Ten years ago, on the eve of the general election, the then Labour leader, Alfred Sant, was asked whether Labour’s brief stint in government (1996-98) was after all only a parenthesis. No, he replied: history would show the years 1998-2008 to have been the Nationalist parenthesis.
Well, the years might have been a bit off. We have a different Labour leader, Joseph Muscat. But, as we remember five years of Labour government, unable to imagine Labour losing an election in the foreseeable future, it is telling that the idea that the post-1998 years of PN government were a historical parenthesis does not seem outrageous.
On the contrary, it seems plausible and sensible. Take Europe, the one single issue on which Sant is still considered, today, to have taken Labour to near-destruction when, as leader, he had the party oppose Malta’s EU membership.
Today, Malta’s attitude towards membership has a lot in common with the attitude that had been urged by Sant. What he had wanted was for Malta to stay out but then exploit EU regulations, weaving between and ducking under them, to generate trading, commercial and financial opportunities for whoever wanted to be free of those rules but close enough to the EU.
It was a pipe-dream as was said at the time and as we definitely know now. But put aside the concrete plan and focus on the strategy. Malta today is, essentially, enacting that strategy but within the EU: weaving and ducking to sell passports, financial services, and online gaming. EU citizenship itself has become a commodity we trade.
This isn’t the only count on which “Europe”, as seen from Malta, has become Labour’s Europe.
In its campaign against EU membership 15 years ago, Labour had stoked fear of Europeans coming to Malta to find work here. Labour had stayed clear of civil liberties, but it tells you something about Malta at the time that one Labour Party club notoriously put up a sign saying that if we joined Europe, gay marriage was bound to follow.
The club was promptly told to take that sign down, but the incident was not forgotten, especially by the minority group for whom the issue mattered deeply.
Now, consider the situation today. Labour has presided over the massive Europeanisation of Malta’s labour market. It has taken full ownership of the civil liberties agenda.
Let us argue over that pre-2013 country but let us remain scrupulous about the facts
It has, in short, taken two values strongly associated with Europe, and made them, in addition, strongly associated with Labour. Who, under 30, can now think of Europeanisation and link it with any political party other than Labour?
It suddenly becomes very difficult to resist the temptation to rewrite the past, as one in which the Europeanisation of Malta was held back until Labour came to power.
We’ve been here before: in the denigration of Independence, obtained by a PN-led government in 1964, because national independence wasn’t “real” until Labour came to power in 1971.
We’re not there yet. But we’re getting close. Labour is claiming, for example, that the past five years have put paid to the ‘Nationalist myth’ that Labourites didn’t understand Europe. But that is not how the PN campaigned.
In the run-up to the 2003 referendum on EU membership, the PN was clear that the Yes vote needed Labour votes, and that social democrat values were at the heart of Europe. The argument was: real Labourites understood Europe. If anything, the Nationalists were saying, truthfully or not, that the Labour Party was divorced from real social democracy.
If anyone put any distance between Europe and Labour, it was (then) the Labour Party itself. It did not just oppose membership by making major claims we know to be bogus today. It also campaigned against Labour figures who openly favoured EU membership, making them out to be Nationalist stooges.
The attitude was still alive and well in 2008, during the Labour leadership contest which saw Muscat elected ahead of George Abela. During that contest a photo was circulated of Abela’s daughter attending a pro-EU rally a few years earlier. It was not a compliment paid to her judgement. It was a smear against her father.
When asked about it by Lou Bondi on TV, Muscat condemned the ploy. But Labour leadership voters must have remembered that, only a few years earlier, it was Muscat himself who claimed the Yes to Europe movement was a covert Nationalist organisation because (wait for this) Bondi’s own eldest daughter had signed up for it.
In other words, to attribute Labour’s former reputation about Europe to Nationalist spin isn’t just getting the past wrong. It’s whitewashing the party machine’s own major role in how that reputation was acquired.
And yet, claiming the Nationalists spread this myth sounds plausible today. That is a measure of how the past is being reinterpreted, in general understanding, from a dominant Labour viewpoint.
None of these observations dispel the economic growth, the real changes in equality laws, and the pitiful state in which is found the Nationalist Party today.
But they should remind us, in judging the situation, to be alert to the power of myth and pseudo-history. By all means let us argue over that pre-2013 country but let us remain scrupulous about the facts. Every fact is a sliver of our own personal lives.
ranierfsadni@europe.com