An unmitigated disaster

This was my column in The Malta Independent last Thursday.

The picture shows Labour’s spokesman for water and electricity, Marlene Farrugia, in her own publicity photograph.

In the absence of even the merest glimmer of a Labour Party policy that we can really sink our teeth into (and for the benefit of my English-as-pidgin readers, that doesn’t mean ‘savage’), many of us have turned to the party’s much-advertised website, therealbudget.com, for hints about what Labour has or doesn’t have planned.

And it tells us a great deal, though largely about the fact that Labour has nothing planned and doesn’t know where to begin. It looks like nobody bothered to fertilise those eggs Karmenu Vella’s been sitting on for the last two years and trying to hatch.

As public relations exercises go, therealbudget.com is an unmitigated disaster.

Any public relations tactic which doesn’t achieve the required aims is deemed to have failed (obviously), but when the tactic actually achieves the opposite aim of that intended, then you call it a ruddy disaster and people are fired.

Ironically, this particular tactic has blown up in Labour’s face because it has been so successful in getting across a true and accurate picture of the party’s preparedness to govern. And that, the various pieces which have been commissioned from trusted Labour brains show, is zilch.

So far we have had such exercises in brilliance as something called ‘The Budget – A Nice Economic Literature’ by somebody called Silvio Schembri, a nephew of Charles Mangion who is preparing for election in the sixth district. He calls himself an economist and teaches economics at the University of Malta, yet he can’t write simple sentences or express simple thoughts, let alone complex ones.

You have to Google him to find out that he is a Labour politician. Therealbudget.com presents him as independent, though quite frankly, in Labour’s position I would disown him too.

The last thing I saw on therealbudget.com before writing this was a piece by the freshly-divorced Marlene Pullicino, who now faces the challenge of rebranding herself with her maiden name in little more than a year before her constituents hold that ballot sheet in their hands and wonder where Marlene Pullicino went.

It turns out that the progressive Labour Party has a spokesman for water and electricity, and it is she. Pullicino’s piece for therealbudget.com is called ‘Pin Cushion PN’. It is unclear where the pins or the pin cushion enter the equation, but there you go.

Unfortunately, I had great trouble taking her thinking seriously, because I had just seen her Facebook profile picture, in which she poses – at almost 50 – with her hair in loose plaits. When I last saw grown women wearing Pippi Longstocking’s hairdo, it was Miriam Dalli and Moira Delia on Super One, and I think even Miriam regretted it, though I wouldn’t be too sure about Petra Pan Delia.

But I did my best, and struggled through it, with all its non sequiturs, cracked logic and confusion as to whether Labour wishes to be perceived as green and progressive, or as the champion of those who wish to consume as much water and electricity as they can while paying very little for it.

Here’s an excerpt:

“This fact alone should make this government quiver with shame and regret at their squandering of our monies. But no. We have a PM who boasts he raised prices to lessen our consumption, no less. And most patronisingly of all, that that was the only way to encouage us to lower consumption.

“Every ordinary family is doing this, cutting down on fuel consumption that is, not only because of the rising cost of fuel but simply because everyone’s salary by the end of the month (bar those who have paid themselves an increase of 500 euros per week) can no longer cover the previous outlay. Most people can’t make ends meet. This of couse is apparently beyond the comprehension of those who pay themselves huge increases to cushion themselves against rising expenses.”

Oh, I see – that’s where the cushion comes in.

Marlene Pullicino can’t understand why electricity and water on a 17-mile-by-nine rock caught in the cusp between Tripoli and Tunis are so much more expensive than they are in, say, Britain, with its North Sea oil, its coal mines, its rivers, lakes and rain, and its wind farms.

She doesn’t even seem to know that water is expensive because a huge amount of electricity is used to produce it, or maybe she does know but disingenuously pretends not to, so that her constituents can’t accuse her of trying to manipulate their concerns.

The worst of it, worse even than making a dentist spokesman for water and electricity, is that Marlene cannot tell us what Labour’s solution is because Labour itself doesn’t know. The best that her leader and deputy leader can come up with is ‘John Dalli’s plan’, when we now know for a fact that John Dalli does not have a plan but only the business card of a commercial outfit involved in the design and operation of a new kind of power-plant.

I think this raises more eyebrows than it does questions.

As for therealbudget.com, Labour should pull the plug immediately. It’s true that lots of us are enjoying it, but that’s for reasons that the party’s communications gurus will not love. Every day it tells us a little bit more about just how lost in the wilderness Labour still are.

Elect us, and then you’ll see? No thank you. If I want a lucky dip, I’ll pay my 50 cents at a fun fair. Choosing a government is serious business. It’s about time Labour took it a bit more seriously too.