Protection money

Bribes, gifts, favours and donations - when is it one and not another?

Malta Today appears to think it news that companies and individuals give money to both the governing and the opposition parties. It isn’t. But trust Malta Today to pretend to think so, even though it is 50 per cent owned by somebody who was for many years head of information at the Nationalist Party and had a pretty good idea of who donated what to whom.

These are not donations in the strict sense of the word. They fall somewhere between protection money and bribes.

There is a significant difference between donating money to one political party because you support it and think it is the best option for government (and wish your money to go towards that end) and handing out money to both parties in equal or unequal measure, which is akin to feeding the lions so that they don’t eat you or taking out insurance on favours to be called in.

Majtezwel naghtihom flus it-tnejn. The motivation is pure cynicism; it is corrupt and corrupting.

The political parties have rendered themselves dependent on hand-outs from people who then come calling for their pound of flesh. The understanding with a proper donation is that you have made it because you believe that party to be better for the country, when in government, than the other option. It is not quite altruism, but getting there, if we think in terms of what’s best for the country being also what’s best for the economy and for business in general, rather than for one particular business at the expense of others.

But with the other kind of financial hand-out, the sort that the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party receive on a regular basis from individuals who keep their options open, the understanding is that the pound of flesh will be called in.

Because the parties are now dependent on that money, they find themselves reduced to feeding the lions themselves. If they don’t keep their paymasters happy, their paymasters will pull out or threaten to give money to The Others instead (when they are doing so already).

That the parties compromise themselves to big business, or what passes for big business in Malta, is foul enough. But it is even more unpleasant to see them grubbing around in the dirt to collect the loose change cast at them by the likes of Sandro Chetcuti, who is currently facing trial for attempted murder.

Are they really so cheap as to accept his cheques for a thousand euros, when it is obvious that this sort of common boor is sure to tell everyone that he has given it to them, and to order from the bank authenticated copies of the cheques so that he can wave them in their faces as a threat, leverage or revenge?

Both political parties have suffered long years of angst and desperation as a result of this sort of prostitution. And both have brought the situation on themselves by setting up and running huge media machines that are a relentless drain on funds and which can never be self-financing, while building new general headquarters at huge capital expense – headquarters which come with the sort of overheads that are a recipe for bankruptcy unless you have a proper source of income.

When the bills come in, the party secretaries-general – or whatever the Labour Party now has instead of one – must grit their teeth, stick their finger up (a coarse expression but an entirely appropriate one in the context of the sort of vulgarity that this sort of behaviour entails), get on the phone and beg, beg, beg.

We can see the humiliation and cheapness in this – political power prostrating itself in desperate need before money as the banks draw the line and threaten to foreclose – but we should also be able to see the inherent danger to democracy.

Democracy is not just about having the electorate go to the polls every five years. It is a way of life, a way of thinking and a way of being.

Our system, in which political parties are kept alive by being hooked up to a financial drip from big (and small) businesses with no transparency at all, is not undemocratic. It is actually anti-democratic. It undermines the very essence of democracy.

It is perfectly acceptable for companies and individuals to donate money to political parties. That is democratic. Those who support party X or politician Y have the right to give them money to help them achieve their aim of getting into government. But then, that same democratic principle dictates that electors have the right to know who has given money, how much, and to which party or politician.

Democracy can be served only if there is full transparency in the matter of gifts and donations, with detailed lists made public. No anonymous donations should be permitted, because to permit them will open the way for abuse in the form of ‘nudge-nudge-wink-wink’ anonymity that is anonymous only to the public and not to the recipients.

When lists are published, the electorate is able to monitor any links between real or perceived favours given and donations made. With no such lists, the electorate is forced to rely on good faith, which is fast disappearing.

If this good faith, this trust, is now almost gone, the political parties have only themselves to blame. If you want to be trusted, you have to show yourself to be worthy of trust, and part of this is telling us where you get your money. The current situation is beyond ridiculous and it is deeply insulting to the electorate.

Members of parliament are obliged to declare all their interests and official sources of revenue, but they are not obliged to declare the sources of funding they receive from unofficial quarters for their campaigning, because then the authorities will be forced to acknowledge that the regulations which restrict campaign-spending to a pittance are broken by everyone all the time.

To heighten the absurdity, the political parties of which these MPs form part, and whose line they toe, are not obliged to declare any interests or donations at all. So the law scrutinises MPs (to some extent) but leaves their parties free to take money from whoever they please and in total secrecy.

There was a big debate about this many years ago, when the Nationalist Party in its second term of government still sailed on a wave of zeal and idealism and planned to do something about regulating donations to political parties. It was a subject which interested me greatly at the time, so I kept the cuttings. But five years ago, when cleaning out a filing cabinet, I threw out the entire file in disillusionment.

The thing is that it just can’t happen, not unless Malta breaks away permanently from the Sicilian mindset and develops its civic and democratic sensibilities. When I say ‘Malta’, I don’t mean the state, but the people who live in it. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

If the publication of gifts and donations to political parties is made mandatory at law, then the number of significant single donations will decline dramatically and duplicate donations to both parties will cease altogether. Companies and those who are associated with them will not give large sums of money if their actions are made public knowledge, because this exposes them to scrutiny and discussion in the press and more pointedly because it reduces, rather than increases, the opportunities for demanding their pound of flesh. If the electorate can make a link between the money they’ve given and the contract they’ve got, then the chances are they won’t get it.

The parties will be left with those mythical pennies from the populace which they claim fund their mammoth operations in their entirety. If the political parties are technically bankrupt now, imagine the destitution, the sackcloth and ashes, the bread and water, if legislation obliges them to declare the source of their donations and those donations dry up.

Why, they might even have to give up their television and radio stations and take in lodgers in some of those glossy rooms.

If Joseph Muscat really wants to put his money where his mouth is – an unfortunate choice of expression given that neither of the parties appear to have any money at all unless they go to the political equivalent of a loan shark – then he should commit himself to a law regulating donations to political parties, making their publication mandatory.

The Nationalist Party in government has been talking about it for 15 years and appears to have decided that it is not a good idea to expose donations to the glare of transparency because they’ll dry up. No doubt, Labour feels the same way, but if Muscat wants to convince us – and the credibility he started out with has been sucked away pretty fast – that he represents a fresh and contemporary way of doing things, then he should start here.

I don’t mean a pathetic promise for a private member’s bill when he becomes prime minister, either. That’s the lily-livered, fence-sitter’s way out, and as we have seen already with the little matter of a divorce bill, it’s worth jack.

At this rate, the electorate is going to head to the polls in 2013 in such a state of annoyance with both political parties that the results should be – well, interesting. A plague on both your houses doesn’t even begin to describe it.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.