THE YUF SPEAKS

It is the silly season and all that, when columnists’ and bloggers’ minds should turn to lighter things than politics.

I could, for instance, go off onto a pastoral detour on the joys of summer and eating (or being eaten) out on balmy nights. The bucolic delights of lounging on the beach, or of luxuriating in a car on the way thereto, with the prospect of parking half-way up the hill towards Mellieha before getting to the actual beach, could have formed the core of this blog, avoiding the really hot subjects.

But you’ve got all the glossy mags for that sort of thing, with the added bonus of being able to spot a picture of the new, slim(mer) me, nestled amongst all the Sacha Farmer Timpkinson wannabes that grace the pages of “Circling Sunday First” in their full-colour, “look at me I should be in SITC” finery. How these people manage it, scooting from party to party to party, managing to change clothes and arm-candy on the way, is quite fascinating and could form the basis of a whole series of blogs, probably entitled “Look who (s)he’s with now, thought s(h)e was married”.

The thing is, that is the stuff of ephemera, reserved for the spaces between the ads and the chunks that are ads but pretend not to be, presumably because in the mind-set of the chattering classes, trade still smacks of crassness and mild vulgarity. Much nicer to pretend that the people putting the mag together want to talk to me, pretty picture an’all, ‘cos I’m a celebrity in my own right and not because, what a coincidence, my import company stuck a whole series of ads into this month’s edition.

If I were to do that, though, I’d probably get ignored and the choice between being ignored and having all manner of lil’elves fulminating at me, taking me all seriously like, is easy to make. Give me fulmination over oblivion any time.

So, it’s time to be poking sticks into bee hives again, or rattling cages or shaking trees or whatever it is one does to get things jumping, for all that it gets me called all manner of names and told I should stop writing this blog because it’s got boring and because I’m nothing more than a blinkered spokesman of the horrendous Nationalist Party. I’ll be told, most amusingly, that my stuff is repetitive and that my interlocutor will not be reading it anymore, which would be worrying, except for the fact that for every elf that abandons perusal of my oeuvre, two more take his place, imperfect spelling and syntax to the fore, to call me names and tell me they won’t be reading me anymore, either, so there.

On everyone’s lips, quite understandably, is the surcharge that the nasty Nationalists have slapped on our electricity bills, no doubt in order to make the fat friends of their friends even fatter and friendlier. It’s not really OPEC that has done this to us, it’s Gonzi himself, personally, because he and Kate had a fight and he’s prone to do that, he hits out at the population at large. He’s an uncaring beast that way.

And to make things worse, he just won’t listen, he knows it all and doesn’t think he needs to check with anyone before turning the screws on pensioners, the working class, single mothers, puppies and everyone and her sister. And taking away their apple pie,an’all.

Look at the MLP, on the other hand, led by St Joseph of the Glowing Halo. They would have consulted everyone, taken everyone’s views, taken into consideration the legitimate aspirations of all the special interest groups, not least of which would have been the hunting fraternity and the greens and anyone else whose vote might swing it – oh, hang on, that was then, this is now. Now these are hardly relevant considerations, now it’s the MLP itself that needs to be appeased, because votes don’t count for the next few years (not that you’d know that, the way the MLP keeps on and on about representing nearly half the population, as if this gives them dibs on governing the country)

Still, consultation and talking to everyone remains the order of the day, according to Labour’s young man at the helm. Before allowing energy prices to rise, instead of imitating Canute, the Government should have consulted stakeholders to establish the precise formula of the hike. Never mind that this was done some time ago, presumably while Dr Muscat was doing worthy things in Brussels: it needs to be done again because now he’s here, poised to save the world. Nope, the Government, presumably in the form of the Minister for Finance, who has little else to do (what’s trying to save the exchequer from the life-sucking influence of the shipyards compared with sitting down with the unions and the employers and all the rest of them, to go over the same tired stuff again and again, after all?) should have patiently sat down with the unions and the employers and the rest of them, to go over the same tired stuff again and again.

And before some lil’elf jumps in and says I’m repeating myself and that this is evidence of my failure to comprehend the niceties of the art of writing, I was being repetitive in order to illustrate the futility of talking about the same thing over and over, given that nothing has changed fundamentally. It’s called trying to be a bit comical, innit, you know?

But I forget, humour and a lightness of touch are weapons conspicuous by their absence from the lil’elves’ armoury.

Getting back to Dr CMJ, we shouldn’t be too hard on the young feller’m’lad, really.

He’s clearly taken with Blairism and heading off into the sunset down the Third Way, though we don’t talk about third ways here, there’s only one way, the one that will keep the MLP faithful, erm, faithful. We dress up the idea of talking to everyone and being nice to everyone, preferably in shirtsleeves and carrying a nice mug of coffee, in a costume of “the Government is wrong and we should be sitting there at the table not them”, which is like soft rain on a parched desert for the aforementioned faithful.

Keeping everyone happy, the way Muscat has done it with the Shadow Cabinet re-jig he’s pushed through, is a handy way of keeping the lid on things. Making statements of the bleedin’ obvious, such as “you should have consulted all the interested parties” (even though that was done way back) and “be excellent to everyone” and “love everyone”, make him look statesmanlike, because at a facile level, these platitudes shouldn’t irk anyone and therefore the person making them is a statesman, not a lowly party politician.

The problem is, as Blair discovered before him, there’s a gulf separating saying all these nice things and actually getting things done: the former is an easy exercise, the latter requires getting your hands a bit mucky. Giving all your MPs something to talk about, in the short run, will keep them quiet and beavering away at their corner of the pie, but eventually, when they’ve exhausted their subject, they’ll want to stick their oars into the sea of more weighty affairs.

That’s when things will get interesting.