A must-read

In The Sunday Times, today:

The Fair Society, est. 1971 (or 1987)
by Mark Anthony Falzon

Joseph Muscat has a new flame. He calls it the Fair Society, by which he doesn’t mean a national programme of complimentary cosmetic surgery.

I’d love to know what he means, in fact, that is if I didn’t suspect that it’s yet another piece of mindless waffle.

There are, I think, three reasons why Muscat’s politics are so jejune. The first is hard to put politely. I’ve been following him (legitimately and in broad daylight, I mean) since when I was a newspaper reviewer for Campus FM in the mid-noughties.

I remember picking, week after weary week, on the column he wrote at the time. Mediocre in content and bombastic in form, it had all the ingredients of a press reviewer’s pet hate.

The man hasn’t come up with a single spark of any wattage since. The dull speeches are probably his intellectual limit. He actually said it himself in his very first speech as Labour Party leader in 2008. Talking about his schooldays he said: “Kien jiprometti naqra mill-iskola”.

Never mind the wrong preposition and the spooky out-of-body third person that translates literally as “he was quite promising as a student”. Only the Maltese “naqra” is not quite the English “quite”.

The second reason has to do with the opposition. The Nationalist Party is in such comical form that I can probably understand why Muscat is being so economical even with his naqra.

Whatever one might think about its virtues or otherwise, a bipartite polity can only function properly if both parties are equally strong or thereabouts. Take that away and standards will plummet across the board.

Third, Muscat knows that he’s almost certainly going to win the next election. The only thing that could change that is some pretty major bungle on his part, something along the lines of Alfred Sant’s repeater class or bizarre ‘undead in Birżebbuġa’ speech, in other words.

Muscat will have figured that the best way to avoid such tragic potholes is to float around the pointless stratosphere at all times – to go on about fair societies and meritocracies and avoid sticking his neck out on the specifics. In other words a low-risk strategy and also a wise one in the circumstances.

The word ‘wise’ doesn’t necessarily contradict what I’ve just said. Muscat’s modest intellectual abilities are offset by his shrewdness on matters of political advantage. The man is ħaxixu (wily), and I use the word with respect and without its connotations of deceitfulness.

Certainly he has an uncanny habit of being in the right place at the right time. I also do not for a second imagine he is about to jettison his polls surplus just like that.

Labour’s strategy therefore seems to be for Muscat to play the transcendental visionary and leave the risky details to his shadow cabinet. For example, Helena Dalli made some very thoughtful points about regularisation (the process by which political appointees sneak into the public service, to put it bluntly) the other day.

On his part the Leader ensorcelled us with big talk of meritocracy and all-round fairness.

There are two separate strands here. On one hand Muscat is talking about political cronyism. On that one I cannot fault him, even if the subject is facile and hardly the seismic stuff we were once promised. Besides, a Labour government is going to have to work tremendously hard to avoid lapsing into the same.

I don’t just mean the waiting Labourites, whose rationale I can quite understand. I rather have in mind the little people who until recently thought Lawrence Gonzi was fairly godlike and who now make it a point of flitting around social occasions telling everyone out loud that “the country needs a change”. Muscat is going to need a very big stick to shoo off these pathetic lickspittles.

In any case it’s Muscat’s second strand that really interests me, the bit on the ‘fair society’. He really loves to perorate on how his government (“given people’s trust”, of course) will make it possible for the children of sub-literate nobodies to get the best education and the highest-paid jobs. Who you are and where you come from will no longer matter in the perfect meritocracy of the future.

One is tempted to scream ‘Utopia’ or to talk about the contradiction of teaching people to be fiercely aspirational and telling them that who they are won’t make a difference, at the same time. (It seems to me that the whole point of aspiration is for who you are to make a difference.)

Anorak apart, I very much like the idea that the children of sub-literate nobodies should have access to the best education and the highest-paid jobs. Thing is, thanks to reforms carried out by a string of enlightened Labour and Nationalist governments, that is already very much the state of the art in Malta.

Muscat’s point to the contrary, namely that only the children of a greater and blue-eyed god may at present aspire to the good life, is basically rubbish.

Take the university, the institution I work in and know best. A particularly useful example as it happens since the University is also one of the prime sites of production of social mobility. It prints paper accreditations, furnishes people with social networks, and manufactures the ‘dottijiet’ so beloved of political parties and bank managers.

Does Muscat seriously believe that we spend our time tracing our students’ political pedigrees and counting their quarters of nobility? Just in case, I assure him that we – and I can speak in the plural because I know my colleagues – care zilch about all of that. Our students come from a wide range of backgrounds and their results are the product of their abilities and commitment.

Should Muscat wish to see this for himself he would only have to wait a few months. Let’s just say that the thousands of proud parents who attend the graduation ceremonies are not all members of the Roxburghe Club.

It would appear, in fact, that the University is properly an island of meritocracy, inexplicably in place in the dark days of GonziPN. Throw in Mcast, ITS, and such, and you have a Fair Archipelago of some geographical distinction.

My point is not that systematic disadvantage doesn’t exist; it does, in small pockets of waywardness. Rather, it is that Muscat is barking up one or the other of two wrong trees.

First, he tends to ignore the systematically disadvantaged simply because they’re not the type of voter he’s after.

Second, the kind of rampant sauve-qui-peut elitism that he harps on about is happily dead. The Leader of the Opposition is playing a tune so obsolete it would give David Guetta a heart attack.