Changing times

Is it not amazing that with so much to organise and so much to celebrate, Nationalist Party general secretary Joe Saliba had nothing better to say to his party conference than that the government should disband "the web of Labour supporters" hindering the government departments they work in?

Is it not amazing that such a statement should be uttered barely a month after his party leader solicited the nation's vote, "for the sake of the national interest", piling pledge upon pledge that his next one would be truly a government of the whole nation?

Never mind the inanity of the victor playing victim to the vanquished, or the persistence in such provincial and petty ways of thinking.

Change, it seems, is absent from the vocabulary of the Nationalist Party, except when prescribed to the Labour Party and then, only in scorn and to embarrass those who truly seek it. It has been said so often it has become a clichè, that when the Nationalists say that Labour must change, what they mean to say is that it must become like them.

In recent weeks Alfred Sant flogged that clichè for all it is worth when he said he would not let anyone turn the MLP into another Nationalist Party. This, of course, not because there was any such danger, given the centrist and pragmatic complexion he has given it, but in order to shield his revised candidacy against competition from the quarter that truly represents change.

Back to the Nationalist Party, there obviously never was any intention of mutating into a truly national government, beyond the old platitude that a Nationalist government is anyway a national government. The trickle of the usual political appointments to administer public goods and services has already begun.

Mr Saliba, unless he was speaking faster than he was thinking, wants to take the process a few steps further still by placing a watch on pro-Labour public servants.

One could without difficulty dismiss such statements as bigoted rubbish, were it not for the fact that what the general secretary said reflects the real party mood, which is why he said it. It is a common phenomenon with cronies whose party spends too much time in power. Labour Party zealots increasingly used to say such things after 1981.

The people who make up the complicated inner structures that in recent years have come to control political parties, the PN as much as the MLP, have a way of missing the party for the structures, deliberately, in pursuit of self-preservation.

Note how, only weeks after the general election, both party propaganda machines have already succeeded in confusing the issues beyond recognition.

People like Mr Saliba, whose place in his Nationalist Party is not to make opinion but to state it, now puts it out that the people voted PN because the PN was good. They conveniently forget that the leader and the rest of the party before the election asked voters to vote for the PN to ensure EU membership even if they thought poorly of the PN's record, for which forgiveness not praise was solicited.

With remarkable symmetry, the MLP leader and spokesmen, who before the election declared that partnership had won, after the election attributed the party's defeat to the EU issue, alone.

Such posturing means only one thing, namely, that left to their own devices, those in charge of either political party want to continue doing exactly what they had been doing before and with the same people.

By downplaying the EU factor and suggesting that the PN won on the basis of its performance in government, the PN leadership and management want to forestall any demand for change. At both government and party level the PN is gearing to become more, not less, sectarian, emboldened by the MLP's apparent hesitation to change in its turn.

By overstating the EU factor, the MLP leadership and management, on the other hand, foster the impression that if once the party accepts EU membership, it has no more problems, but only a few difficulties that can be remedied without changing or hurting much. Meanwhile, they continue to bank on the odds that a party can only spend so many years in office before the people are fed up of it.

Is it not amazing, while change beckons so insistently and when change could make all the difference between splendour and the doldrums, that our party political elites continue to rely on the folly of the other side to capture the people's confidence and imagination?