Robert Abela lapped up the applause. His smile was broad. But away from Mile End, all was not well in the land of Labour.
One of its former sages, Evarist Bartolo, recently wrote a scathing post decrying Labour’s loss of values. And one of its most outspoken current crop of politicians, Conrad Borg Manché, has just quit the party.
Labour, Borg Manché said, “is no longer a socialist party that fights for workers”.
Those words must have been ringing in Abela’s ears, because he made it a point to emphasise the party’s socialist roots in his speech closing off Labour’s general conference.
No amount of rhetoric can mask what is clear for all to see, though: Labour is not the political party it professes to be.
That is not entirely Abela’s fault: he inherited a chalice that was poisoned by the misdeeds of his predecessor. No amount of surgery can fix the monster brought to life by Malta’s modern-day political Frankenstein.
Labour points to increases in pensions, stipends and social benefits as evidence of its socialist credentials. And credit where it is due, it has grown those programmes far more than previous administrations did.
It also operated extensive aid programmes for businesses and workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and it continues to spend millions on a blanket subsidy to cover rises in the cost of electricity.
All those are social democratic measures. All deserve to be part of the story when the history of Labour’s time in government will be written. But a decade of bad governance, sheer lies and brazen favouritism for the chosen few have dulled their sheen. It increasingly feels like Labour has managed to relegate its own achievements to a footnote.
No amount of surgery can fix the monster brought to life by Malta’s modern-day political Frankenstein
It is ironic, for instance, to hear Abela pledge to crack down on workers being abused by temping agencies, given that his predecessor spent so much time in opposition decrying what was then termed “precarious work”.
Having had more than 10 years in power to fix things, we are now told that change is around the corner.
Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of people who make up Malta’s new working class have been allowed to slip through society’s cracks by what is ostensibly a workers’ party.
Instead, Labour has spent a decade doing its utmost to help its own become what Joseph Muscat has described as “little lords” (sinjuri żgħar) and not asking too many questions about how they get there.
How does that square up to the claim, right at the start of Labour’s party statute, that “the health of a society can be measured by the progress registered by its weakest members”?
This obsession with chasing GDP growth at all costs – and with protecting its own before anything else ‒ has led Labour down some very dark paths.
We have seen Labour politicians cosy up to major developers who have shown, time and time again, that they have no regard for authority or the communities they engulf.
We have witnessed Labour MPs argue, like parrots, that Jean Paul Sofia’s mother does not deserve a public inquiry into her son’s death, because their boss said so.
And we have heard the prime minister say, with a straight face, that there is nothing untoward about a minister texting officials with requests to ‘help’ specific people. It’s all a part of “the system”, he said.
Whatever system that is, it doesn’t sound like a democratic socialist one.