Ninety-Nine L-A-B-O-U-R

Sometimes I wonder how news reporting works in this country. Yesterday, the newspapers carried a court report detailing the fact that One Productions Ltd has lost the legal battle to use the trademark One for its embryonic mobile telephony business. The trademark had been registered already by another telecommunications company called One Telecom Ltd, and the judge decided that this latter entity had a prior claim to it by virtue of chronology (he’s right).

The court report was published on the inside pages of the newspapers like all other court reports which deal with the prosaic unpleasantness of daily life: men who’ve beaten their wives, others who have knocked somebody down while drunk, teenagers who have stolen handbags, and café owners who put too many tables outside their café. I was so astonished that I had to read the pieces twice. The Labour Party is going into the mobile telephony business and the news isn’t even in the headline, let alone on the front page.

One of the newspapers didn’t even bother explaining for the benefit of its readers the fact that One Productions Ltd is the telecommunications arm of the Labour Party, which operates (Super) One television and radio. Those readers, unless they made the connection themselves because they keep abreast of such things, would have cast a bored eye over the brief piece and thought it about nothing more significant than yet another tedious battle over rights between one business and another.

It would have been nice to see the story put into context, bulked up with the essential background, and stuck on the front page, along with comments from the Labour Party, the Nationalist Party, Vodafone and Go, because this really means something. I’m one of those who had hoped that the years to come would see the political parties engaging in a process of ‘nuclear disarmament’, divesting themselves of the television and radio stations that are a drain on funds, time and skills. These have become money-hungry monsters and too many of the parties’ resources have had to be diverted towards servicing them. They are not revenue-earners but revenue-eaters, and the political parties have justified this vast haemorrhage of cash by insisting that they have few other ways of getting their message across. Unilateral disarmament is out of the question: if one party has broadcasting weapons, the other party is going to need them too. Now mobile telephony has entered the arms race.

I have nothing against the idea, as such, of television and radio stations owned by political parties. My primary objections have to do with the fact that they so often seem to be used to further ignorance rather than to alleviate it, and that they sap the resources of the political parties, causing the party bosses to worry about how to pay these particular bills when they should be concentrating on making policy and preparing themselves (at least in one case) for running the country.

A few months ago, Toni Abela – who has since been elected deputy leader – suggested in a newspaper interview that the Labour Party should think of its voters in terms of a market base, and come up with ideas for selling to them, using party loyalty as a hook. The idea which he used as an example, demonstrating just how little he knows about business, was for a Labour supermarket. Leaving aside the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand that a political party is in the business of making policy and trying to implement it, not in the business of running supermarkets and selling food and lavatory cleaner to its loyal voters, the core thinking is all wrong. People choose their supermarket on the basis of convenience, proximity, range of products and price. I go to the supermarket down the road because it’s there, the aisles are nice and wide, and it sells what I want to buy at a reasonable price. If the Nationalist Party opened a supermarket in Sliema, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to my choices.

People will boycott a supermarket because of who owns it, but they will not choose it on that basis. Food shopping is a large slice of the family budget, takes up a lot of time, and these are more important considerations. So a Labour supermarket, and then only if its prices are good, will end up selling to those who vote Labour and who live no more than a very short drive away.

I would like to see the Labour Party take up Abela’s idea, just for the hours of fun it would give me. There’s endless scope for speculation on clever marketing tricks. They could have large cut-outs of Joseph Muscat standing next to a two-for-the-price-of-one discount bin of corned beef, for example: ‘Doctor Joseph Muscat jiekol Buster Bully Beef darbtejn fil-gimgha.’ They could stick little torca flags in all the big cheeses in the delicatessen counter, or have special days when Michelle Muscat mans one of the check-out tills. They can sell Anglu Farrugia loaves baked on the premises, and stick Jason Micallef in the toothpaste aisle. They can stick pictures of the famous twins with extraordinary names right down the nappy aisle, and have Toni Abela himself, performing that famous pre-electoral Super One act of his, walking around like a robot wearing a pair of giant pilot’s gloves and joking about ‘par idejn sodi’.

Instead, the Labour Party has chosen to go into mobile telephony, having no doubt rationalised it on the basis of what it imagines to be its captive audience of loyal Labour supporters, which means around half the population. I wouldn’t put it past the Labour Party to go into business with neither a business plan nor a survey of the market – not that the Labour Party has a reliable reputation where the interpretation of survey results is concerned, so it probably wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference anyway. The Labour Party no doubt imagines that there is a lot of money to be made here, enough to start knocking down the debts which it has ratcheted up over the years.

But there’s more: mobile telephony is not like a supermarket. It does not eat up a great deal of your earnings and does not demand that you drive there once a week for two hours of excruciating tedium and physical exertion. Switching to another mobile telephony provider is a simple matter that no longer involves changing your number, so people switch simply on the basis of price. With the entry into the market of the Labour Party, there will be another factor for switching: political loyalty. This means that the Labour Party doesn’t even have to offer a lower price to encourage large numbers of people to switch to its – now nameless – service. All it has to do is match the lowest price on the market. Labour voters will reason that, like for like, they might as well pay their money to the Labour Party, and they’ll switch. Almost everyone has a mobile telephone in Malta but most of these are on the prepaid system and don’t really care about excellent roaming connections when they travel. They’re content with the ability to make and receive telephone calls and send and receive text messages in Malta. Then, of course, we’ll begin with the usual targeting of companies by Labour’s heavy-hitting fixers, trying to persuade them to switch the company mobile phones to Labour Mobajl. I don’t even want to think about it. It’s bad enough that when you advertise on Super One, the NET people call for the same ad, and vice versa, and the same with the newspapers.

The Labour Party will not just be hoping for revenue from mobile telephony, but for strategic gain. Data Protection Act or not – and the political parties seem to be the only organisations who think that it doesn’t apply to them – the party will know for certain that its telephony subscribers are Labour voters or what I call ditherers. The ditherers themselves prefer the word ‘floaters’, which somehow puts me in mind of those things one sometimes comes up against in public lavatories. They will encourage prepaid clients to register their numbers, which will give the party their names and addresses, but in any case they will have their numbers, and can use them to mass-message when appropriate. Preaching to the converted is a very important part of political campaigning, because it helps keep them on side.

The interesting question is whether the Nationalist Party will think it necessary to keep up in this particularly unappetising arms race – Malta’s very own Star Wars. As for me, if Labour can match Vodafone’s price and excellent global coverage, I might think of switching, just for the sheer hell of it. Foxing people is fun. I might even change my number to 99522687 to camp it up on the Joseph bandwagon (I love that sort of thing), but I imagine some sucker’s got it already, which means that no time soon will I be enjoying myself giving my number as Ninety-Nine L-A-B-O-U-R, the American way. On second thoughts, I’ve had the same number for around 16 years and I rather like it, so I’ll leave Ninety-Nine L-A-B-O-U-R to Jason.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.