The Labour Party: “in not being anything, it can be everything at the same time”
A former police inspector and a former Super One reporter: and they're going to run the country
Posted by Matthew S, this morning:
As if to prove my point that Joseph Muscat doesn’t want his party to be seen as socialist, last Sunday he went on record saying that the Malta Labour Party didn’t pay its membership fee to Socialist International because of “differences between the perspectives of the European socialist bloc and those on other continents” – obviously, without specifying what these differences are, and not being asked.
The strategy is as clear as daylight to me now.
The Labour Party doesn’t want to be seen as socialist. It doesn’t want to be seen as Nationalist.
It doesn’t want to be seen as conservative or Marxist, green or communist, a free market environmentalist or a libertarian. In fact it doesn’t want to be seen as anything at all.
In not being anything, it can be everything at the same time.
The Labour Party is now, outwardly, a blank.
It’s the equivalent of a carnival cutout like the ones you see at fairgrounds and some cinemas, where you stick your head into the hole above the painted or printed body and, while you pose for the photo, you’re that person or thing.
Then shove along because it’s someone else’s photo opportunity.
The Labour Party is socialist, but only just about enough to keep the Mintoffjani on board. It is xenophobic, but occasionally it condemns racism.
It is gay, but only for one week per year.
It is pro hunting, but only until it’s the environmentalists’ turn to take a photo. It encourages feminism, as long as the feminists don’t demand too much.
It supports North Korea, as long as it’s done in the privacy of an embassy. And it opportunistically courts the disabled vote, because that is an evergreen tree.
By denouncing the term ‘party’, it can even entertain those many clueless, naïve people who insist that all parties are the same and all politicians are corrupt (the so-called floating voters, who think that their stance makes them clever, rather than stupid, when the choice is so obvious).
Joseph Muscat has turned the Labour party into ‘a non-party party’. He calls it a movement.
I have to admit it’s a nifty little con-game. His plan is to trick people into voting for him – which shows you how much self belief he has, but none in his own party.
It might just work as long as nobody asks too many pesky questions about policies. As long as reporters and journalists are, as Daphne remarked a couple of days ago, dead in the water if not actually rooting for him shamelessly.
It is only then that the true Labour colours will come out, and there will undoubtedly be just the one. If it were a tube of oil-paint, it would be called Socialist Red. And it will be socialist red at its worst, what with all those Mintoffian has-beens populating parliament, Dom’s daughter, fossils from her father’s cabinet and KMB’s, and Labour mobs frothing at the mouth at the scent of blood and power.
It’s going to be a shark-feeding frenzy.
If Francois Hollande makes a hash of things, the French can blame nobody but themselves. Throughout the campaign, Mr Hollande proudly wore his socialist credentials and beliefs on his sleeve. If Joseph Muscat makes a hash of things, some people might be able to say they were conned.
But they were conned because they wanted to be conned, because their need or greed, their lack of nous, led them into it, just like those individuals who fall for men selling them blank pieces of paper and telling them that it’s magic money and all you have to do is give him a thousand euros and he’ll give you the magic marker to bring the cash alive.
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Malta is the movement and the movement is Joseph.
Movement as in a bowel movement, I imagine,
Reminds me of bowels.
The labour party may be a carnival of colours, but will be the party that will oust your dear beloved gonzi :)
That’s the reason for its entire existence: ousting Gonzi. Even if what it takes is to be all things to all men, no hint of policies (biex ma nnaffru lil hadd).
If there’s one consolation from The Sunday Times survey, and it’s an unexpected one at that, is that the young see through the bull and know who truly delivers “Garanzija” without having to shout it out.
It is the voters who will ‘oust’ the present government and not the Labour Movement – it is not a party as we are being continuously told. You may have missed that, Mr. Tagliaferro.
So by your reasoning, as long as we get rid of Gonzi, anything goes.
Translating to…..get rid of the ‘devil’ we know and let’s see what this new devil can do (without any care for our own future).
Pathetic.
Unfortunately, that is the reasoning of many, along with the usual “they’ve been in power for 25 years now, far too long …” (with the fact that Labour was in power from 1996 to 1998 conveniently completely obliterated from memory).
The problem is not the ousting. The problem is that Joseph Muscat and his group of merry men (and women) do not have the least idea how they shall govern.
And this effects all of us, including you. And if I am proven wrong, I shall be a very happy person.
If it were a business deal and not politics, it would be called fraud.
Muscat prides himself on being transparent but he clearly isn’t. The above excellent post describes him perfectly. He does the opposite of what he preaches.
You mean he says the inverse of what he actually means. If one had to follow his speeches, movement becomes the antithesis of the old MLP forced onto the country, or better this time it will be consensual. A fascinating oxymoron.
The crux however, is that the electoral mandate remains carte blanche to dispose of existing social structures, be it unions, business, associations or pieces of the state which hold a power different to his.
One has to see whether it’s a strategy which determines the content of what he says or if he’s forced to improvise to avoid at all costs the hints familiar to ideology. I say he’s doing both, it all depends on which audience is listening.
When was the last time he gave a press conference where journalists ask questions?
It will lead to the creation of a false Malta, officious and contrived. Does he really think this blog will somehow fade away under his benevolent rule? Or will it be subjected to claims of betrayal and subsequent action, in the name of the electoral mandate giving him a majority?
“Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In the Labour Party, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why.”
This was spotted on the net and slightly altered to fit. .
As happens so frequently with Muscat, it’s not even a remotely original idea. It’s been lifted, warts and all, from Beppe Grillo and his Movimento Cinque Stelle.
Joseph Muscat and Beppe Grillo seem to believe that anti-politics is the new politics.
A very cynical ploy, if you ask me – you use it to win an election, and once you’ve got your rear on the benches of power and become the establishment yourself, you demand the very respect you undermined to get there.
How many names has this loony party had over the years anyway? MLP/PL/LP, (pseudo)-New Labour, Partit Socjalista, Moviment tal-Haddiema.Identity crisis or what?
Joseph Muscat is the consolidation of what Benjamin Demottin wrote about in Junk Politics: non-politics politics.
Joseph wears a coat of many colours.
As the quotes and links of PQs from the Star LP PMs are proving to be so enlightening and entertaining, why shouldn’t we have a competition on who can dig out the best one.
The one who finds the winning PQ will be allowed to sit for a whole sitting in parliament next to the MP in question. Also the winning PQ will be printed as a blowup to be put up on the billboards on the side of our roads.
Muscat IS transparent, just as much as something filled with hot air, and nothing else, is.
The above is spot on. Unfortunately we will all suffer if Joseph Muscat finds himself at the helm, clueless and unaware of the havoc he will undoubtedly cause, spurred by his one desire of carrying the title of PM.
Daphne,
I believe you’ve left the “i” out of run in the caption……..
X’qed jaraw? Il-gamiem gej?
Can you please send me your email address?
[Daphne – [email protected]]
Dr Joseph Muscat is behaving the same way Tony Blair did when he was elected. Tony Blair tried his best to distance himself from the extreme left.
Saviour Balzan needs to find Eur 15,000: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120711/local/fined-for-libel.428162
Another overnight issue of “Payback Time,” perhaps?
An excellent piece. The comment on floating voters is spot on. Many of these so-called floaters always give me the impression that they are socjalisti imdejqin wearing a different dress for every occassion and who at the moment of truth, will vote Labour just the same.
Obviously, the PL believe that its best course to political viability is a blank slate. There no longer is a “party” (it’s a movement). There is no recognition of its previous history (no images that evoke its past, its mistakes, its terrors, or its injustices). No one speaks of its past (or of its present composition), but only of its imagined post-electoral future.
For the PL, no apologies are given and no policies provided. There is only attack against a (wishful) demonized PN, portrayed as “corrupt” and “inept.” There can be no truly rational discussion of its own credibility or trustworthiness, but rather there is an appeal or advocation for the voters’ unanalyzed trust, in the collection basket of its self-generalization to all (men/women/undecided/undetermined). Just believe, and your dreams will come true.
The PL is simply a projection for its anachronistic and populist desires: a psychological “inkblot” for whatever its would-be supporters want to see, or as they may believe the PL to be, according to personal (and not intrinsically national) gain for themselves.
For those with a grudge or a bitter life experience, the PL seems to offer some hope for vengence and retribution, and may provide personal self-justification for their personal identities, after a generation of exile in the political wilderness (except for the two-year blip, now fourteen years ago: who remembers, right?).
And, along with this, the PL will offer their standard measure of good old-fashioned Socialist-defined “redistribution” of wealth (without a genuine recognition of the sources of true wealth creation in human and capital resources, except perhaps to steal and plunder from those resources as much as possible) according to political loyalities (and greed), and its political power to act against perceived enemies.
In its totalitarian framework, might defines right; and its “definition” of legal force becomes its justification. There is not the law of reason; but there is the law of its force through “law,” which is the [facist] code for its amoral or immoral purposes.
It is with good reason that the PL cannot define themselves within the context of other European Socialist Parties: the PL is fundamentalist and right-wing in its attitudes and amorality (or immorality called pragmatism), and seems to be rather confused in its identity (against the better-forgotten record of its Maltese history and the post-modern and current-economic contexts of struggling contemporary Socialism).
The PL hasn’t found a socially successful model for itself, except through force. And in its revolutionary fervor, the peasants storm “Castille,” and wrest power from the “king” and his “court”, and rationality is guillotined in the process–until, of is ill-fated natural course against the actual logic of external and internal forces and saner men, the revolution eventually fails.
But, for now, the natural course of politics is still unfolding within the timeframe of its Constitutional limits. There will be an election. And the voter decides. I hope rationality and reason will not be a casuality. I hear of many emotions out there among voters, often without their rational validation.
I say the PL, MLP, whatever, is an unsustainable idea in an island this size.
Redistribution of wealth in a closed system will inevitably lead to entropy, that lukewarm tasteless soup. We’ve seen it in the 70’s and 80’s, a progressive degeneration of spirit and impetus. It doesn’t take long to bring this place to a complete halt, no mass. What is one to do? Boffa had the Brits, the PN has the EU, they had Gaddafi.
The latest design is to bring everything on board with the premise that somehow, if everyone works to it, it might just work. Being members of the European socialists isn’t enough, I don’t think George Vella has the respect of any of his interlocutors.
Which logically leads to the the right wing aspect, the inheritance they prefer having, even because the right has been taken up by regional parties.
Labour always insisted on Malta being small in size, as if this could affect the way we should think. Joseph fails in understanding this basic premise, thinking his five years in Brussels are enough, fact is concept building has never been so poor in Labour.
Inheritance might also carry material benefits, which they cannot do without. The way I see it, theirs is a desperate attempt to regain self-respect and a raison d’etre, otherwise why bother?
Joseph was quite vocal about this initially, then the rot started. It would be interesting, for example, to know why they abandoned the new logo, if the intention was to distract the party faithful before the blue or if it was received with malcontent.
One never messes with symbol, doing away with it means a transitory state, to where, is anyone’s guess.
That rainbow coloured flag flying on the PL HQ had nothing to do with the Gay Movement. It’s the future PL flag
Compare and contrast.
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Definitely-not-Uomo-Vogue_and-Anglus-tie-is-off-message-too.png
http://freeimagefinder.com/detail/6575216069.html