Past personalities and policies

Labour’s rewriting of history and hankering after the past goes on apace. This fact leaves me somewhat be­mused because who in their right minds would want to be reminded of a past that hardly gives anyone with a love of democracy warm and fuzzy feelings? I can see, dimly, where the notion of resurrecting what a certain type of person might feel is a glorious past gets its oxygen but, seriously, why appeal to the Soldiers of Steel if they’re going to vote for you anyway? Do Joseph Muscat’s political “advisers” (you can give the inverted commas whatever meaning you like) really, really think that invoking the days of Lorry Sant and Dom Mintoff will actually do anything other than get people like me hot, or, at least, warmish, under the collar?

And isn’t it to people like me, or my readers, that Labour must appeal in order to get a chance at seeing Dr Muscat’s lower limbs under the Prime Minister’s desk in Castille?

This is not going to happen if the 1970s and the 1980s are recalled to us at every spin of Labour’s PR wheels, which is what’s going on as we speak. It’s not only the personalities of the past to which Labour seems to want the country to return but also to the economic policies, Heaven help us.

A programme on Super One (sorry, I just can’t call it One TV) regaled us with a trip down memory lane recently with a paean of fulsome praise for the way the country’s economy flourished back then and the manufacturing industries that beat at the heart of it.

Let’s have a small reality check here, shall we? The industries that we are told today were so valuable to the country employed many hundreds, this is true, but they were low-skill, high labour-content enterprises (cut, make, trim anyone?) that were already becoming too expensive back in the early 1980s, when the Maghreb countries were already providing cheaper labour than we were and without the inconvenience of the unions wanting more all the time.

Either that or they were elephants of a hue that was so dazzlingly snow-like that you needed sunglasses to gaze upon them.

Why, then, are Labour’s apologists telling us that “those were the days”? Is it only coincidental that at the same time that we had this blast from the past we had another one from Tony Zarb, telling us that the General Workers’ Union is still there, despite the hostility of the government? The GWU used to get its power from the legions of blue-collar, relatively unskilled workers that populated the assembly lines and it is a reality that unions must face that the higher-skilled employees of the new age of our economic structures tend not to resort to unions to look after their interests, being capable enough to do it themselves.

Labour’s problem, it might be said, stems from the fact that although it wants to be progressive, liberal and whatever, its core support isn’t that and Dr Muscat’s policymakers certainly aren’t either. Karmenu Vella, Alex Sceberras Trigona, Toni Abela et al are not, by quite a long shot, breaths of fresh air poised to waft over the landscape and make the flowers grow and the new kids on the block are, well, not quite up to it.

Cyrus Engerer’s performance on Bondìplus last Tuesday, for instance, is proof positive of the latter point I’m making in the previous paragraph. A minor politician from the Nationalist Party who defected to Labour in well-known circumstances, mere weeks after standing to make an apparently (but not) deeply felt expression of loyalty, he tried to make us believe that he has a new Best Best Friend in Dr Muscat because the Prime Minister defied the electorate over the divorce issue.

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on this, which, however, raises the question: Is he so single-issue driven that he can’t even grasp the fact that divorce is now a reality and that the country has moved on?

Read our lips, Cyrus, we don’t really care about your obsessions, the country has other concerns now. And, frankly, if the other swallows in Labour’s summer that you mentioned are the only evidence you have that the sun shines out of that quarter, well, think again.

Deborah Schembri did a great job helping to get divorce introduced over the Curia’s machinations but she is hardly evidence of a mass defection from the PN to Labour given that she was not politically active before this. And the other bloke you mentioned, Manwel Mallia, is an eminent lawyer but that’s as far as it goes.

If you have an hour or so to spare on Monday evening, take a look at La Famiglia on Net after the news. If you look at the credits, you’ll see why I’m indulging in this shameless spot of paternal promotion. And if you want a decent meal in Gozo and you’re in the Sannat area, try L-Iskoll, which serves one.

imbocca@gmail.com

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