I much look forward to reading the results of the inquiry – if the findings are ever published – by the commission currently probing the Nationalist Party’s inglorious elections defeat.
Blowing air kisses to everyone in the room won’t hack it
If the commission were to pour through a similar report drafted for the PN in 2004 by a similar commission it would probably let out a collective groan of dismay discovering that issues of culpability unearthed then, account, broadly, for the party’s downfall now.
It was tall poppies inside the PN who recklessly, unendingly, continued to drive a coach plus fours through almost every value laid down by their hallowed creed encapsulated in a document called Basic Beliefs.
There were the big-headed ministers, then and now perceived as disastrously inefficient. There were the hasty, grossly inappropriate promises made to everyone – only to be more honoured in the breach. Worse, a warped sense of moral equivalence became a sort of guiding philosophy where ministers and their lieutenants justified their dismal behaviour on grounds similar transgressions were committed 20 years earlier by Labour governments.
As a result, popular disdain spiralled to beyond the government’s powers to believe it was failing. In most eyes, this had become the party of the rude, the elite, of profligacy and sleaze, constantly showering privilege and fortune on the undeserving, not least its bankers – squalid contractors – and dodgy journalists.
Much less would it find the moral strength to curb the rampant cronyism and corruption or end the stranglehold the wasteful maintained on public funds. Little effort taxed the administration’s concern with the march of increasing poverty.
It was, in brief, the epic lightness with which ministers bore the burden of command that drove the Nationalist government into the valley of death.
The past, as we say, has now been sold and a new government is in charge. One expects the PN to soon pick itself up, dust itself and get its ball back in play, first by voting in the right leader.
Whoever wins the PN leadership race must be talented and skilled enough to face the gamut of risks that comes with wholesome reform – an aching need for the PN. He must be able to soon replace the party’s phoney stuck-on feathers with real plumage.
To use a phonetic metaphor, he will need to make the party, in its political conversation with us, adopt the glottal stop, the sounds in speech widely associated with the middle class. One-trick ponies will not do.
Soon, the national debate will have to focus on what the Prime Minister says kept him in politics: radical change. These include revitalising a middle class whose energy has been sapped by mistaken economic directions.
For the country to be steered away from perilous reefs, Joseph Muscat’s government needs to show its teeth if it is to secure the cooperation of people that matter, possibly also that of a reliable, credible opposition leader. Blowing air kisses to everyone in the room won’t hack it.
In opting for the wider shores – instead of staying inside the cosier country of politics by rote – Muscat’s government may have to grapple with some very nettlesome home truths: that governance is complex not least because most governments end up relying on people often more used to being someone than doing something; that refashioning and rebuilding the middle class into renewed fitness, where people can be provided with better living standards, affordable homes, better wages, less taxes, a secured retirement and less State-minted problems, is hardly a walk in the park.
People in future will increase their demands for a qualitative lifestyle and that adds pressure on a government forced to live by quantitative yardsticks.
It would be foolish for the Government to reckon any one particular class or sector of society will wield the dagger first. Only strong-willed politicians, often found in the ranks of the Left but much better if they come from both parties, do this well.
Additionally, Labour has pledged to keep all of Malta’s sacred cows, primarily our ever-expanding culture of welfare dependence – financed largely by the middle class – sacred.
In what sense, one might ask, is this bad? It isn’t but is it realistic given the economy must each year grow by something like five per cent?
The optimist in me says it can be done, more so if a renewed PN recognises the signs of the times and agrees new energy needs to be pumped into the veins of the middle class. But there’s a problem.
Extracts published recently from David Boyle’s forthcoming book, Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes? (Fourth Estate), deliver a stark warning with piercing clarity: “The middle class can no longer trust their existing institutions, political or financial, to look after their interests because these are dedicated to looking after the interests of a different class altogether”.
The question is: do Maltese politicians have it in them to turn Boyle’s observation on its head?