Last Wednesday was the 30th anniversary of the notorious incidents at Tal-Barrani. In 1986 I was in my early teens and certainly in no position to evaluate things with any degree of sophistication. My opinion then was simply that, on Tal-Barrani at least, the Nationalists were right and Labour wrong.

That view remains unchanged today, broadly speaking. The Nationalist Party had every right to hold a meeting wherever it chose. That right had been confirmed by a court sentence. What Labour thugs did on the day was unspeakable. It is not true that they were provoked into anything, simply because they threw up the barricades and took up their positions well ahead of schedule. It’s not as if they were minding their own business when the Nationalists showed up.

That they were actively supported by the police was an affront to the most basic function of the State, which is to guarantee law and order by means of a monopoly over violence. On the day, the police were only too happy to share that monopoly.

I am not interested in being an apologist about happenings that I consider despicable. My point in what follows is to try to understand Tal-Barrani in context, and with the benefit of hindsight.

The events at Tal-Barrani were not in any way the exception. They were a masterclass of their kind, to be sure, but the violence of the 1980s was simply the extreme end of a certain physicality. That was a time when people did politics with their bodies, usually with heaving and short-fused masses of them.

The extreme end, because Tal-Barrani and the murder of Raymond Caruana were, to borrow some words from Indian English, the work of a small circle of goons who had perfected thuggery to a fine art. Their main stomping ground was Żejtun, but they were perfectly happy to perform elsewhere on occasion. The more enterprising four or five of them became household nicknames.

It is not true that they were tolerated. Rather, they were actively cultivated by key figures in the Labour Party, the memories of some of whom have since been honoured with monuments and street names. Proof of this is that many thugs also had privileged access to the resources of the State.

Exactly why that was the case is a moot point, because their actions did no favours to Labour. One guess is that it was a legacy of the early days of Mintoff, when socialist reformers had at times found themselves violently attacked.

In the longer term, it is worth remembering that Manwel Dimech was once very nearly stoned to death, and that his wife and children were reduced to poverty following his exile. While I doubt it-Toto had a scholarly interest in Dimech’s writings, the people who let him do as he pleased probably did have collective memories of stoning and exile.

While Tal-Barrani was the work of a small circle of the usual suspects, those men were not the exception

Be that as it may, the argument is that while Tal-Barrani was the work of a small circle of the usual suspects, those men were not the exception. Funnily enough, the thought occurred to me while watching a video of a 1986 Nationalist party meeting on the recently-put-up Eddie Fenech Adami website.

Compared to today’s rows of smiling young people wearing scarves in heated marquees, the average 1980s mass meeting looks like the storming of the winter palace. It’s extraordinary to watch how people heaved, screamed slogans and made the victory sign. When the party leader was carried shoulder-high, the crowd went into a frenzy, to the extent that big men were hired to prevent Eddie’s strangulation.

Politics in general was more tactile, visceral and physical. People actually went places to listen to interminable speeches. Many of them made the trip in the backs of construction trucks, the acoustics of which when banged on with metal pipes were perfect. Wearing blue or red at meetings was standard. There was hardly a wall anywhere that wasn’t covered in posters and graffiti. And so on.

Even the smallest acts of transgression were physical, and in turn courted a greater physicality – I have in mind things like buying a pack of blue Du Maurier cigarettes, or walking in Valletta with the front page of The Times in full view. I was once nabbed vandalising a school desk at Il-Kulleġġ, but got away with it because the carving read ‘Eddie 51’. A pupil who scribbled ‘Joseph’ or ‘Simon’ today would certainly be marched to the school psychologist.

In this context, men – and sometimes women – whose backgrounds or jobs had an aura of physicality about them, found themselves privileged. Dockyard workers were among the most exalted of all. When Prime Minister Fenech Adami visited the dockyard following the accident of 1995, many wondered what the world had come to.

My point, however, is not that Żwieten or dockyard workers were the exception. On the contrary, I’m saying that their image and actions made sense, so to say, as part of a general theme of physicality that was not limited to party politics. In the 1980s, it was commonplace for the village festa to turn into a bottle-throwing contest.

Nor did Labour enjoy a monopoly over the twin themes of violence and physicality. That’s because, if they are to function properly, these two need victims as well as aggressors. The success of the Nationalist Party was due in part to the convincing way in which it cast itself in the role of victim.

Take Eddie. In the 1980s, Eddie was great partly because he was not Mintoff. He did not ride horses, wear ironmongery on his belt, or swim in February. And yet, he could fill the Fosos at the drop of a hat. The second was true because of, not in spite of, the first. In a general context of physicality and violence, being a mild-mannered victim becomes an essential part of the story.

I know that many Nationalists will be offended at my choice of words. My defence is that to outline a plot is not to devalue actual events. I wish to take nothing away from the very many Nationalists who were actually beaten up, and whose property was routinely destroyed. My point is simply that there was nothing alien about Tal-Barrani, and that it takes different roles to make a good story.

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