Socialist is who socialist does. Talking socialist is not enough. Let’s examine this government’s record in that respect.
Before the 2013 election, the Labour opposition exacted political advantage when Malta’s exposure to the international price of imported oil and the exchange shifts with the US dollar meant Maltese people and businesses were squeezed by high electricity bills. Solving that problem promised to be an inclusive social measure.
International market prices went down, which means that in real terms we saved money. But the new energy deal commits us to buy energy from Azerbaijan even when we can find cheaper elsewhere. We’re paying tens of millions more than we need to.
We? That’s the poorest among us whose household budget right now would be hundreds of euro better off without Electrogas. That’s not socialist.
Before 2013, Labour never said anything about privatising public hospitals, a socialist anathema. Socialists are averse to privatising anything, let alone the national health service, the levelling equaliser for a fair society. Privatised hospitals providing free public healthcare cost public funds one and a half times more than they used to cost in full public ownership.
Patients say they have perceived no improvement in the quality of the service given. Rather the opposite, they are confronted by a hospital management whose primary consideration is increasing profit, and they can only do that by cutting costs, since they can’t hike their fees.
The increased public expenditure spent in lining the pockets of the new hospital owners means the government is tight with approving new treatments for public health provision.
I am not talking about experimental cures here. Cancer patients are being referred by their doctors to the Malta Community Chest Fund. Taxpayers are getting their treatment paid for by charity because the State cannot afford to pay for it. And charity is not keeping up.
Doctors are warning patients their treatment might be cut off midstream because the President’s purse cannot keep up. That’s not socialist.
Tertiary education funded by the State has been opened to profiteers. The American University of Malta is in great part funded by the State, which has provided it with public land to operate from. Presumably the AUM’s owners are making money.
A few dozen students are benefiting from whatever teaching they provide, almost none of them people who will continue to work in Malta’s economy, returning some of the value of the subsidised public land given to them with their research or professional services.
Think what the University of Malta could have done with the value of that land. It could have funded more research and learning for people who are committed to Malta’s future. It could have eased the pressure on the Tal-Qroqq campus that is growing tired, crowded and behind the times. But the profits of the Jordanian AUM owners were prioritised over the needs of young Maltese people. That’s not socialist.
Immigrants escaping untold miseries were left for months floating at sea, going mad, trapped with the distant view of a land that won’t let them step on it.
The few survivors who made it ashore were locked up in squalid concentration camps that the animal welfare regulator would have shut down had they been made for pigs.
This government is ‘business friendly’ but to those businesses that are friendly to it
Fourteen-year-olds are treated as adults but not allowed to work. Instead they are given less than €5 a day and told to fend for themselves, forced to choose between eating and washing with soap. The few migrants allowed to live among us are treated as beasts of burden.
Official government policy is that they are to do jobs beneath the dignity of indigenous Maltese: rubbish stays with rubbish.
Government policy has shifted from ‘push back’, which it says it regrets, to push down, to the point where soldiers-at-arms allegedly drive by and shoot people for the crime of being black. That’s not socialist.
For six years, the government did not hand over the keys to a single apartment where people who can’t afford their own home can live on social terms.
Instead, families have lost their homes as their roof collapsed under the weight of the behemoths built next door to them.
Construction is rampant, but it’s for apartments that no one earning their living in Malta can ever afford. The first rung in the property ladder is too steep for most young people to climb.
Available property is rented out to billionaires who will never use them but are willing to pay to get themselves a Maltese passport. That pushes up the price of property that people born to a Maltese passport can no longer afford to rent.
For the first time in decades the sight of people sleeping rough has become commonplace. That’s not socialist. In the heady days of Alfred Sant, Labour complained about businessmen exploiting their proximity to politicians to help their businesses grow.
A crusade was fought over a ground-floor restaurant in Birkirkara that sells burgers and milkshake for €4.99 to teenagers and where the football club got public property for its upstairs offices.
Some businesses ought not to be profitable, and yet they thrive. Competing with them is impossible as access to their activities is not allowed. The extortion of ‘silent partners’ is taken for granted.
Refuse and your business is bashed by tax audits, planning refusals, customs hesitation and shameless bureaucratic discrimination.
Seeking justice with constituted bodies is pointless as they’re in on the deal or too scared to challenge it. Going to court is unthinkable.
Socialism is rarely concerned with the wellbeing of entrepreneurs. But this government is. It is ‘business friendly’, but to those businesses that are friendly to it. It has become corporatist in the fascist sense, operating a corrupt hegemony of oligarchs.
Socialism is, however, concerned with nurturing a growing middle class and that is supposed to come from the prosperity of individual initiative, farming, services, smallholding businesses, self-employed creators, innovators and artists.
But these people can’t afford to pay the ‘silent partners’.
In place of a new middle class we are creating pockets of unheard-from underclasses. They are homeless. Or black. Or poor.
They are cold in summer and hot in winter. They can’t afford the medication they need when they need it. Their young are not getting the best education, which means they’re not getting the best chance in life.
And if they make it anyway, they find themselves pushed back by an oligarchy that excludes them.
They live in neglected neighbourhoods where schooling is poor and hospitals are privatised. Or in concentration camps with no food, let alone dignity.
And when you get an underclass, you get an overclass: compromised, collusive, corrosive, corrupt and criminal.
I’m not waving the flag for socialism. I am pointing out that those who do are not merely hypocrites.
They have built highways for tax-dodging, fuel-guzzling cronies driving over the footpaths trod by people with real needs.
There is the need of a real, progressive agenda that thinks of people first, profits later. Someone has to do it. Right now, nobody is.