The politicians are here

It has been announced that Labour leader Joseph Muscat will be embarking on a nationwide campaign which will see him and his team visiting every household in the country. The door-to-door campaign is intended to be both a recruitment drive for the party and an exercise in listening to citizens' views and complaints.

My long-held view is that unsolicited house calls by politicians of all stripes are an infernal nuisance. I don't see the point of nattering and making small talk when there are other more pressing or interesting matters to attend to. When I find out that home visits are imminent, I turn off my door bell and pad around the house in socks, hoping to avoid a fruitless exchange.

I realise that not everybody shares my view regarding home visits and that there are people out there who are quite keen to meet politicians in the flesh. I suppose these are the people that the Labour Party wants to impress favourably during the forthcoming campaign.

The MLP will be seeking to introduce its leader to voters to show what a pleasant 'man of the people' he is. Muscat will be pushed as a likable, approachable chap who is willing to listen to people's concerns. This is clearly an attempt at 'personality politics' which is a trademark of the American electoral campaign and increasingly of the local scenario. Instead of concentrating on the issues, voters are persuaded to decide who should govern their country on the basis of the candidate's personality.

We may like to think that personality is not such an important factor when deciding on our voting preferences and that we weigh up the issues at stake rationally and calmly. However, this isn't the case.

We always take politicians' personality into consideration. The smiling, affable Lawrence Gonzi who promised us environmental reform, tax cuts and energy-saving light bulbs was a vote-catcher. The MLP is now emulating that approach and embarking on its own version of personality promotion.

I am still sceptical as to whether the door-to-door tour charm offensive will have the desired impact on the voters that Labour wants to win over - namely floating voters, new voters, and voters who are not staunch PN supporters.

I'm not including those voters who have always voted for the MLP. The likelihood is that they will continue to do so. There is no need to preach to the converted. The unconverted are another kettle of fish altogether. Floating voters are the most unlikely to be swayed by a winning smile and a chat in the hallway. They are the most likely to keep track of which promises have been broken and of which political proposals are feasible or impractical.

As for the youth vote, I'm afraid that home visits by a bunch of party officials brandishing membership forms just won't cut it. Until the MLP finds a way of communicating with these two groups the pavement-trudging would be in vain.

While channel hopping the other evening, I came across M'Intiex Waħdek - a programme presented by MP Silvio Parnis. From what I could gather the topic being discussed was usury or fraudulent scams. A police officer was going to great pains to explain that yes, reporting these scams was advisable but there was no guarantee that the culprits would ever be traced or that the money they had tricked their victims out of would be refunded.

There was the fact that the fraudsters would probably be half way across the globe to contend with, numerous jurisdictional hurdles to overcome and the very real possibility that ill-gotten gains would have been disposed off by the time the long arm of the law had caught up with the fraudsters.

"Prevention is better than cure" the police officer kept on repeating. I imagine he has met with more than his fair share of gullible people wiring their cash to complete strangers in the vain hope of becoming millionaires overnight.

I have a mental picture of the police officers scrunching up their faces in frustration when they receive yet another report from someone who has been duped out into sending his or her cash to fictitious deposed dictators. The scams have become so commonplace that one of them - the Nigerian letter scam - has been described as "one of Nigeria's most important export industries".

Back to M'Intiex wahdek.

Another guest was telling TV audiences about a woman who had borrowed the equivalent of around €47,000 to participate in a scam. She had no hope of retrieving her money and was being pursued by her creditors. We were invited to sympathise with her plight, and to some degree, we should.

However I see her story as a cautionary tale rather than that of a totally helpless victim. The scams in question offer untold riches, from people who are totally unknown to the victim. How credulous can one be to believe that a stranger is going to offer such largesse to someone he doesn't know from Adam? Has it ever crossed the minds of people answering these crazy schemes, why the people offering glorious rewards don't try to procure those rewards for themselves?

You have to be very trusting, very naïve or very greedy to believe that a fortune can be made overnight without it being illegal or without being adopted by Lady Luck. Although the fraudsters who set up scams are criminals, an iota of common sense and self-preservation will go a long way in stopping them from having their way.

As a rule of thumb, anything which sounds too good to be true probably is. If more people remembered that, there would be fewer victims of fraud and fewer harried police officers politely telling us to stop being suckers.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt