“Labour – because we’re not worth it”

Labour’s message in this electoral campaign is ‘Vote for us to tee the others off’. It may well work, given the propensity of so many little-islanders to cut off their nose to spite their face. But in terms of a confidence-boost, it’s going to get the Labour Party nowhere fast.

It’s the equivalent of the village bicycle or the cocktail-party slag making herself available for a quickie in the restroom so that some man can get his back on his wife or girlfriend. There are five minutes of blissful triumph – if that – but there’s just nothing in it in the long term.

I don’t know who the midwife is in the current campaign, but as usual it appears to be nobody with brains and somebody who thinks short term. As Joseph Muscat told The Sunday Times during an interview broadcast on the internet, “My focus does not extend beyond June 6.”

Spoken like a true amateur. It’s easy to see that he grew up beneath Alfred Sant’s wing. That man’s single-minded focus on becoming prime minister left him no time or energy to think about what he would do when he got there. The result was disaster – for him as well as for everyone else.

Last Sunday, Muscat went to Gozo to spread the word. He wasn’t half an hour late for the ferry, because you don’t play power-games with a boat. People should vote for Labour candidates, he told the punters in Gharb, to send a message to Lawrence Gonzi that “the country is not moving in the right direction”.

Imagine if the Coca-Cola CEO were to go out and tell people to buy Coke to send a message to PepsiCo that their product isn’t quite up to scratch. Or if the CEO of BMW were to say, ‘All you people out there should buy BMW cars to send a message to Audi that they need to get their act together.’

I was never favourably impressed by Muscat’s level of intelligence, but now I am even less so. Nowhere has Labour been promoting the message ‘Vote for us because we are fabulous.’ Either Labour is aware that its candidates are far from fabulous, or it hasn’t actually sat down and drawn up a list of its candidates’ selling-points.

Nor does Labour have a negative campaign message of ‘Vote for us so that the others don’t get in because they are useless and embarrassing.’ It can’t do that because it knows that no one is going to buy this. Even its own voters are well aware that Simon Busuttil is by far the best candidate of those fielded by all political parties.

The only reason they are not going to vote for him is because he’s not on the Labour ticket.

So all along it’s been ‘Vote for us to show the others that they’re on the wrong track with government policy.’ How Labour imagines that this comes across as anything other than a very desperate measure is anyone’s guess. The party is asking you to vote for it, to cannibalise the L-Oreal strapline, because it’s not worth it.

Negative campaigning plays a crucial role in any electoral battle, but this is not negative campaigning. It’s ‘shoot myself in the foot’ campaigning. It says ‘We know we’re pretty much useless and have no comparative advantage or competitive edge over the other lot. So we’re asking you to vote for us to annoy them.’

Talk about undermining yourself. It may and probably will achieve the short-term goal of pulling in votes in the EP election, but as AD discovered in 2004, in the long run it makes no difference at all.

On the contrary, the purpose it serves is to get the competition to shape up and trounce you again. And from Labour’s point of view, that’s not the most brilliant of ideas.

Even less brilliant is the way the Labour Party has tried to mimic the competition’s advertisements in the English-language newspapers. Mimicry is rarely successful in situations like this because what sets you apart from the competition is innovation.

When you copy the competition’s formula, what you are saying is that you lack the ability and imagination to innovate. It is even more self-defeating when your attempts at copying are inept. You entrench your already sceptical target audience in its opinion that you are amateurish.

Labour’s ‘positive’ newspaper advert last Sunday told us to ‘Take a second to ponder what the 6th of June elections are all about.’

You can tell that Labour hasn’t set a thief to catch a thief here because nobody in the target audience it is trying to address says ‘ponder’. I have yet to have a friend say over coffee, when I ask what’s on her mind, ‘Oh, I was just pondering what to wear to the party tonight.’

It’s the same with their strap-line, ‘Send the Message. Vote Labour.’ Setting aside the fact that it’s crazy for a political party to ask for your vote so as to ‘send a message’ to the other party, in my neck of the woods we wouldn’t use the definite article – ‘the message’.

And we wouldn’t say ‘send a message’, either, because it’s a literal translation from idiomatic Maltese. In English, we tell people what we think; we don’t send them messages, unless it’s by email or mobile phone, though we sometimes leave them messages via the telephone, care of a secretary or another member of the household.

Let’s leave that aside. The advertisement has the answer to its own rhetoric. If you were pondering what the European Parliament elections are all about, Labour will have you know that they are all about national issues which can only be dealt with by the national parliament.

Using a single-person verb for the plural noun ‘elections’, the advertisement instructs us: “It’s about your concerns on cost of living, illegal immigration and rising unemployment….the increase in electricity bills….and…secret plans to introduce charges on healthcare”.

So the intelligent reader asks: how is a vote to send to the European Parliament a Labour politician – or a politician from any other party for that matter – going to solve our problems, real or perceived, with the cost of living, electricity bills or imaginary plans to make us pay for healthcare?

Labour doesn’t tell us. Instead it explains that dispatching its people to the European Parliament will not help with these problems as such.

No, what it will do is ‘send the message’ to the government. In other words, vote Labour not so that Labour will get cracking on a solution, but so that the government will.

At this point, I feel that I must raise my index finger from the keyboard so as to tap my temple.

The advertisement continues, with its alien English: “The times are harsh yes, but he finds no qualms to make them harsher.” He, of course, is the prime minister, whose government has been working overtime to fend off the worst of the international recessionary impact.

It has been largely successful in doing so, which is why no homes are being repossessed and instead of mile-long queues for low-paid jobs cleaning out the pens at London Zoo, what we had was a mile-long queue of thousands of people who bought new cars and wanted their tax back.

The Labour Party’s message would be more credible if it were rooted in reality. To do this, it has to acknowledge the good things: ‘Look, this government is doing fine. But we think we could do even better.’

The problem remains, though, that this is a general election message and not a suitable message for the European Parliament elections.

It has become all too obvious that Joseph Muscat is fighting this like a general election. I imagine he has heard of the dangers of peaking too early. If not, perhaps Jason Micallef, Toni Abela or Anglu Farrugia could do some research.

The other day on television, Muscat actually said ‘il-gvern tieghi’. Yes, he’s talking in terms of his government. That’s something an intelligent campaigner would do only in the final stages of a general election campaign, and even then it would have to be a calculated risk.

Realising at an advanced stage that there was something senseless about the advertisements, Labour’s copywriter stuck in a sentence: ‘Labour is fielding a team of candidates with a concrete plan crafted with you, your concerns and your aspirations in mind.’

The trouble is that at no point in the campaign were we told what this plan, crafted in concrete or otherwise, might possibly be. We are expected to guess, and that’s never a good idea where the Labour Party is concerned because the answer usually begins with N: nothing.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.