Both the Labour Party and the General Workers' Union share a distinct misconception. It is that they are the only champions of the workers' interests. Were this to be true, the party would have had the master key to the seat of power at Castille, and there would have been no need for all the other trade unions in the country. The situation is of course vastly different, with the Nationalist Party enjoying as much backing from the workers as the MLP and most of the other unions growing stronger by the day.
When the new Labour leader, Joseph Muscat, said that the language used at the GWU meeting for dockyard workers last week "provided ammunition to those people who are actively working against workers' interests", he was only resorting to rhetorical political talk of times past. If he did not mean this, he should have been more categorical and identified those who were working against the workers' interests. This kind of talk does not go down well with his mission of promoting a new political season. On the contrary, in exhuming the socialist vocabulary of times past, Dr Muscat runs the risk of giving his mission an early burial.
Dr Muscat has a problem, one that he could have easily avoided had he been politically shrewd enough. By attending the GWU meeting in Paola, he played straight into the hands of those who were clearly carried away and indulged not in hot language, as some preferred to describe it, but in open incitement and intimidatory and threatening language. With the GWU seen by most as a political ally of the Labour Party, he could have foreseen the situation. The fact that he did not speaks volumes.
Threatening to topple a democratically elected government is very serious talk in any circumstance, and Labour should have had the courage to come out in far stronger terms against such language than it did in its statement. Indeed, the threatening language used drew widespread national anger. People had generally thought that such antics as displayed by GWU speakers at the Paola meeting had long been forgotten. The fact that union speakers felt the need to threaten the government in this way suggests that the union is in great need of reform.
Despite its fine talk, Labour still seems to find it difficult to wriggle out of its old shell. But wriggle completely out it must if it wants to win the support of the uncommitted voters, who are not at all amused at the turn of events over the shipyards' privatisation process. And does the Labour Party, now so keen to get the young to its side, think that young people can ever get enamoured with a party whose leader finds himself at a union meeting where one speaker steals the show with talk about toppling the government? When the Labour leader is so eager to usher in new times for his party, it is strange how many wrong turnings it is taking.
The government could have tackled the privatisation process differently, but this in no way justifies the kind of anti-democratic threats made at the GWU meeting. Hopefully, the mediation efforts being made now will help break the deadlock between the GWU and the government and lead to a smooth privatisation of the shipyards.