PEOPLE • 12 JANUARY 2003

A ‘kind’ of new Leftie…

A charming mug and a couple of Stanley knives for good measure make the archetype politician. MATTHEW VELLA speaks to Labour MP Evarist Bartolo, whose only qualm with European membership is that it remains, to all effects, the big boy’s club he does not Malta want to join.

Mile End, Hamrun - Evarist Bartolo knows his politics. His affable, engaging smile gives his bourgeois, socialist demeanour a more savvier media image far ahead of the rest of Labour’s pundits. He is Tenth District material, purely, a man who can make Labour look sexier than it ever was and show the electorate that New Labour still has a flame of furious socialist in it.

His ideology is a typical Latin mix of Marxist lit, particularly Gramsci (he is after all, a man of the seventies), and Catholic patina, calling the Second Vatican Council ‘inspiration’, strewn in with some Dickens and Flaubert. In the void of Mile End’s boardroom, Evarist Bartolo talks to me about his new, eagerly-anticipated play, teasingly named www.guzeppimattewcallus.com, his take on Maltese nationhood and the way we perceive our history as Maltese.

And that makes him unlike the rest of some of Labour’s frontliners. But he justifies New Labour’s slant to Harvardian high-finance in the form of a socialist cocktail for the 21st century, adjusting to circumstances. And his justification, he says, comes from Lenin himself, saying the party will be ultimately judged on the quality of life it can provide. Hail the politburo.

Somehow, at least through popular perception, Evarist Bartolo is the Nationalist’s secret darling leftie, spared from the proverbial guillotine of Labour-hating. Of course, he had been asked by Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and Louis Galea to join the Nationalist Party back in the seventies. Maybe it is because his own family is of Nationalist tint. Or maybe it is because he lives in Swieqi, cavorting with pépé and champagne socialists who have retreated into the genteel ghettos, that makes him somewhat more pleasant to look at, to talk to, to listen to.

His journalism students at the University of Malta have talked about his charisma and his piquant manner when lecturing. Maybe he knows that the smug rack of white teeth and greying clump of wavy hair wins him just that much more sympathy than Sant’s worn and strained grin.

So ten years in his parliamentary career, is he as much a smarmy fox as most of his critics point him out to be? The poison pen in the Labour press, the suave talker with more than one dagger in his coat, the man who pointed his impugnable and accusing finger at Prof Kenneth Wain – how far does the man who calls Maltese politics "trench warfare", throw the mustard gas when it comes to the offensive?

"I have absolutely no regrets on what I’ve said about Kenneth Wain," is Mr Bartolo’s curt preamble to his justification of the searing attacks on the university professor back in 2001 on Xarabank. Although sanctioned by leader Alfred Sant, his venomous tongue brought outright condemnation from academia.

"It strikes me hard that Prof Kenneth Wain has written some excellent essays on indoctrination and how to avoid indoctrination in schools. I could never accept that the chairman of the Foundation of Education Services calls for schools to include teaching on the European Union for primary and secondary schools.

"This man’s line is ethics, he's also a lecturer at the University’s Faculty of Education, and yet he chose to allow MIC officials in schools to talk about the EU in primary and secondary schools.

"I am glad that it did not happen. The scenario would have been tragic. I am all for talks on the Comenius project, for example, Labour having been the first to initiate talks on the project. I am definitely against having young children being indoctrinated on the EU at such an early age."

In truth, Evarist Bartolo is no rabid anti-Europeanist, certainly not standard anti-abortionist cum Labour xenophobe.

"I feel very much at home in the countries of the European Union, and am certainly not xenophobic. The EU is a positive thing, and I think that the world needs it. Malta has always suffered because of the wars that were fought on the European mainland, so it is mandatory that we have the best of relations.

"But as a small country, we should not subordinate our decision-making power to the EU, which is in fact a condition of full membership.

"In the EU, our power would be in proportion to our population. Within the Council of Ministers for example, we will have little power.

"I’m all for working together for our mutual interests, but it is important that Malta retains its decision-making power.

"Labour’s strategy for and EU partnership answer our need right now without having to close any door and to give us the change to see how circumstances evolve."

The partnership strategy Labour has finally settled on, after even temporarily toying with idea of shelving the EU proposal completely (Sant’s gaffe, in an apparent moment of forgetfulness), has however encountered problems of communication. It has been the foreign policy to have garnered the most flak since Mintoff’s Libyan flirtations. The media does not like it. The Nats calls it "Abandon-ship", having won the battle of the quips. Daphne calls it, less savvily, but equally playfully, "partnership".

Labour’s aesthetic and lacklustre media image has not helped the pundits at Mile End. Maybe it’s Super One’s grainy Super-8 vision and crummy sets, or maybe it’s Labour’s in-your-face style, never stooping to seduce the public with a sweetener, that makes its message so unsexy.

Evarist Bartolo’s justification is the media’s apparent contempt for Labour.

"There are problems in explaining our message. One of them is that the local media is pro-Nationalist."

Pre-empting an interruption, Mr Bartolo says that "this is not about paranoia". But things have certainly changed, I continue. Back in 1996, a fresh-faced, innovative New Labour programme sought to bring Nationalist arrogance to a halt. Post-1998 elections, Labour’s tactic change to a siege mentality, a min mhux maghna kontrina approach, carefully woven by spinmeister Manuel Cuschieri’s admonishing verbosity at times, with victims including Prof Kenneth Wain and Central Bank Governor Michael Bonello.

"It is a reality. The majority of the media monitors what the Opposition does, with denigrating scrutiny. In other countries it is usually the opposite, and the media usually checks on Government’s performance. But in Malta, the local media is somewhat against Labour.

"For example, the PN attacks the Ombudsman or Broadcasting Authority Chairman Joseph Said Pullicino, and yet the local media does not budge. It is as if we are living in a one-party state. You see, it is not only the MLP that carries out an offensive.

"Basically, the PN’s advantage is that the media owners generally support the party. How different that would be if the commercial media were to be more critical. But that is the problem on this island. There is a dearth of civil society. There is no democratic watchdog.

"Our society’s size does not permit critical analysis, the result being silence. In such a small island with so many radio stations and newspapers, a lot of the media is operating in a restricted economy, so they become fragile institutions in that they depend on their sponsors. Our media are subsidiary institutions to commercial interests, and that’s why they end up being loudspeakers or jukeboxes for opinions generated outside them. They don’t analyse. They are just pulpits.

"We need more depth, independent opinion, and to stop being a Tom and Jerry society. This is the very democratic deficit we face in our political, economic and social debate."

Let’s talk about education then, the key to the future.

Education Minister Louis Galea and Evarist Bartolo do not meet, so there’s little dialectic at the top except for what goes on in Parliament, the place Mr Bartolo calls a dormitory.

Evarist Bartolo however calls for a radical overhaul of the educational system, from what boisterous kindergarten toddlers are imbibed with to the hot air supplied by university lecturers.

"Too many children are falling by the wayside.

"We must start off by teaching young children a positive mode of expressing themselves and socialising with each other, building their self-confidence. Primary education is losing primacy, especially the subjects of Maltese, English, Maths and more importantly Science and Technology. There is nothing close to science and technology in primary education. How is this possible in the 21st century? Today children are losing something like six years of education.

"There must be a big push in literacy as well, and not only in reading but also in expression. The problem here is a dearth of creativity. Children are only being told to conform and shut up, and nothing else. How can we expect these children to face a television camera and speak the way Italian children speak.

"Part of the problem comes from teachers who are not being trained in pedagogical skills. This has left us with Bismarkian institutions. We produce soldiers to obey, a form of military camp. When it comes to university, we then expect students who were previously told to shut up to suddenly start debating with their lecturers!

"At least 50 per cent of students fail their Maltese and English examinations. There is obviously a problem in language teaching and in the relationship between development and language competence. Unfortunately, due to the fact that textbooks are imported, language development is related to foreign settings and expression therefore not related to the world in which we operate.

"There’s also the problem of a crazy examination-fuelled system in Malta. The greatest exam of all is facing the real world. We have to teach children to face the world by confronting them with problems to solve. This has to be done by designing exams differently. They should be challenged, with curricula designed differently and updated to make them more relevant to the real world."

And true. Evarist Bartolo speaks of a nation which has dug its heels into the carrier of social mobility – examinations, a 19th century segregation relic on for ostracised ‘ignorants’, as we learn. The result has been generations of textbook-parrots whose lives depend on end-of-year certificates and MATSEC grades. Something has to give, but nothing has yet changed. We remain, in the most gracious of demeanours, a nation of schooled idiots.

Of course, this is a new glance on Evarist Bartolo, a man whose otherwise radical ideas for educational reform, have been obfuscated by an alter ego rearing the dark side of the silky, suave politician.

I forget to ask him whether he would like to be leader, although he is convinced that the country "needs" Alfred Sant: "He is a man with many good qualities which are sometimes not expressed in his media image. He is a man of great intelligence with a great will to do things."