Choosing a badge – that’s a tough one

Labour's new emblem: a pot of hair-gel, a house in Modica and a law degree

It appears that the Labour Party’s emblem has gone off on a summer holiday along with the rest of the country.

Two months ago, the party announced that it had received from 96 artists, students and advertising agencies the grand total of 206 entries to a competition to find itself a new badge to stick on its lapel.

Two hundred and six from 96, eh? Imagine the quality – a veritable Kama Sutra of torches and fists.

That was the last we heard of it. One assumes that the ‘technical team’ – the party’s description, not mine – remains closeted in some obscure chamber in Hamrun, debating the niceties of Prussian Pink versus China Red and the finer points of how best to balance the P and the L now that the M has gone AWOL.

That technical team includes “representatives of all PL branches”, which would account for the delay. Imagine a selection committee composed of many tens of people who know nothing about branding and even less about political communication and design, sitting round a table sifting through 206 suggestions that were cobbled together mainly by individuals who are as amateurish as they are, everyone with an opinion to shout down.

You get the picture. No wonder they threw away the key and left them there with a Thermos flask to sweat it out.

And because Labour is so democratic and believes in devolution, after the technical team has done its business, the choice will be filtered further down the line, until everyone and his Chihuahua has had a say in the matter.

Fascinatingly, the Labour Party’s resident donnafugata is not part of that technical team and will not bring her smart touch to bear, on the badge she will be obliged to wear conspicuously in 2013 unless she has fled again before then.

Marisa Micallef is being paid handsomely to spruce up Labour’s image and get it to appeal to people like her (but who are devoid of bitterness and anger against The Others, which would make them people like me). So why isn’t she on the eenie-meenie-miney-mo team that gets to choose the party’s headscarf?

She certainly isn’t hard at work teaching the Maltastar ‘team’ how to write simple sentences. One of their recent headlines included the word ‘forgotton’. Perhaps she’s been quietly let go, or got herself locked in some lavatory somewhere in the building, while Polly-Pocket Kurt Farrugia and the rest of the ‘team’ pretend not to hear her screams.

A THRILL A MINUTE

Just when I thought that life couldn’t possibly get more exciting, along comes the Lourdes Philharmonic Society of Paola to prove me wrong. They’re petitioning the law courts to stop their parish priest from organising the usual feast.

These spoilsports want to stop the fun because for the last three years they haven’t been permitted to play their music during the street celebrations, marches and processions. The parish priest, they tell us, has had the bloody nerve to contract the services of other bands, and those bands are not from Paola.

Exciting, isn’t it? Well, it makes a change from Eastenders.

Smart Island, Isle of MTV? This is the real face of Malta: squabbles between parish priests and brass bands over who gets to play behind a statue of Astarte’s natural descendant. Wake me up when it’s over.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.