Louis XIV was on the throne of France for over 72 years. That hasn’t stopped an army of pundits, hacks, brown-nosers and hangers-on from celebrating, and making us celebrate, 10 years of Joseph (five on the throne of Malta). Impressively, even by Maltese standards, there is now Joseph wherever you turn.
What with a bizarre diet of force-fed zeppole for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it’s hard to keep the blood sugar low enough to be able to think straight. Still, I’ll try. I’ll assume that Joseph Muscat is responsible for the Labour government’s successes. The experts tell us it is his personal vision that truly matters, and that we would be foolish to underestimate him. I’ll take their word for it.
Muscat is exceptionally good at two things. First, at an extreme form of laissez-faire obsessed with growth, credit ratings and big numbers generally. A recent book by David Pilling sums it up perfectly: “Growth has become the overlord of measures… the idea of not maximising growth has become almost unthinkable in modern political discourse… growth has become all we care about”.
Pilling’s book is not about Muscat. Rather, it’s about what he calls the “growth delusion” that underwrites economic thinking and policy in the contemporary world. Muscat, in other words, is not being very original, let alone visionary. He has simply hit on the obvious formula of letting people – notably in Malta’s construction sector – do as they please, so long as the numbers get bigger.
Another set of numbers is equally relevant. The second thing Muscat does very well indeed is win elections, usually by landslides. The two are linked. The vote may be massive and popular, but it is also embedded in structures of power and influence. It would, for example, be foolish to underestimate the import of massive campaign funding by super-rich construction magnates.
Still, there is no escaping the fact that he enjoys a huge popular mandate. The secular priests at his service tell us that, in a democracy, it’s votes that matter. They’re both right and wrong. Certainly, popular support is a necessary condition for political success in a democracy, but it is not a sufficient one. In other words, while it is necessary for a good politician to enjoy majority support, majority support alone does not make them good.
For that, we must turn to a few basic questions. First, has there been an improvement in standards of public life?
Labourites will say the standards of public life were rotten five years ago, and that there hasn’t been a deterioration. I agree. Corruption and cronyism were rampant under Nationalist governments, and I don’t think there’s more of them now. But nor is there less. Likewise, meritocracy and transparency of government are as elusive as ever. What has happened is simply a replacement of one crony with another. Muscat is a successful politician, if the benchmarks of political success are the replacement of cronies and the maintenance of a stable level of corruption.
As far as I’m concerned, no time’s soon enough to see the back of him
There are many reasons why he gets away with it, with overflowing ballot boxes at that. One is that it hasn’t been a simple matter of Labourite crony replacing Nationalist. Muscat is too cunning for that, to devastating effect. Another is that people are easier to hoodwink when, as the national broadcaster makes it a point to remind us every single day, the economy is growing so magnificently.
The second question: has there been a moral, political and tangible investment in models of sustainable development? If we must worship at the altar of growth, this has to be a key question, for obvious reasons.
The answer, in the strongest possible terms, is that there hasn’t. As far as sustainable development is concerned, the country is falling apart at the seams, to the extent that the standard coping mechanism is to simply not care what happens beyond one’s bubble. I’ll just mention two examples, both of which I came across in conversation last week.
The first is of someone whose elderly parents live, and have always lived, in a small house in Mellieħa. He told me they feel lost and alienated, entombed in a mass of blocks of flats, traffic, construction noise and neighbours who are here today, gone tomorrow.
The second is of a family who live in a terraced house in Swieqi. They like the house and its location but are reluctantly selling out to a developer and moving to a flat elsewhere. The reasonable thing to do, when the mould from exposed party walls eats away at your belongings and every window in your house becomes a voyeuristic experience. This, supposedly, is Muscat’s L-Aqwa Żmien.
Third question: has all the supposed wealth translated into more money for the population generally, as opposed to a few thousand who were already pretty rich to start with?
The answer to this is more complex, partly because the economic resilience of the Maltese population is based on the principle of a finger in every pie. Speaking for myself, my salary is not higher today than it was five years ago. I’m relatively privileged and I’m not complaining, but I hate to think what things must be like for people on the minimum wage. They are probably better off, provided they enjoy working three jobs.
The final question is whether or not there been an improvement in the standard of living broadly defined. Again, not really. Many things in Malta are as shoddy and mediocre as they were five years ago. Try using a wheelchair for a day, or cycling to work, or walking in the countryside – standard fixtures for the Europeans who supposedly envy us.
It’s a culturally impoverished L-Aqwa Żmien, too. Unless, that is, your idea of cultural richness is jablo junk on the squares of Valletta, tritons being serenaded by a giant puppet, or a Mario Philip Azzopardi production in which someone dressed up as a Grand Master steps off a Captain Morgan boat dressed up as a princely barge.
So far, Muscat’s great achievement has been to preside over a national tragedy of the commons. We’re told the Labour mailboxes have been inundated with popular requests for him to stay on, presumably for another 62 years at least. As far as I’m concerned, no time’s soon enough to see the back of him.
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