The Thatcherisms of Alfred Sant

Basking in her first election victory, flushed with success after an electoral campaign during which she poured buckets of scorn over her principal opponent, standing on the threshold of 10 Downing Street, speaking into the microphones eager to capture her first prime ministerial words, Margaret Thatcher recited a version of the peace prayer attributed to St Francis of Assisi. (She then went on to become the most confrontational and divisive prime minister in her country's living memory.)

This is only one of several points of resemblance between Mrs Thatcher and Alfred Sant, especially in his current form. Is the resemblance superficial? Is it even less than that - mere coincidence? Or does it indicate a deeper similarity?

What should we make, for instance, of their shared impatience with any form of authority other than their own? Mrs Thatcher centralised power at the expense of local councils and authorities. Dr Sant will bypass the Malta Environment and Planning Authority if he has to.

Finding points of resemblance is not difficult. The problem is deciding whether they mean anything.

For example, the issue that brought Mrs Thatcher down was her stand on the so-called community charge. This was a local tax on households. Mrs Thatcher wanted to reform the system then in place and put, in its stead, a flat rate that did not distinguish, in principle, between the well-off and the rather less well-off. The bills of struggling households would have gone up astronomically. The country seethed with anger at the proposal and Mrs Thatcher's own party turned against her.

Is it superficial to point out the resemblance to how Dr Sant, as prime minister, raised electricity and water rates across the board? Yes, if one tries to suggest that Dr Sant questions the principle of progressive income tax, as the extreme Thatcherites appeared to do.

But the two political measures do have something in common, and it is not superficial.

Since the hiking up of those bills, the MLP has admitted that it was a mistake. The British Conservative Party made a similar admission on the community charge. In both cases, however, the admission is surely beside the point. Everyone knew it was a mistake; no one needed to be told. What is curious is how anyone could think, even for a moment, that it was not unjust. The reason has to be this: behind those measures lay a form of thinking that is blind to certain forms of solidarity.

Both cases show an inability to consider society as anything more than a summing up of its various parts. It is a collection of individuals and their families. But the idea that there is a common good that they all share is missing. At best, there is a coalition of my good, your good, and their good, which put together might even add up to a majority in the country.

When Mrs Thatcher uttered her notorious "There is no such thing as society", she went on to explain what she meant. There are individual men and women, she said, and there are families. Her speeches over the years show that she certainly believed that there were communities and that there were nations, and that she believed heartily in the primacy of hers.

So it is no reassurance - at least for those of us with an instinctive antipathy for Mrs Thatcher's social philosophy - that Dr Sant tells us that his slogan "You first" really means you and your family, you and your community, you and your nation. No one ever thought he was appealing to hermits.

Pointing out the differences between the MLP's electoral programme and Mrs Thatcher's is not reassuring, either. The distinctiveness of the MLP's programme, this time round, does not lie in its domestic ambitions. A cleaner environment, a more robust tourist industry, a better package for foreign investment, free trade with the EU - these and much else are shared by the PN programme. The difference lies in how the MLP, on the one hand, and the yes parties on the other, view solidarity.

If, like Mrs Thatcher, you are going to oppose the EU as inappropriate for your country, then this has to be because you are blind to certain forms of solidarity that are needed in an age of globalisation.

Social democrats have played such a key role in the development of the EU because they recognised that environmental protection requires solidarity between nation-states. So do industrial protection and education programmes in knowledge-based societies.

The insight and conviction are eloquently expressed by a French socialist, Pierre Moscovici, in his recent book on Europe (p. 74). George Vella has sometimes cited this book, but I invite readers if they can imagine Dr Sant uttering what Mr Moscovici (in my translation) says here:

"My ambition for Europe, and that of many progressives, has always been to go beyond the horizon of a simple institutional and financial construction... If, after the 1950s, European socialists have always been among the principal leaders in the construction of a unified Europe, this is because they consider that not only does it not obstruct their wish for social transformation, but that it can indeed be a powerful force in the struggle for progress and against inequalities."