We are intol(l)erant of criticism

If more proof were needed that the Labour Party doesn’t understand the important role played by criticism, here it is. Alfred Mifsud has reminded us today (in a report in The Times) that in 2003 the party’s Board of Vigilance and Discipline (the name alone is enough) had give him a formal warning after he wrote newspaper articles that criticized the Labour Party, Alfred Sant, and his decision to stay on following all those defeats. This warning more or less expelled him from the party for the grave misdemeanour of telling it what was wrong with it.

No wonder Labour can’t reform, and will have won only one electoral majority of votes in almost four decades by the time we get to the next general election. With this Josef Stalin approach to its internal and external politics, it is dead in the water.

Now Alfred Mifsud wants to return to the fold, though he is not committing himself publicly to whether he will be in the electoral race or not. But to return to the fold, he has to have somebody open the gate. So he has written to the people who warned him to ask them to take him back, now that Sant is no longer a deterrent (ah, but he is).

“Time has proven me right,” Alfred Mifsud told The Times. “It is now clear that I was not at all trying to damage the party but was trying to avert more damage. I have now asked the board to reconsider the warning it had issued. After that, we’ll see.” In his position, I would have told them where to stuff their warning, and wouldn’t have gone back on it. But the Labour Party needs his in-put so maybe he’s right to eat humble pie and beg forgiveness. I don’t know. To me, it just says a hell of a lot about what’s wrong with Labour that it has this kind of ‘vigilance and discipline’ board to police internal criticism and dissent.

Pariahs and outcasts

If the Labour Party considers all those who criticize it constructively to be pariahs and outcasts, or ‘helping the other side’, then the party just hasn’t entered the post-Stalin age and can’t function in 2008 (as though we needed more proof of that). I have spent the past four years tearing the Nationalist Party, government and senior figures to shreds for a variety of reasons, but that hasn’t made me a pariah to the party, and some of my criticism might actually have been taken on board. It is because the Nationalist Party is forever listening and monitoring, changing and evolving, that it has survived so well and is nothing like the Nationalist Party of 30 or 40 years ago. Labour, on the other hand, has remained unchanged. True, I am not a politician like Alfred Mifsud, only a newspaper columnist. But I can’t imagine that if a Labour-supporting newspaper columnist were to criticize the Labour Party on a regular basis and on matters that deserve criticism, she would ever have a hope of entering Mile End again, unless it is under police escort.

I agree wholeheartedly with Alfred Mifsud (and also with Dominic Fenech, who wrote in a similar vein in L-orizzont a couple of days ago) that the Labour Party should now choose its leader carefully, and not in a rush to fill the gap. Labour should learn the lessons of Maltese political history, more particularly those taught by the istory of the Nationalist Party over the last three decades: that it almost doesn’t matter what the party is like, because you can only swing it when you have a brilliant and charismatic leader, the kind who magnetizes crowds and inspires audiences with hope and faith in their future. The Nationalist Party managed to produce the man for the moment in 1981 and again in 2004. Each time, the person chosen first came across as a nonentity, and then evolved into a powerfully compelling figure. That’s really because what is needed in a situation like this is a relatively unknown person who can be shaped, moulded and allowed to grow into the person to suit the times. The last thing a political party needs is a new leader who is a known and disliked face already. People fall into the trap of mentioning such contenders for the leadership, but they really are non-starters. Joseph Muscat? Evarist Bartolo? Marie Louise Coleiro? Anglu Farrugia? Oh sure – that will really help Nationalist supporters to relax in 2013. I hope the Labour Party isn’t going to make the signal error, once more, of choosing a ‘Labour leader’ rather than a Maltese prime minister.

Alfred Mifsud had more to say, but I get the feeling that he will be ignored by the ostriches with their heads in the sand (so many birds – chickens, peacocks, albatrosses, ostriches – so little time!). “The party should be open to people outside as well as within – Labour supporters and the electorate in general,” he said. “The problem with the 2003 decision to reappoint Dr Sant after he had been rejected in the general election was that the decision defied the electorate, which is why Labour is in the position it is in today.” Damned right – but the main problem I can see now is that Labour has nothing to choose from. All the names being bandied about are no-hopers and non-starters. True, Labour can try to work the magic like the Nationalist Party did so successfully, but the starting-point is good raw material. And it just isn’t there.

When choosing a party leader, Labour – and the rest of us – must picture this person as a prime minister, sitting in the prime ministerial chair and doing prime ministerial things, meeting other prime ministers and having prime ministerial discussions. A Labour leader isn’t just a Labour leader. We may have forgotten this fact due to the party’s absence from government for so long, but he or she is also a would-be prime minister. The moment you see the contenders in this context, they fall at the first hurdle. They just don’t have what it takes, nor will they ever do so, no matter how many magic wands are waved. It takes more than a magic wand to command respect.

Hurry up, Harry – and go

Harry Vassallo thinks he has won the election because AD’s votes added to those of the Labour Party together exceed those of the party that is governing. He calls it ‘a minority government’. His foot-soldiers are currently engaged in spinning this all over the Internet as the latest AD buzz-phrase, to replace ‘coalition works’ and ‘single-party dictatorship’.

How tiresome they are. It is like hearing somebody forever nagging in the background or yapping on the sidelines, trying to prove a fatuous point. Given AD’s reasoning, a government is a ‘minority government’ if the party scores less than 50% of votes cast. Some of them are even saying that it does not represent the people of Malta, because taken together there were more who didn’t vote, who voted Labour or for AD, Norman Lowell or AN. With this kind of creative accounting, they should be filling in the boss’s VAT returns. Instead, they sound like Alfred Sant explaining to us why partnership won the referendum.

To render more palatable the fact that he has wasted the best part of his life, just as Alfred Sant has done, Harry Vassallo is going through the psychological process of rewriting ‘the narrative’ in his mind. Unfortunately, he is also writing it on his keyboard and emailing it to The Times for publication. Some of it appeared the day before yesterday. I have no doubt there will be lots more.

Apparently, the Greens increased their support by ‘nearly 100 per cent’ since the 2003 general election, despite scoring only 3,810 votes from all 13 districts in this one. I’ve tried punching the buttons on my calculator all kinds of ways, but I still can’t work this one out. As one man advised an AD activist who had been haranguing over the Internet with this kind of reasoning that 3,810 votes taken all over Malta is ‘a quota’, AD’s only hope now is to issue a directive to all its 3,810 supporters to go and live in Sliema.

Harry is ever so cross because TVM reported his resignation with those of Alfred Sant the thrice-defeated Labour leader and Josie Muscat ‘shaking the dust off his sandals.’ But for ‘the Greens’ – sorry, Harry, but the last time I looked, the party was called Alternattiva Demokratika, and that’s how it was listed on my ballot-sheet – it wasn’t a defeat at all. Oh no. It was a victory. Harry is still ‘fighting fit’ because he has given his ‘giant adversaries a tremendous run for their money’. Another ostrich, I see: no Harry, you didn’t give the parties a run for their money, you put the 140,000-plus electors who voted for the Nationalist Party into a state of high tension, and you won’t be forgiven easily for doing so.

But Harry doesn’t see this, and if he does, then he doesn’t mind. He clearly thinks of himself as a heroic figure not just in his own mind but also in reality. Some of his statements are beginning to seem increasingly delusional, like extracts from the Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. Just read this piece from his victory panegyric last Friday: “Life is about living and Greens live gloriously. What a fight it has been! What a glorious fight. There are 3,810 of us who have been confirmed resilient to fear and propaganda blatant and subliminal. Perhaps I was born a snob” – yes, Harry, I’m afraid you were, are and will forever be one, and that’s the main source of your problems: the combination of a superiority complex with an absence of skill, talent and ability – “but I am grinning with pride in being Green. The few we are and the more massive the hysteria, the taller I stand. Ninety-eight point seven per cent of the voting population may take offence at it, but I find it hard to hide my satisfaction in not being counted among them. My bond with our splendid core support is unbreakable. What rare, terrific people they are!”

Well, if they’re so rare and terrific, get a team of them to fill in your VAT returns so that you can get that presidential pardon you were after.

Ah, but there’s more. Harry tells us that he spent the last 36 years of his life ‘in Opposition’, but he fails to explain how that might be, given that he never had a seat on either side of the house. I suppose what he means is that he segued from being against the Labour government between 1971 and 1987 to being against the Nationalist government between 1987 and 2008, and that he was against the Labour government again between 1996 and 1998. Coming from somebody who is claiming victory in this election with 1.8% of the vote, nothing surprises me.

Labour buys Harry a few drinks

In one of my columns just before the general election, I quoted an extract from Herbert Ganado’s Rajt Malta Tinbidel, in which he describes how he and Robby Borg Olivier bought Mabel some drinks after the general election that followed the collapse of the unworkable coalition government of 1953. The Nationalists got into government in that election because of a scenario similar to what we almost had last Sunday, when there was the possibility of Labour getting into government on a minority of votes and a majority of seats because of AD. In that election, the Nationalists won by default. Because of the ‘third party’ factor put up by the Constitutional Party, Mintoff’s Labour Party got the majority of votes while the Nationalist Party got the majority of seats – and the government. And that is why they bought Mabel Strickland rounds of drinks – though in those straitened times it was more likely to have been a thimbleful of sherry.

I recalled this passage from the book when I read Harry Vassallo’s description of history repeating itself last Friday. He had parked by the Naxxar parish church on his way to the counting-hall. The Labour Party club is just across the road from the church. Harry wrote of the Labour supporters who were already celebrating victory in the morning outside the club: “It took just a moment to walk back around the church to my car but the crowd was now waiting for me. I could not refuse their invitation to a drink at the bar. They too were warm, loving and sincere. If anyone there took a picture, I want a copy. I stood with my back to the bar while my hand was pumped during Labour’s brief foretaste of victory. It was surreal but beautiful.”

It was surreal but beautiful. Oh, my. Of course they loved him for one brief moment while celebrating the victory they had been told was theirs. Labour supporters understood what so many people in Sliema and Swieqi couldn’t: how the electoral system was going to work in favour of the Labour Party because of AD machinations and the absence of a correcting mechanism with more than two parties elected to the house. Harry Vassallo was Labour’s Trojan horse – an unwitting (or witless) one perhaps, and they knew it.

What can I say? In this general election, we had six party leaders, and only one of them appeared not to need a spell on the couch. The electorate chose wisely, because he’s the prime minister now.

Another one who’s going to keep us guessing

The only reason Sant called that press conference to say he is resigning was to pre-empt matters and prepare the way for his survival. Even he knows that the party machine is not going to tolerate him sitting tight through a fourth consecutive hammering. So he mollified them by resigning irrevocably. Soothed and reassured by this, they will not object now to his continued presence among them ‘until things are sorted out’. This despite the wisdom nagging in the sensible half of their brain that a political leader who resigns is like a managing director who resigns: he doesn’t stay on in the office pottering about and keeping an eye on things. He clears his desk, removes the family photographs, hands back the keys, the company car and his other perks, and goes home, his relationship with the company severed completely.

Creative means of persuasion might have to be used, like the letter making dirty accusations against Lino Spiteri, which reached the Labour Party machine just in time to put a rocket under his rival candidature in the leadership election of 1992, leaving the way open for one A. Sant.

Unable to fulfil his ambition himself, as he will not be allowed to stay on as leader, Sant will fulfil it through a poodle on a lead. This is unlikely to be the poodle with the ginger beard in Brussels, but it might be another sort. Part of his strategy will be to anoint that successor and ensure that the konferenza generali votes him in.

It’s not as though we haven’t been there before. When Mintoff resigned, he ensured that his successor was a puppet prince. Then he stayed on in the backbenches, making his presence felt. Why do I get the feeling that the same thing is going to happen now? Sant might do it with more cunning and finesse than Mintoff did, but he is still going to do it. He has no life or role to go back to, and this type of character is unable to relinquish the aims and ambitions, the certitudes, in which his entire identity is bound up – not at this late stage in the game, anyway. Sant will survive – unless Labour closes ranks against him.

So having exhausted his options as leader, Alfred Sant now intends to be a kingmaker and a power behind the throne. For those who wished to read them, he has put some of his cards on the table already. At his resignation press conference, when asked whether he would resign from his parliamentary seat and make a clean break with the party, he said that he may or may not do so when he knows who the new leader of the party is (because the new leader might wish him to stay on in a ‘consulting role’). The country is going to be treated to resignation by degree.

A credible resignation is one in which the party leader packs his bags and leaves, and not one in which he stays on, hanging about and meddling in affairs. And that’s why I just don’t find Alfred Sant’s resignation in the slightest bit credible. If he is managing the organisation of the general conference and monitoring the candidates, then he hasn’t really resigned at all. It was yet another mise-en-scene to throw us off the scent.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.