Beyond the 5% difference

When writing this article, I faced a difficulty: whether to qualify it as a critique of, a continuation of, or a response to the article ‘PL-PN: that stubborn 5% difference’ penned by my colleagues Godfrey Baldacchino and Michael Briguglio (June 22). This is because it is a bit of all these things and none of them.

Among other things, the article by the two professors takes a look at the history of local elections, considering features such as each party’s best showing in terms of percentages throughout the years and concluding that “History suggests PL is the more ‘natural’ government”; a statement I found quite surprising given that, like yours truly, the authors are old enough to remember the pre-Joseph Muscat years, when some used to wonder whether Labour would ever be re-elected.

(Maybe one reason why the PN failed to recover effectively from the 2013 debacle – no matter the advances made in May, the party did not even manage to halve the gap with Labour – may have been the fact that, at the time in question, some of the “thinking heads” at PN headquarters were thinking along these lines, ignoring the possibility that one day they might no longer be in office.)

The article makes a claim and embodies an assumption that are central to the argument it advances but which are highly questionable. The claim is that, if one looks at history (or, more precisely, at post-World War II local history), Labour’s “natural” majority was put in peril only when there were “strongly divisive issues... [like] the Mintoff-Boffa split... the Church-MLP rift... the antagonism of the 80s [whatever this may be] and the question of EU accession”.

Apart from the fact that there were instances when this was not the case (2008 comes to mind), until we arrive at some chimerical end of history, politics is, and ought to be, about strongly divisive issues. If there are no divisive issues on the political horizon, it is very likely that the political establishment is ignoring them rather than that they do not exist.

A case in point of a potentially divisive issue that is being ignored could be the increasingly necessary presence of third-country nationals in Malta, their exploitation and political invisibility, and – apart from the immorality of the whole thing – the consequences this is likely to have in the future.

A party that tends to be sidelined in times of strongly divisive issues (which, again, ought to be noted, was not always the case; Labour came out the winner in relation to the 2011 divorce referendum) can hardly be considered the “natural” home of the majority of the electorate. Moreover, the fact that the supposedly progressive party is the “natural” home of the majority when there are no divisive issues should raise a few questions about its progressive nature.

This leads to the assumption the argument makes: namely, that, when referring to the Labour Party across all these years, we are referring to, fundamentally, the same political entity. In terms of legal identity, this might be the case. In other respects, however, things might be slightly different. To unearth this, it might be best to consider the party in relation to one particular group.

Labour managed to retain its loyal core- Michael Grech

Take the many who have recently either converted their homes into apartments or who (rightly) believe they can easily do so. (Contrary to what some might think, ours being a country of homeowners, development is not merely a matter for the big contractors, though obviously these have the lion’s share.) In the period following World War II, at least up to the earliest years of the 21st century, many who were into real estate used to consider the PN (the party of free enterprise) as their “natural” home. Labour, in contrast, used to be perceived as the party of restraints and controls.

Labour, in office since 2013, has been anything but, proving itself more lavish and laxer when it comes to permits and accommodating the demands of this sector than the PN has ever been. Combined with a boom in other sectors, this has led to a situation in which many who invested in property – again, not just the fat cats – have never had it so good in terms of income (though, perhaps, not in terms of lifestyle, for quite a few), earning a few grand a month without lifting a finger.

It is safe to believe that, though there were many within this group who, out of loyalty or for other reasons, continued to vote blue, a good number hailing from PN backgrounds switched allegiances, not wanting to endanger the gravy train and remaining oblivious or indifferent to the social and environmental costs of this development spree.

What Labour managed to do, however, a fact rightly noted by the two authors, was retain its loyal core, though even here there was both continuity and discontinuity in the process. Apart from parochial passion, one way in which the party in office maintained such allegiance was through handouts, freebies and, in some cases, jobs with government agencies (all measures that will not realistically enable many within this category to become sinjuri żgħar, though aspirations here may be equally modest).

This is nothing new, and there is a measure of continuity with the past (both Labour and PN). Where Labour was discontinuous with the past was in failing to support this category through measures aimed at implementing the now-dreaded r-word: redistribution. Indeed, it is likely that the bill for these handouts and freebies will ultimately be footed by other members of the working class – the above-mentioned foreign workers who keep our economy going.

What is remarkable in relation to Labour’s loyal core is the PN’s unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with this part of the electorate. It would be interesting to discuss this and other features of the PN campaign, both positive (such as the divorce, finally consummated, between the PN and the Church – one which, as a Catholic, I consider to have been made in heaven) and negative (such as the PN’s puerile boasting about EU accession – an institution we were promised would lead to a raising of standards but which could not lift a finger during the campaign itself, in which Labour pulled every dirty trick in the book). But this lies beyond the remit of the present article.

Michael Grech is a lecturer in philosophy within the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta.