Thanks to the assiduous research of one reader of this blog, here’s another storja tal-wahx. It’s particularly dear to me because it encapsulates the prospects of my generation of school-leavers. I was 16 when Mintoff gave this speech in 1981, outlining his plans to set up another organised gang of workers, this time called Id-Dejma, to provide work for the thousands of people aged between 18 and 25 who had no jobs. It reminds me why one of my best friends, privately educated, cried with relief when she found a job that paid Lm80 a month, standing behind a shop counter for nine hours a day dealing with rude customers. Or why one of my other best friends, also privately educated, rose at 5am to take two buses to a radiator factory where she began work at 7am, answering phones for Lm30 a week. And we were the lucky ones, who got our amazingly lucrative jobs laden with thrilling prospects through a network of parental contacts. Everybody else had to join Mintoff’s Dejma or live off their parents.

“Biex ma nhallux lil dan il-fjur ta’ pajjiz jintilef se nergghu nifthu korp iehor, differenti min ta’ qabel. Se jidhlu fih dawk ta’ bejn it-18 u l-25 sena. Ghal erbatax il-xahar biss, biex wara jsibu fl-industrija u jidhlu ohrajn flokhom. Din il-forza se jkun jisimha ‘id-dejma’, ghax irridu nfakru fl-antik. Fl-antik il-Maltin kienu ffurmaw id-dejma li kienu johorgu bil-lejl biex iharsu u jiddefendu lil-pajjizna. Kull sena se nibdew indahhlu forza biex nidefendu lil Malta.”

- Dom Mintoff addresses a meeting in Birkirkara, 31 May 1981

What vision! And then they say that this man was is-Salvatur ta’ Malta. No wonder they ended up with Alfred Sant, and foisted him on the rest of us.

How many times must I tell you the same thing, dear readers? The man just won’t go away. Alfred Sant is like one of those annoying trick candles that go on children’s birthday cakes: you think you’ve blown them out but they flare up again. Let me guess, now – most of you thought that he had retired gracefully from the limelight when he gave what you thought – mistakenly, alas – was his swansong press conference a couple of days after the election, when he was finally able to unglue his lips and admit that he had been trounced once more.

After all, he said that he had resigned irrevocably, didn’t he? And there I was, cynical little so-and-so that I am, convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that when parliament convened, he would pop back into our lives like one of those creatures that never dies. And sure enough, just when you thought that it was safe to get back in the water…

You have to admit that it’s almost funny. If you don’t look at the farcical side of all this, you’ll be forced to confront the fact that things have gone a little bit bananas, and that can get you down. It is beyond weird to see the same man addressing parliament, as leader of the opposition, after his fourth consecutive hammering at the polls. And then he has the brass neck to insist on the resignations of others who are in a far, far less embarrassing position than he is. Astonishingly, he isn’t embarrassed at all. Anybody else would have crept in covered in shame, or frankly, just stayed home and fed the chickens. But Sant just stood there and spoke as though the past 16 years haven’t happened.

His speech in parliament was a disturbing taste of what the Labour Party is going to be like for the next five years: Sant behaving as though it is still 1992, with his clone Joseph Muscat trying and failing to build a strong identity for himself in the dark shadow of the man who made him. Between now and 2013, the Labour Party is going to have two leaders, Alfred Sant and Joseph Muscat, and make no mistake about it: it’s Muscat, the official leader, who will be cast in the role of bridesmaid.

The few people who pounced on me for continuing to write about Alfred Sant in the aftermath of the election, on the grounds that he had ‘irrevocably resigned’ and should be left to rest in peace, must be wondering what’s going on. They must have looked at the photographs of him speaking in parliament as though he had never resigned at all, and said to themselves: “You’re kidding me, right?” Ah, but no – there’s no kidding involved. I really hate saying ‘I told you so’ because you got pummelled for that kind of thing in the playground, but here goes: I told you so.

Now that I am safe in the knowledge that there is no risk of his ever being prime minister again, unless he is going to be the wild card in the leadership election (nothing surprises me at this stage), I can dissect him for fun rather than out of necessity. The next few weeks should be most amusing.

Let’s begin with his shock-horror-x’gharukaza announcement that the government, using its power of incumbency of course, waived (not pardoned, for heaven’s sake, as reported in the newspapers) €2.6 million in income tax owed by 1,061 individuals. You may have failed to notice, as I who keep track of these things did, that this was the first time ever since Malta joined the Eurozone that Sant referred to a sum of money in euros rather than liri. Throughout the election campaign, whenever he mentioned money, it was in liri, as though admitting the fact of our new currency was something that stuck in his throat because he hadn’t agreed with it. All the proposals in his error-ridden electoral manifesto were calculated in round sums of liri, rather than round sums of euros.

So why did he suddenly decide to give the total sum of tax waived in euros rather than his pet liri as usual? Ah, my dear Watson – that’s because it multiplies the figure to something that sounds a lot more impressive. He reckoned without that irritating Daphne and her pesky calculator, who immediately sat down and did what the newspaper reporters should have done before getting too impressed. I worked out what that comes to as an average per head, and it’s a considerably less impressive €2450, or in Sant’s preferred currency, Lm1,052.

Now please tell me what is so damned shocking or extraordinary about waiving €2450 in contested taxes that have been due over several years, particularly if this was done to collect a much fuller sum. But Sant is using his old tricks once more – firing off claims and figures, secure in the knowledge that few people are going to look beneath the blast and bombast and actually analyse his claims. I’m sorry, but I’m not exactly going to keel over in shock if the Commissioner of Inland Revenue waives €2450 which Johnny down the road insists he doesn’t owe the taxman. As anybody knows, who runs a business and who has a brain somewhere there between his ears, it’s better to collect €20,000 immediately and to write off €2450 as a bad debt than to pursue €22,450 through the courts for 20 years, after which you might still very well end up with nothing.

Sant himself admitted as much when he said that the individual sums waived varied between €1000 (a paltry Lm420) and €10,000 (Lm4,292). If that was the highest figure waived, we’re not exactly talking about big cats, bigger cheeses and the barunijiet that appear to have been erased from Sant’s vocabulary. He acknowledged, too, that these sums were due over several years, so we’re not talking here about the Commissioner of Inland Revenue being ordered by the power-of-incumbency government to waive the current taxes of 1,061 party apparatchiks.

Exhaustingly, the man is still banging on about honesty and integrity, and this when he is prancing about in parliament, as leader of the opposition, after the general public booed him off the political stage four times in a row. Oh, but all of that wasn’t his fault, because as he has so carefully explained to us, he lost this election only because the government used its power of incumbency to buy votes. And what was his excuse the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that again? Clearly, he hadn’t yet turned up the phrase ‘power of incumbency’ while ploughing through his journals.

Read my lips, Alfred Sant: the Nationalist Party won the election because you were the leader of the Labour Party. Face that fact and let the country get on with the business of living. Go away, please, and leave us alone. What more will it take to drive home the message to you that you’re not wanted? Isn’t there some power of incumbency you might want to be getting on with up at Mile End?

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.

In one of the comments sections, somebody posted this quotation from an infamous speech by Dom Mintoff in December 1979, just two months after Malta endured its worst rain-storm ever, in which two people drowned. I’m re-posting it here because it perfectly encapsulates the Labour government’s approach to the ‘modernisation’ of Malta’s infrastructure.

“Ghandna progett iehor ukoll, li fih ahna rridu naghmlu li nistghu biex nghinu lil kullhadd halli nibnu tankijiet tal-gebel u mhux tal-hadid u anqas tal-konkos, biex nifrankaw il-flus li jmorru barra minn Malta. Mill-bejt, l-ilma jigri fit-tank tal-gebel li jkun fil-gholi u mit-tank tal-gebel imur fil-viti tal-kanna, ghall-ikel u ghax-xorb. Iz-zejjed jaqa fil-bir. Il-ministeru tax-xoghlijiet diga ghamel mudelli ta dawn it-tankijiet.”

- Dom Mintoff addresses the nation on 28 December 1979

Biography excerpted from Who is Angelo Farrugia? - ‘violet revolution in Giorgia’ and all. He must have had pink elephants on his mind at the time.

Anglu Farrugia has come up with a cunning plan to bring down the illegitimate government. He wants passive resistance and mass meetings every fortnight. After all, if Eddie Fenech Adami did it in the years 1981 to 1987, why can’t Joseph Muscat do the same in 2008 to 2013? That was a rhetorical question. We’re not all as interestingly-brained as Anglu Farrugia, who expounded these views in an interview on Super One radio earlier today.

Farrugia used the opportunity to tell his audience of plebeians that he is an expert in international law, who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Malta. Imagine being in your 50s and boasting about these things. Is it a disease that affects Labour’s big cheeses exclusively? Farrugia took the trouble of explaining, for the benefit of those plebs, what magna cum laude means.

Well, here’s another one who’s divorced from reality. Does he honestly think that what people really, really want is another run of boycotts, partisan hatred, Sunday outings to mass meetings, the preaching of fear and hatred, attempts at bringing down the government, and lots of other jolly ideas that destabilise the economy? All this when a factory that employs 2,200 is threatening to shut down its operation here?

These people are nuts.

Last Friday’s performance at the Labour Party points to a fundamental schism that has now become a chasm. This is what divides the typical, old-style Laburisti, who make up the majority of party delegates and supporters, from the truly new Labour element that is far, far removed from the fictitiously ‘new’ Labour of Alfred Sant.

George Abela is not just another leadership contender, but the representative of a particular strain of thinking within the Labour Party. This is the pro-active, positive-thinking, can-do, chip-free element that is light years away from the negative, resentful, fearful, anti-change, no-clue-how-things-should-be-done, they-owe-me-a-living attitude of almost everyone else within that party.

I can usually guess which way somebody votes by his or her attitude to life in general. Sometimes I’m wrong, but only sometimes - because on the whole, people who are energetic and who have initiative, who are pro-active and outward-looking, who enjoy challenges and who understand that no one owes them a living, who strive to improve their lot through their own hard work, determination and efforts, who are enthusiastic for more and better work, tend to vote Nationalist. Those who are brimful of resentment, who think that they are owed something by somebody somewhere, who are negative, defeatist, fearful of change, envious of others yet who won’t go out of their way to improve their own lives, tend to vote Labour.

This is a generalisation, but it is far from a gross generalisation. It is actually a very safe one. Of course, there are exceptions, as with everything else, especially when you consider that so many people here vote out of habit or in line with family tradition. But on the whole, I usually find that proactive people with initiative are attracted to the Nationalist Party while negative and defeatist people with personal resentments and chips on their shoulder are attracted to the Labour Party.

This is the reason why young people from Labour families start voting Nationalist when they go into tertiary education or begin to develop successful lives and careers. Labour politicians have gone on record as saying that they think this is because these young people are ashamed of being associated with Labour as they see it as the partit tal-hamalli. Oh, how wrong they are. It’s not that at all, but goes much deeper. A person who comes from a Labour working-class background but who strives for wider horizons, a broader outlook, and a more interesting life with a good career has the aspirations and the attitude that align him or her to the Nationalist Party, and not to Labour. People from working-class Labour backgrounds who want to get ahead in life vote Nationalist not because of shame but because of politics, policies and beliefs.

Labour has become a party for losers, and I don’t mean that in the electoral sense. The Nationalists, on the other hand, have somehow managed to become a party for can-doers and winners. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) exhortation that underpins virtually every message coming out of the Nationalist Party and the governments it has formed over the last 21 years is essentially this: ‘You can do it. Stride right in and conquer.’ Labour’s message over the equivalent period? ‘You can’t do it. It’s impossible. You will never survive.’ This is the main reason why the two parties have come to attract completely different kinds of people, and why the George Abela faction is in such an unwanted minority within the Labour Party.

Friday’s meeting was a metaphor for all of this. The George Abela faction is made up entirely - at least, as far as I can observe - of go-getting people with initiative who have made something of their lives and who are acutely sensitive to the new direction that Labour must take if it is to equip itself for the 21st century. At the Friday meeting, this faction was clearly distinct from the rest in terms of content and delivery of speeches, manner of dress and general attitude. It is the faction that represents the only viable future for Labour, but sadly, it seems to have been consigned to the past already.

So isn’t Joseph Muscat one of those go-getting people with initiative, then? Well, yes - and no. A mysterious ingredient is missing. While it is undeniable that he is rabidly ambitious and all out to get to the top, there is something there, or perhaps something not there, which slots him into a different category entirely to the ‘can-do’ people I’m talking about. I get a weird sense that the man is going through the motions as though he’s acting a part in a play, without really grasping what it’s all about - like somebody who is sitting for an examination having learned all the texts by rote but without truly getting a handle on them, so all he can do is repeat what was learned by heart rather than interpreting what was learned. I would definitely slot him into the Old Labour category along with Alfred Sant, because Old Labour wasn’t just about violence and corruption but also about one’s attitude to life.

Labour’s delegates have voted against widening the leadership election to take in party members. Only the naïve, or those who have scant understanding of human nature, would be surprised. This is not to say that those who tried to push the vote through are either of those things, but at this stage, I really don’t know what they were thinking.

What we have here is a situation in which a select group of people with decision-making powers, which they safeguard zealously, have been asked to vote on sharing those powers with another 19,000 people. And of course, they used that vote to deliver a resounding No. No, we don’t want to share our toys. No, because being one of the select few who can determine the future of the Labour Party and thence, of the country, gives us a sense of importance. No, because we won’t feel that important if we’re one of 20,000 rather than one of 900. No, because you insulted us by saying that you don’t trust us to make the right choice. No, no, and no again.

Look at it clinically, and you’ll see that asking people to vote to share their powers and privileges is bound to get a negative result. From birth, people don’t like to share. The average toddler would rather see his toy car confiscated than be forced to share it with a little friend. It goes on through the different stages of life. That’s why the biblical story of Solomon threatening to divide the baby in half is so potent. That’s what it’s all about.

So 165 party delegates voted to share and 620 voted not to share. Some commentators have said that this is because they want to ensure that Joseph Muscat will become leader, and widening the electoral base to party members might bring in George Abela instead. I don’t think so. It’s a whole lot more primeval than that. The delegates are protecting their own interests and privileges. That’s all.

Somewhere in the course of the evening, I received a text message from a journalist friend there in the Labour arena where the big debate was going on: “I wish you were here. I feel like I’m in a theatre with a stand-up comedy act every 10 minutes.” Well, I didn’t wish I was there because my sense of humour tends to evaporate in these situations. I would have been aware every step of the way that this was how our potential prime minister was being chosen. Labour councillor Michael Cohen spoke to great applause. The party couldn’t possibly organise an election among 19,000 people in just 27 days, he said. I tend to agree with him there, given that the party couldn’t organise an election campaign or manifesto for an election for which it had had at least five years’ notice.

Somebody called Joe Fsadni stood up to say that delegates should vote against the motion lest they seem to be washing their hands of the responsibility for electing a decent leader, “like Pontius Pilate did with Jesus Christ.” Oh, for heaven’s sake. Lots of loud muttering later, they gave a standing ovation to the absent Alfred Sant, he who led them onwards and upwards to nothing and took 16 years to do it. But then, they were bound to applaud their own choice. The strongest argument against allowing delegates to choose a party leader is the reality of Sant, but when people are confronted with the stupidity of their own choices, they dig their heels in and become defensive.

The new Labour MP Marlene Pullicino put forward the motion in favour of widening the electoral base. The tone of her speech revealed that for the best part of the last 20 years she supported the Nationalist Party, switching to Labour only after the EU membership issue was decided (she voted in favour). By then, her marriage to Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando had collapsed and she had set up home with another man, which fact has provoked a cynical response of religious inconsistency to her protestations, during an interview, that she will vote against divorce because she is a Catholic. Dr Pullicino revealed that she doesn’t really understand the mindset of a party she joined as a fairly recent convert. She still thinks like a Nationalist.

“When were Laburisti ever scared of change?” she asked her audience. Well, I’m sorry, but that would be for most of the last 30 years or so. The Labour Party has morphed into the most conservative political grouping in the country, beating the Nationalist Party which now remains conservative only in terms of conformity to the dominant religion, which is bad enough.

“The aim is to have a strong leader who will take us to victory and push the Nationalists out of government,” Dr Pullicino said. Ah, but here’s the thing. Her idea of a strong leader is the Nationalist idea of a strong leader, which is why she thinks that George Abela is the obvious choice by far, as I and thousands of others who are not Laburisti do. Dr Pullicino is thinking like a Nationalist – in other words, she is making an intelligent and pragmatic decision as to who is most likely to pull in the floaters and the doubters – and not like a Laburista iffissata, who doesn’t understand how The Others think. Marlene Pullicino knows exactly how The Others think, because she was one of them for a long time. “Use your minds and not your hearts,” she enjoined her audience – uselessly, as it turns out, because it all depends on what kind of minds we’re talking about here.

The resounding defeat of that motion, which is now linked in the public and party mind with George Abela – indeed, Dr Pullicino is one of his champions – tells us that Abela, like the motion, will be resoundingly defeated too. You can argue that he put himself to the vote before actually putting himself to the vote. What we had here was a test-run. The delegates were put out by his motion and they are put out by him.

Abela took a big risk with this one, but it doesn’t seem to have been a calculated risk. He didn’t stand any chance of pushing his motion through because people don’t vote to limit their powers and privileges, but to increase them or to stop them being shared or restricted. By pushing for this motion, he alienated the delegates by more or less saying that he doesn’t have confidence in their judgement. This means that they’re not exactly going to trip over themselves to vote for him now, no matter how hard he campaigns. So insisting on widening the electoral base to members never had the slightest chance of getting him that wider electorate he needed, and at the same time, it lost him the only electorate he was ever going to have.

Joseph Muscat can smirk all the way to 5 June, and the rest of us had better become accustomed to the sight of that self-satisfied face because we’re going to be seeing lots more of Alfred Sant Mark II, with the same mannerisms, the same verbal tics, and the same shirt-cuffs hanging halfway down the hand because the arms are too short or the sleeves are too long, and there appear to be no bespoke shirt-makers in Brussels. No. The Labour Party doesn’t like change.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.