The tide not taken

Reading reports of the president’s speech at a conference marking the first five years of Malta’s EU membership, I was reminded of what I had thought a year ago when Labour delegates chose Joseph Muscat over him as party leader.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;” Brutus tells Cassius in Julius Caesar as they debate battle tactics. “Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

It is one of William Shakespeare’s most perspicacious observations on how our recognition of a major opportunity, when it presents itself, and our decision to seize it or not, will – rather than could – affect the course of our lives fundamentally and permanently.

The decision to choose Joseph Muscat rather than George Abela will have this far-reaching effect on the fortunes of the Labour Party and, hence, on those of the country. Though this was obvious to many people of different political persuasions at the time, it was not so to just enough party delegates to swing the decision and seal the party’s fate, bounding it in shallows and in miseries.

There seems to be little doubt that Labour will win the next general election by default, and that this would have happened even with a one-eyed Martian at its head. Consumed as the party and its most fervent supporters are by the rabid desire to get into government and to seize power as an end in itself, not one of them appears to be worrying about what comes afterwards. It is easy to extrapolate from the present: what will come afterwards is confusion and amateurish fudging, policy made on the hoof and opportunistic gambles.

Even now, when technically it is on a roll, the Labour Party struggles to convince us that it is fit for purpose, that purpose being government.

Muscat and Labour are in the lead not because increasingly large numbers of people truly believe that Joseph Muscat, Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela will be brilliant at the job of running the country, but because more and more people have reached the point of stagnation, and feel that they are bobbing about in those miserable Shakespearean shallows, asking themselves: ‘Is this all there is to it? What next?’ The personal invariably becomes the political, and when people begin to search for the next big thing in their private lives, they blame it on the absence of a next big thing to look forward to in the public life of their country.

When George Abela spoke at that conference a couple of days ago, I was overcome by waves of regret for the sheer wasted opportunity, rejected on behalf of the country by a couple of hundred people whose decision has bound this country’s foreseeable political future in shallows and in misery.

Deprived of a worthy and equal opponent, and presented instead with a former Super One reporter of no great substance, the prime minister has to fight against slipping into below-par performance. Faced with an Opposition made up of such incredible choices as George ‘Allahares nidhlu fl-Ewropa’ Vella as spokesman on EU Affairs and former 1980s police inspector Anglu Farrugia as spokesman on justice, the government has to battle the temptation to slip into mediocrity.

We are stuck in those shallows, and it is creating political misery that can only grow worse as the dread day nears when we wake up to find George Vella as foreign minister and Anglu Farrugia as minister of justice.

It is not only the general political life of the country that has been made so much more unpleasant by the Labour Party’s choice of the ineffectual and not particularly bright Joseph Muscat. It is the life of the party itself. A person like Muscat cannot make change because he lacks the moral or personal authority to do so.

Psychologically, he is a follower and not a leader and he is driven by the need to please and to make no enemies. There was no chance that the earthquake he promised would ever materialise because earthquakes spell death for some and Muscat wants everyone to love him. I have no doubt he believes that if he smiles at me enough, even I will come to admire him. A year later, even Jason Micallef is glued to his hip.

That, however, is just one of the main reasons he cannot get people to think and behave differently. The other main reason is that he is like them, and thinks as they do. Because it was precisely that system and structure which got him where he is today, he can’t change it. He is part of the system that made him.

Muscat’s current struggles to convince us that the Labour Party has never been against EU membership but only against this or that aspect of it are now verging on the pathetically risible. His words lack the ring of conviction, because those other words – “Partnership won the referendum” – are still ringing in our ears.

Many of us have clear memories of Muscat presenting a weekly programme on Super One, called Made in Brussels (but pronounced Made in Brussel) in which he sought to warn us of the grave dangers of EU membership.

Muscat may work hard to persuade us that he underwent a Damascene conversion while working in the European Parliament, but that still leaves the rest of the party hierarchy, its officials, delegates and the 140,000 or so electors who voted for what they firmly believed to be an anti-EU party.

Labour’s spokesman on EU Affairs remains as anti-EU as he ever was. “L-Ewropa li dahhaltuna fiha,” he told foreign minister Tonio Borg on television a couple of weeks ago. Those were hardly the words of a sworn enthusiast.

It didn’t take a tremendous amount of political foresight and strategic skill to understand that when faced with a leadership choice between a man who had worked to help Malta join the EU and a man who had worked to keep Malta out, those Labour delegates should have chosen the former and made the party’s life so much easier. But they acted consistently and in line with their beliefs – and really, who can blame them?

They chose the anti-EU candidate because he reflected their line of thought and the pro-EU candidate did not. So Muscat won and Abela didn’t and the net result is that the Labour Party, instead of taking the tide that leads on to fortune, is now becalmed in the shallows, an anti-EU party led by an anti-EU campaigner trying to carve out a role for themselves in an EU member state.

It is not just because Muscat hasn’t got what it takes in leadership skills and grey matter that the party is in serious difficulties now. It is also because of its confused and confusing messages on Europe. Its EU spokesman continues to bristle with resentment towards the EU, which he doesn’t bother to hide. Its leader tells us that “with hindsight” he realises that the Yes vote might have won the referendum.

The party’s various officials and candidates alternate between suspicion of the EU, antagonism towards it and blaming it for all our ills, while at the same time adopting the attitude of ‘Heqq, we’re in it now so we have to accept it.’

There is the world of difference between seeing that Malta’s prospects within the EU are tremendous while its prospects outside it were dire, and reluctantly accepting the ‘reality of EU membership’ as the will of the people, while taking as your declared political stance ‘making sure the EU doesn’t cheat us’ and ‘now that we’re in it, we’re going to make sure that we can get what we can out of it.’

The tragedy of Labour’s decision in choosing Muscat over Abela was encapsulated in the contrasting speeches of both at that conference a few days ago. It was enough to make one weep with regret at Labour’s folly, which is going to have far-reaching, long-term and almost certainly dire consequences for Malta. It is like watching a train heading in slow motion towards the edge of a cliff.

You can see the inevitable result, but you are powerless to stop it.

Compare their words. “The decision for Malta to join the EU was in Malta’s long-term interest,” George Abela said, describing the last five years as “historic”. He said: “This milestone after just 40 years of independence was a remarkable achievement which showed us how, with sacrifice, optimism, determination and courage, great things can be achieved even by a small country like ours.”

Malta, the president said, shares the same goals and visions of other EU member states. “This country is better off now than when it was not in the European Union,” he spelled it out, lest somebody might have misunderstood, “although we are aware that there were sectors which faced problems in the first six months of membership…..Fear of change was the main obstacle to EU membership, but that fear was unfounded….I am proud that Malta is now a successful member of the European Union.”

The president can say those words, convincingly and with conviction, because he was part of the movement committed to getting Malta into the European Union, even if he kept quiet about it. His erstwhile rival, on the other hand, was part of the movement to keep Malta out, and conspicuously so.

He was, in fact, one of the poster-boys of the anti-EU movement. So listen to his negative, nihilistic words at that conference, when he spoke after the president and the prime minister. The EU, to him, is all about the financial crisis – even though that financial crisis was triggered in the United States of America.

“The EU is about people. The financial crisis shook the confidence of many who now face an uncertain future and are asking if they have a future. Students ask if they have any prospects.” The inference is clear: without the EU there would have been no financial crisis.

The financial crisis has somehow been caused by the EU, because of “broken promises and bad decisions all over Europe….Europeans are blaming the EU for being passive in the face of what is happening….civil society shouldn’t feel like outsiders in the decision-making process.”

Do you see what I mean? Still the same old story – I wonder who they’re blaming in the rest of the world, where they can’t blame the EU.

One year on, it is clearer than ever that a couple of hundred Labour delegates, when they failed to take that tide, set this particular ship on course for more of a peculiar sort of hell. It is the hell that comes from living with the knowledge that the amateurs are waiting in the wings, gagging in anticipation of the day when they can take over, making life an exciting ride from one mess to another, as they press the wrong buttons all over town.

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