It quacks like a duck but believe me, it’s not a duck

The Labour Party’s deputy leaders are two of its greatest liabilities, but to hear them talk, they are its main assets.

Let’s take Toni Abela, and leave the elephant-rider out of it for now.

Abela gave an interview to The Sunday Times and said that it doesn’t matter if Labour moves to the right when this means it will get more votes.

That begs the question as to what he thinks a political party is.

He doesn’t appear to understand that a party first sets out what it stands for, what it believes in, and what it plans to do, and then attempts to persuade as many people as possible to vote for it.

The way Abela sees it – and the way his party leader sees it, too – is that first you conduct lots of market research as to what people want, and then you try to hit as many birds, with as many stones, as possible.

If it means veering to the right when you’re a Labour party and you sit with the Socialists in the European Parliament, then so be it. We shouldn’t be surprised. The Malta Labour Party stunned all its European socialist friends by fighting against EU membership, rather than for it.

I imagine the reason we haven’t yet had any policies from Labour, or discovered what Joseph Muscat plans to do and what his – deep breath here – Movement of Progressives and Moderates stands for, is because Labour hasn’t yet decided. It’s still researching the market and trying to square all those circles.

The party’s delegates, or so it was announced two days ago, are to hold a big pow-wow to discuss what it means to be moderate and progressive, and perhaps also liberal. It wants to work out how to attract those who think that way, rather than merely the embittered and resentful who believe they’re scoring points and paying back those who spurned them.

If Labour feels obliged to describe itself specifically as moderate, then I have to ask how it saw itself before now – as the party of extremists, one would think.

In that, it would be correct. Truly moderate political parties don’t feel the need to tell you they are moderate by stuffing the word into their job description and their name. You can deduce their moderateness from their policies and behaviour.

This is not so with Labour, which has to tell us it is moderate every time it appears in public or issues a statement, because it has a track record of dire extremism and now, no policies to prove otherwise.

We have to take Joseph Muscat’s word for it – but quite frankly, I’d rather not. Imagine if we had taken him at his word about voting No in the EU membership referendum and had swallowed all that tosh he fed us about fictitious partnership and becoming Switzerland in the Mediterranean.

We’re talking about the man who insisted, only a couple of years ago and just before becoming party leader, that Malta shouldn’t join the Eurozone and that we should stick with the Maltese lira.

He should have been sacked, not promoted.

And despite his cavilling, he was the first to go rushing off to Brussels within weeks of Malta joining the EU. I wouldn’t buy a used car from that man.

A secretary-general doesn’t make the tea and do the filing

Toni Abela said that the Labour Party can do without the post of secretary-general (well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?) because he, as deputy leader responsible for party affairs, and James Piscopo, Labour’s chief executive officer, can do the secretary-general’s job between them.

What a busy man Toni Abela is, what with his private legal office and all. He must be ever so harried.

James Piscopo has no such problems. He’s an Air Malta employee who has been given unlimited leave of absence from work to take up his appointment with the Labour Party. The Labour Party pays his salary – or at least, we hope it does – but Air Malta has guaranteed Piscopo’s job and seniority.

He can go back any time he likes. That’s nice for him, isn’t it?

I rather suspect that if Air Malta were to make the same arrangement in respect of the Nationalist Party, we would never hear the end of it on Super One and at cocktail parties, where all the chattering classes would delight in giving this as another reason for their plans to make Joseph Muscat prime minister.

Empty vessels vote for empty vessels, but anyway – the less said about that, the better.

Labour can do without Jason Micallef, but not without a real secretary-general

The Labour Party misunderstands the role of secretary-general, perhaps because its most recent secretaries-general have been quite inadequate. Instead of concluding that its secretaries-general were not up to par, Joseph Muscat and his panting acolytes have concluded that the post is redundant.

The historian and Labour Party veteran (though not in the Sant years) Dominic Fenech wrote a newspaper piece in which he said – quite curiously, I thought – that secretaries-general are much over-rated and that the Nationalist Party has had no significant one since Louis Galea.

I would say that this is not acutely observed and that every Nationalist Party secretary-general since Louis Galea has been significant, though the present one has yet to be tested.

The significance of the Nationalist Party’s secretary-general was particularly obvious in the last general election.

In the Nationalist Party, the secretary-general is the second most important and powerful person after the party leader. If the party leader is also the prime minister, then the secretary-general is effectively the most important and powerful party official.

Secretaries-general are instrumental in winning or losing general elections – again, as we saw in 2008 in both parties – because they micro-monitor public opinion, rally the vote, organise the campaign at all levels, raise funds, keep tabs on everything and everyone within the party, see to every detail, and are aware at every hour of every day where the vote is going and why.

Or at least, that is what they have done so far in the Nationalist Party, and never have in the Labour Party.

Labour’s main handicap since the party began trying to reinvent itself in 1992 is that it never had a sharp enough secretary-general, somebody who would act as a check on and balance for the party leader, somebody who could tell him where he was going wrong and why, with all the facts and statistics to hand.

When Labour’s secretary-general went on television in the aftermath of the last general election and gave a figure for new voters that was off by several thousands, we had one of the reasons why Labour managed to foul things up so badly. If Jason Micallef didn’t know how many new voters there were, then it is hardly surprising that he didn’t know they planned to vote Nationalist, and so he couldn’t tailor-make his party’s campaign to try and change their minds.

I can’t see Toni Abela and James Piscopo between them doing the sort of thing that Joe Saliba did for the Nationalist Party in general election terms. I suspect that they don’t even know or understand the full extent of what is expected of – and what has until now been delivered by – the PN secretary-general.

If Toni Abela thinks he is going to win the general election other than by default, he is deluded.

He is certainly not going to win it by such stratagems as writing mock letters from Barack Obama to Joseph Muscat (in Maltese) and reading them out at demonstrations, putting his hand down the cleavage of a lusty rubber puppet on a Super One show called Teletubi, or stomping around on another Super One show wearing extra-large pilot’s gloves and intoning ‘par idejn sodi’, which are but three of the moronic things I have seen him do.

Dan klapp ghall-partitarji biss

Toni Abela’s interviewer asked him how Labour’s core supporters feel about these attempts at luring ‘Nationalist’ voters over the fence. Toni Abela’s reply was so revealing of just how deep in the dark ages the Labour Party is that I strongly suggest he not be allowed to speak in public any longer lest he says something even more embarrassing.

The party has enough of a problem with the leader’s wife and her empty brown envelopes bl-arma tal-gvern.

“We’ve explained to them that if we want to grow it’s no use trying to keep the party to ourselves,” Abela said.

Keep the party to ourselves? What is it – a club of sorts, with decisions taken to blackball people? So much for the Movement of Progressives and Moderates.

Joseph Muscat appears to believe that if you dress it up like a duck, then it will walk like a duck, quack like a duck and might even become a duck.

Toni the Touchy Liberal who sues if you mock him

Toni Abela said in the same interview that he is a great respecter of freedom, believes in civic rights, and is a very liberal thinker. Would that be why he’s suing me for calling him a clown? Refer to that duck, above.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.