Rehabilitating the Malta Labour Party

It was only a few months ago that the Labour Party fought a visceral campaign against EU membership, culminating in a double defeat at the polls. In their struggle, they stoked fear and pandered to the basest of selfish interests. Theirs was a crusade loaded with paranoia, tinged with insularity and a dose of xenophobia.

A few months later, the unreasonableness seems to be fading. Last week, the party announced its full participation in the coming elections to the European Parliament. The switch is all dressed up with such rhetoric as: "Now that the country has spoken, the party accepts the new reality. But the party will be the watchdog for the working class. The party will make sure that the gains will not be appropriated by the few," and so on...

You have to ask: why did they not try to sound as reasonable before the referendum and the election? The path that Labour's leadership seems to have taken is the only non-suicidal one available. It promises rehabilitation for the party and survival for its leaders.

Still, as inevitable as the U-turn may be, it does not exempt this same leadership from having to deal with the demons they unleashed. Their pre-referendum and pre-election rhetoric has taken a life of its own.

It is coming back to haunt them. Their own strong words are being tossed back at them, and there may have to be a struggle to exercise the party of the anti-EU demons.

The fringe element wants the anti-membership war to go on. They are reminding the Labour Party of its pre-referendum and pre-election message: "that the membership agreement was disadvantageous and injurious to the people, especially to the workers, and just because a 12,000-vote majority approved the agreement, the agreement still remains disadvantageous and injurious to the people and the workers..." That's a loosely translated quote from the missive sent out from the fringe to the party delegates.

Having unleashed the demon of Euro-phobia, Labour's leadership now has to live with the consequences. Labour had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the post-accession reality, and the switch is all the more glaring when that same leadership has to fight off a fringe element that wants to yank the country back out of the EU.

The hard language from the fringe harks backs to an earlier decade when some of the characters that now populate that same fringe held the reins of power in Labour's darkest days in power.

The message to the delegates reads something like this: "It was the Labour Party that obtained full freedom for the Maltese people and made our nation neutral and active in working for peace. Our party has now been again bestowed with the good fortune of leading the second fight for the restoration of full freedom, neutrality and active in our work for peace. In the first struggle, those who came before us were Soldiers of Steel. Like them, we have to be made of steel, not sawdust..."

It is hard to accept that such fighting words still pop up in our politics. The reply from Labour's leadership starts out, "Ghaziz Karmenu..." and its language is placid by comparison.

The fringe wants the country to break its solemn word, to go back on the treaty of accession, a treaty that the country freely entered into after long deliberation and with the democratically expressed consent of the citizens.

If the fringe had its way, Malta would signal an inability to stick to a decision that it made freely and deliberately. The fringe would feel at home if we went back to old days of political insecurity and democratic immaturity.

The Xarabank U-turn

There is more than one facet to Labour's rehabilitation. Take the U-turn on Xarabank. Labour will now participate in the programme, bringing an abrupt end to a needless, seemingly endless controversy.

The party has just announced that it will not leave its seats vacant on the any of the podiums offered in the public media, including public broadcasting. The statement had to go into the party's continuing objection to the spinning off to private enterprise of public broadcasting programming on news and current affairs, but Labour's principles will no longer keep it off Xarabank.

The logic behind the MLP's original boycott of Where's Everybody? remains clouded in a thick fog. However, certain cynics noted that for as long as the Where's Everybody? surveys showed EU membership supporters were short of a majority, the Labour Party displayed no ill will.

Once the surveys started showing the tide turning, Labour's animosity started. Labour started its boycott. It seems that Alfred Sant's new Labour was uncomfortable in tackling on TV the arguments that were being brought up on the EU issue. I suspect they wanted a more controlled environment.

Labour's stay-away turned into something of a fixation, to the extent that Dr Sant turned down some 25 offers to appear solo on Xarabank. Still, on various Xarabank shows, there seemed to be no shortage of supporters who, through their heckling or otherwise, voiced loud approval for Labour's position on particular issues.

The one-sided war contaminated even a charitable event like L-Istrina. In retrospect, now that it appears it is all over, it seems so silly that the Labour Party chose to silence itself and to look so much like a Stalinist leftover, out to suppress and shut down those who somehow earn the party's ire.

Electoral Commission U-turn

This was a week for U-turns. We also had Labour's somersault on the Electoral Commission. A couple of years ago we had the resignation of four MLP-nominated electoral commissioners, on the grounds that embarkation/disembarkation cards needed to be reintroduced to be able to check on the six-month residence requirement for a person to be eligible to vote.

While other countries try their utmost, some even with the force of law, to get the widest possible participation in elections, in Malta the 'progressive' Labour Party is scared of wider participation, and cries foul because some Maltese students or workers doing their job overseas want to participate in their country's elections.

To me, the message given by this behaviour was that Labour had figured out that people who travel and work overseas are less likely to be influenced, some say fooled, by some of Dr Sant's often nonsensical arguments.

So eliminating such voters from the electoral register was perceived to be to the advantage of Labour, and to heck with a central tenet of democracy, namely that of allowing the fullest and widest participation.

This issue has now been brushed aside, and Dr Sant has once more had to eat his words and decide to drop another boycott. Thank goodness for common sense. One wonders were such sense resided before and why it was so uncommon under new Labour!

Character and amnesia

We cannot lose sight of the fact that the leadership of the Labour Party is fundamentally unchanged. The citizenry has seen those leaders exercise poor judgment in the past, and the public wants hard evidence that the same leaders have grown up into something better than they used to be, and that the next time around, their misjudgments and missteps will not be as serious.

We have to be sure that today's about-turns are not merely desperate and opportunistic manifestations of the drive for survival.

That Dr Sant shows signs of mending his party's ways augurs well for our politics. He'll be helped by a basic fact of our politics: the memory of the electorate tends to be short.

Dr Sant himself devoted a recent Wednesday column castigating the brevity of the collective political memory. Dr Sant, don't knock the voters' amnesia. It will help you save your skin!