‘The eighties’ is Nationalistese for the political pits. In the minds of many, the period is the ultimate canon of corruption, thuggery and all-round bad governance. It follows that it is not terribly flattering to say of a party or a government that it has gone back to the eighties. Nor is it a good idea for it to be on the way.
The one party that can captain that kind of journey is Labour. It is only Labour that can actively take us back to the eighties, simply because the doer at the time was the Labour government.
For many years, the threat of time travel yielded much dividend for the Nationalist party. That source is now all but dry, for two reasons. First, there is a growing number of voters to whom the eighties mean very little. Anyone under the age of 45 or so will have had crises like acne and jammed cassettes to worry about. They may even have secretly enjoyed the ride, as I did when we were locked out of school for several weeks in 1985.
Second, Labour since Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici has shown little inclination to go back. Both Alfred Sant and Joseph Muscat made it perfectly clear to supporters that they would not tolerate thuggery. The party’s clean bill of other people’s health has exorcised the ghosts of Tal-Barrani and Raymond Caruana.
Which is why it is surprising that Nationalists should choose to dust down and play the tune now, so many years on. Over the last few weeks I’ve heard many people say that Labour has taken us back to the eighties, or thereabouts. Except there are problems with that.
First, it tends to rather devalue the eighties. Even if stacks of things are rotten in the state of Denmark, a complete rot it isn’t. Give and take a blind eye here and there (and there, and there), it’s possible to live peacefully and fairly well in Muscat’s Malta. The point about the eighties is that Labour supposedly made that compromise all but impossible. The mischief of the eighties permeated the daily lives of even the most comatose of people.
The second reason why the present could never feel like the eighties has nothing to do with Malta. At the time, anything that was remotely political, anywhere, was played out against the background of the Cold War. What mattered ultimately was on which side of the fence you stood. The rest was detail.
In this respect, Malta entered the eighties bearing a legacy of maverick uncertainty. Mintoff had kept his options open – or maybe he had pretended to do so, so as to be able to put a price on his divided loyalty. In any case, his had been a double raspberry to facile North-South and East-West dualities.
To Nationalists, the eighties were not just a matter of bad domestic governance. Rather, things felt infinitely worse because they came with the distinct ring of the evil empire
Mintoff had launched the revised Labour edition of independence with Gaddafi in tow. For a while in the eighties, Muslims in North Africa were our blood brothers. Arabic was compulsory in schools, groups of children went on school trips to Libya, and there was a library right opposite the Palace in Valletta where you could get free copies of The Green Book. Mintoff’s point had been that North-South was not a choice, but rather an easy commute.
Nor had he been particularly Manichaean in his relations with East and West. In the event, Malta Shipyards acquired its Red China Dock and Nicolae Ceausescu his honours courtesy of the Republic. Kim Il Sung’s choir singing ‘Ma tagħmlu xejn mal-Perit Mintoff’ (‘There’s no one like Mintoff’) must be among the more bizarre offerings on You Tube.
The point is not that Mintoff had firmly anchored Malta somewhere between the Sahara and Pyongyang, or that he had renounced the West and all its works. (He hadn’t.) Rather, it is that Malta in the eighties suffered from all the alignment anxieties of a non-aligned state. Ours was the lot of St Anthony in the desert.
That anxiety proved a rich seam for the Nationalist Party to mine. Part of it was clearly top-down party strategy, the rest a more organic and subtle experience that was born of tacit associations in the minds of Nationalists.
Eddie Fenech Adami was one of many politicians who routinely referred to the Labour government as a ‘reġim soċjalista’ (‘socialist regime’), particularly in the rhetoric that followed the 1981 electoral crisis. The two words conjoined may no longer mean much, but in the eighties they pointed decidedly eastward.
No doubt the alignment was deliberate, as was the use of the V-sign at meetings. That ritual was borrowed from Solidarnosc, the Polish anti-communist trade union that became a kind of model of civil resistance. Certainly the red Solidarnosc logo was everywhere at PN meetings in the eighties.
The popular, organic side was perhaps the more consequential. To many Nationalists, the eighties were not just a rough time generally. They were also one during which the country hovered just outside, and sometimes well within, the dangerous magnetic field of the Eastern Bloc.
The clues were there, to those who wanted to see them. Notions like foreign interference (the Foreign Interference Act was passed in 1982) smacked of the paranoia that the Soviet Union and its associates were notorious for. The weird prohibition on the use of national words further fuelled the sense of paranoia. Nationalists were reminded of it every time they bought the party newspaper, which at the time showed an outline map of Malta as the kosher substitute for ‘Nazzjon’.
Then there were the products – Malta’s answer to the Trabant, shall we say. The way in which Nationalists experienced chocolate, toothpaste, shoes and the rest, was as a missed appointment with the promise of the West. In the context of the age, what that left us with was the East and the assorted tat that passed for products.
To Nationalists, then, the eighties were not just a matter of bad domestic governance. Rather, things felt infinitely worse because they came with the distinct ring of the evil empire.
Take that out of the equation, and ‘back to the eighties’ becomes a vacant and meaningless piece of rhetoric.
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