Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, J. M. W. Turner, 1842. Oil on Canvas 914 x 1219 mm, Tate Gallery, London.
Yesterday we reflected on the political perils of presenting ourselves as a party that rocks the boat and causes sea-sickness. Our reflection continues.
Can one hope to make a difference in politics and yet be accepted by an electorate that would rather have a government that did not rock the boat? This is a fundamental question, especially for a party that in 2013 will have spent twenty four of the previous twenty six years in opposition, especially in a country whose citizens have shown a marked and clear preference for political parties that let them be.
Faced with the choice between a party that promises to resort to surgery to uproot alleged malignant growths and another that traditionally refuses to admit that there is any growth at all, resorts to palliatives and sedates the patient into numbness, our electorate ultimately chooses the party that takes the softest approach.
In this situation, the party that has been consistently punished by a risk-averse electorate is tempted to imitate its more laid back competitor. It is tempted to avoid raising any serious issues and to smile itself into office. “We promise you we’ll do nothing to upset anyone at all. Vote for us and everything will remain exactly as it is. Vote Joseph and get GonziPN!” Will this do the trick? We don’t think so.
It is true that our electorate values continuity, stability and political tranquillity above all, perhaps as a reaction to past experiences. In 1945, Pawlu Boffa resigned from the Council of Government to pressurise the Governor into dissolving it. In 1946 the nine Labour members of the Council of Government resigned. In 1949, after only two years in government, the Labour Party split and prime minister Boffa, now in a minority, survived for another year then resigned.
In 1958, after three years in office, Mintoff’s Labour government resigned, leading to four years of emergency colonial rule. Labour would have to wait another thirteen years – a highly conflictual period during which raged the infamous ‘political-religious war’ – before winning an election.
Then came the electoral victories of 1971 and 1976. These were ten years the experience of which we need to revisit and to reconsider. They were far from smooth but they were decisive for the country socio-economic progress, even if they have been the object of a revisionist historiography that is no less blatant and shameful than the worst examples of Stalinist rewriting of history.
Then came the ‘perverse’ result of 1981 – clearly a sign of political decline -, Mintoff’s resignation in favour of Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in 1984 and the defeat of 1987. The closing years of the 70s and the first half of the 80s were traumatic and left wounds that have yet to heal. There is a lot that happened then that is still shrouded in mystery but the point is that in the memory (first hand or received) of tens of thousands of Maltese and Gozitans, Labour is the villain of those years.
Then came 1996, a glorious year that saw Labour – with the decisive contribution of many activists who had led the difficult struggle to renew the Party – back into government. Merely two years later, possibly in an attempt to turn back the clock of history within the Party, a crisis ensued that led prime minister Alfred Sant to decide to call an election. Need we add a reference to the EU issue? Whatever the merits and demerits of Labour’s position on that issue, it will certainly be remembered as another instance of its genetic negativism.
In all of the cases mentioned above, Labour was – to use an unfashionable phrase – on the side of history. The resignations, the split, the early elections were all the consequences of good intentions. But who cares apart from those who are already convinced that is the case? Our collective memory has retained mainly the distress of those occasions to the extent that in the minds of roughly half the population Labour has become a synonym of distress.
We can, of course, study the distortions of history and the systematic suppression of truth that has moulded our collective memory but at the end of the day, we have the collective memory that we have and that, perhaps, we have deserved.
Which brings back to the future, to our Joseph. There is no doubt that a lot needs to be done to make of this country a decent European one, one that we need not be ashamed of. The question now is how to go about convincing a majority of fellow citizens that doing what needs to be done will cause no distress. On the contrary, that we will all be distressed unless we take action to prevent this from happening.
We think that Labour’s new approach, the ‘new political season’ inaugurated by Joseph, is the right way out of the dilemma we referred to in the first paragraph. It won’t be easy, also because not every Labourite is Joseph, but we can do it. And we will.
