Political belief and public service

While the Prime Minister tries to shift his political vehicle into forward drive, even claiming magical powers in the Mepa balancing act, his foot soldiers are still in denial over the European Parliamentary drubbing, and seeking excuses for it.

They keep alive a main point trotted forward as soon as the June debacle became clear - Labour saboteurs in the public and parastatal service were making the Nationalist government look black. The alleged worms in the administrative woodwork were seeing to it that Labour sympathisers were adequately served, while Nationalist clients were left nursing unresolved gripes.

The accusation is nonsensical. It suggests that ministers and parliamentary secretaries, plus the administrative machine of carefully selected chiefs they head, are incompetent nincompoops. They allow the wool to be pulled over their eyes every hour of the working day. It seeks alien political reasons for the EP defeat rather than stressing the need for greater efficiency throughout the whole public service, which nowadays loaded with European Union demands, has to pull its weight more than ever.

I doubt that the alleged-saboteurs factor will achieve a mere short paragraph in the analysis now being finalised at the PN headquarters in Pietá to try to identify why the party failed so miserably in the MEP race. Aside from ministers and parliamentary secretaries not being that short of what it takes for political manhood, the Nationalist analysts know as well as their Labour counterparts that public sector boards are staffed almost completely by Nationalists or fellow travellers.

Some of them occupy their position on technical merits. Others simply because the party in office wants the top echelons of the public administration to be filled by its own ilk and similar sympathisers.

This point was made by various contributors in the written media. I too touched upon it in the aftermath of the June EP result. Nationalist activists will not have any of that. They continue to charge reverse political discrimination, insisting that Labourite employees are tripping up the government.

Such activists also deny that public boards and committees are staffed in the great main by individuals of Nationalist hue. To justify their stand they do not look at the position as it is now, but grope in the dimming light of the past to find some instances when the odd labour sympathiser was given some position by the Nationalist government.

The exchange will not stop easily. Nor it will it be resolved clearly. Yet there are signs that the Nationalist activists participating in it are finding it hard to keep to the straight and narrow of a decent discussion. Writing from Gozo in this newspaper on Friday ("PL supporters in government departments") one PN diehard brought me into the picture in a rather surprising fashion.

"May I remind readers also," he wrote, "that Minister Louis Galea had commissioned Lino Spiteri to draw up a report on some aspect of education during the last legislature..."

In the context of the exchanges as they have unfolded, the suggestion is that Minister Galea did me a favour, with the snide implication that the government remunerated me in the process. To stoop so low one must really feel backed against the wall.

Dr Galea did do me a favour. He asked me to chair a committee to study inclusive education and people with special needs in depth. Thereby he gave me an opportunity to participate in an exercise of service to my fellow disabled people, and to the public. I accepted on one condition, that I would not receive any payment for my effort.

Neither I nor those who worked with me on the committee, giving me and the disabled the benefit of their great expertise, received a cent for the considerable time and effort we put in. None of us, not just this columnist, expected otherwise. If payment there was it lies in the fact that the subsequent so-called Spiteri Report has proven to be of some utility. Its many recommendations, referred to in three successive budget speeches, continue to be implemented in stages.

There is more to public service than money, though obviously not everybody understands that. Political discussion deserves better.