Labour thinks ‘doing things for the Sawt’ is building projects and not making people’s lives better

This official Labour Party tweet is really telling, because it encapsulates everything that is wrong about the Labour Party’s political philosophy, such as it is.

It’s all about measuring progress in terms of single material projects (of whatever questionable value) rather than improvement in people’s lives.

‘Doing things for the Sawt’ in Labour terminology means plonking a project there, or allowing Sandro Chetcuti and his undeclared-Swiss-account sidekick Michael Falzon to have the Malta Developers Association build over the entire stretch of coast that, in Malta, counts as ‘sawt’.

The reality is that it is one Nationalist government after another that has improved the lives of the people who live in the part of the island that they are clearly talking about (sawt, my eye – the island is too small for nort and sawt).

Progress is not measured in Sandro Chetcuti terms, but in the fact that the sons and daughters of illiterate mothers who spent their lives in rollers and housecoat and of semi-literate fathers who spent their working lives in a boiler-suit or oil-covered dungarees, earning just over the minimum wage, are now working in high-flying careers in London and Brussels, furnishing homes in ways their parents thought of as the exclusive preserve of dawk tal-pepe, buying or renting homes their parents would never have dreamed of affording, travelling all over the world, running two new cars per household, and cooking Thai.

That they don’t read and are largely uneducated despite going through free university education (another PN achievement) is a separate issue. But the fact remains that their lives are incomparably better to the lives of their parents under Labour.

This is because Nationalist Party policies are about empowerment – making sure that people have the tools and the skills they need to get ahead, creating a climate in which economic investment will flourish and people can find jobs that improve their lives and maximize their skills and abilities, as far as possible in such a small place.

But Labour policies are about patronage, top-down, making people dependent and grateful, giving them things and doing them favours. Labour policies are about master-slave relationships in which the master stays the master and the slave stays the slave, grateful to be treated well and fed.