siege mentality - where anybody who is not a paid-up member of the party - is automatically considered to be suspect - is all too evident in the Labour Party. It may explain why external criticism is routinely ignored and why critics are considered to be spiteful detractors and PN stooges.

Now, there may be many of the latter crowing at every Labour setback and magnifying the party's mishaps, but there are many other observers who would genuinely welcome a reform of the MLP and it becoming a credible opposition party.

Just read the online comments of people reacting to the election outcome. Ignore the ones from those who worship at the altar of the PN. You'll find that the majority of comments come from people who are surprised and disappointed at this last turn of events. These are the people which Labour should be listening to. They represent a wider swathe of people who are not instinctively hostile to the MLP, who do not shrivel up in disgust when they see the torca emblem on the ballot paper. They are the voters who are sick of hearing about the lack of foreign toothpaste and chocolate in the 1980s and why this should justify every Nationalist shortcoming in the foreseeable future.

To sum it up - these are Labour's target voters. They are the ones which Labour should be wooing, instead of pandering to those core voters who would vote for the party even if it were led by Ghengis Khan. Instead, the Labour Party or its delegates, or the cliques manning the party machine, persist in ignoring the feeling of the wider public beyond the four walls of the glass house at Mile End.

They really should get out more and find out what people think about the party they've mired in internal power squabbles and mad policies. As the tagline of the X-Files film goes: "The truth is out there."

• A fellow columnist asked me if we weren't making too big a deal of what was essentially the election of an administrative party official. After all, the general secretary of a party is not a public official who decides on policy matters. Ostensibly, his role is to ensure that every department within the party works as it should. However, he is not answerable to the public at large. So, why all the fuss about an internal party appointment, my friend asked. In the normal course of events, I too, would say that we're making too much of this appointment.

However, these are very particular circumstances for the MLP. It has suffered too many consecutive defeats, been on the wrong side of history too often. It cannot afford to put a foot wrong in any situation. Unfair though it may seem, it has to perform even better than its opponents. That's because it has to shake off the 'loser' label which has been stamped all over it. To do this it needs to change the public perception of it - a process which will necessarily involve the media.

We're not talking about the political party media here. Everybody knows that In-Nazzjon and Net TV will never be singing the Labour Party's praises, even if it should deserve them. No, it's the independent media I'm referring to - mainly the English language newspapers.

On the days following the election, they carried wall-to-wall negative pieces about the outcome. 'Back to square one' screamed the Malta Today front page. It described Micallef as an albatross hanging round Muscat's neck. This paper's sister edition carried an editorial predicting a dreary future for the MLP with this administration. It also carried a front-page heading highlighting Muscat's declaration about there not being any room for prima donnas within the party.

It may not have been the delegates' intention, Micallef may not deserve to buried just yet, but he has been cast in the role of Labour bogey man vacated by Alfred Sant. He will have to work a thousand times harder to put paid to the division that he has caused within the party and to win over the press.

Should he not manage to do so, the choice of the delegates who elected him, will be seen as yet another decision which has boomeranged back and damaged the party - perhaps irreparably.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt

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