Lots of hard feelings

The Labour MP Helena Dalli has had an article called ‘141,888 imweġġgħin’ published in L-orizzont.

You will deduce that the 141,888 in question are the people who voted Labour in this last election. I ask myself why they could possibly be hurt, given that you only get a voting document when you are over 18, and grown-ups are supposed to understand that they must cope with the consequences of their actions rather than blaming others.

Voting Labour when Labour is clearly unfit to govern, and when the party is still led by serial loser Alfred Sant is something that you do to yourself (and to the country) and not something that is done to you.

I struggle past the strange characters of the incompatible Maltese font on the L-orizzont website, which makes reading an exercise in deciphering a code, and discover that Helena is cross because Labour politicians are now seeking to dissociate themselves from policies and methods that they think might have led to their electoral downfall.

She wants to know why they didn’t speak out before if this is what they were thinking. Oh, I imagine that would have something to do with the culture of nodding to the sound of His Master’s Voice, and the fear of voicing dissent lest they be cast out into the wilderness by the Board of Vigilance and Discipline. My observation is that there wasn’t much of a discussion thing going on up at Labour HQ.

And sure enough, here’s Helena, in translation because of that nuisance font.

Those who persist in disagreeing with the dominant opinion in the party, and who fail to convince with their own views, would do best to leave the party. There were instances where this happened, and that makes for personal credibility.

I agree that it makes for greater credibility. I agree that those who disagreed and departed are taken far more seriously by all but those with a closed partisan mentality, while the nodding dogs tend to be despised. I agree that those who carried on nodding while silently disagreeing are not worth a cent and cannot be considered to have backbone or leadership qualities.

But I don’t agree with this ‘all or nothing’ approach that takes such an extreme view of policy-building. With its high drama and its far-out positions, it is not just electors that the Labour Party has been forcing into a corner, but also its own officials and key people.

Mrs Dalli says that silence is preferable to washing the party’s dirty laundry in public. How wrong she is. Silence is a killer. It’s not golden, but a cancerous tumour that eats away from within, as anyone who wakes up to find that his perfect spouse has run out on their perfect marriage tends to discover. A party the size of the Labour Party has to learn how to do what the Nationalist Party has been doing for years. It has to learn how to handle criticism in public forums by its prominent and less prominent politicians and past and present members of the executive. That makes for strength. Fostering a seething and resentful silence makes for weakness. But we have already seen that.

Mrs Dalli’s argument that the sight and sound of Labour politicians bickering about what went wrong continues to heap further hurt on the 141,888 people who voted for them is misplaced. That hurt is not the result of bickering, but the feeling of being let down and cheated by a party that promised a sweeping victory and red flags at Castile Palace. Now these electors realise that their chosen party had no hard-and-fast surveys to back up their optimism, no proper campaign strategy, and no real policies. It’s come as a bit of a shock.

Mrs Dalli was spot on when she said that those who went along with the party’s policies before the election, because they were convinced of victory, and who are now distancing themselves from those policies because they lost, are rendering themselves ridiculous. It’s one thing admitting that you were mistaken and that you regret this. It’s another thing going all out to pretend that you had nothing to do with it. Those who want to turn themselves into a political sideshow, she wrote, belong in a circus. And those who are seeking an even higher position in the party after having failed so miserably in a lower one are beyond belief. I agree with her there, too. Imagine making a mess of the job of deputy leader and then putting yourself forward for consideration as leader. It’s incredible. Or having skated into the party as Alfred Sant’s pocket-dog and then claiming that you represent a new vision for Labour – well, that’s incredible, too.