Supermarket politics and national amnesia

Dozens of online debates and real-life arguments are taking place over whether his Labour government is any different to previous PN administrations. Is it really worse… or is it just a case of selective memory?

Unquestionably, the Labour government has opened itself up to accusations of dishonesty, cronyism and nepotism. And coupled with its complete disregard for the environment and its neo-liberal vision? Surely Joseph Muscat’s government is the source of all evil and has screwed the country for good.

But no: this country was screwed long before Muscat took over Mile End back in 2008. What Muscat has managed to do – impressively I’d add – is drive home the message that “this is how things should be”… cheating and bending the rules is normal, a necessary act of survival in a cutthroat environment. This is the way it happened with Sadeen and the American University of Malta, or with Café Premier.

My granddad would say “I’m all right Jack!” – a saying that encapsulated the post-war Maltese psyche. Little has changed over the past five or six decades of this post-colonialist hangover of the survival of the greediest.

If you can drive recklessly without being fined, you can also turn a pile of rubble into an agricultural store with the planning authority’s blessing. If people litter the streets without any sanction, then it’s also possible to get away with shooting birds illegally. If government allows greedy developers to build hospitals without planning permits, then it’s fine to gift ODZ land freely to a Jordanian company before it obtains a licence to operate a private university.

Both starved Labourites and voracious Nationalists treasure Labour’s lax attitude and the lack of rule of law and decency. It’s music to the ears of Sandro Chetcuti: “For businessmen, the parties are like two big shops”. However sore one might feel upon hearing this, it’s a truth which both Labour and the PN feel very comfortable with. They revel in supermarket politics.

For Labour, a former socialist party with aspirations of becoming ‘the Nation’s Party’, image is king. This administration disguises its neoliberalism with a reformist coat that champions individual liberties.

Muscat spreads his net as wide as possible. He talks tough on welfare abuse to gratify the middle class, in full knowledge that most of the working class will vote Labour anyway. Irrespectively of the promises of accountability and transparency, direct orders, tenders and expressions of interest are designed to suit what former Labour leader Alfred Sant called “friends of friends” – sometimes to the companies that also grew fat under PN governments. The only difference is in style. The PN was suave in its deceit, this one is ham-fisted.

Ideological opposition to Labour’s neo-liberal agenda is inexistent. Critical thinking is as common as Ebola in Malta.  People are charmed at the prospect of turning Malta into another Dubai. It’s this kind of mass lobotomy, of voters averse to honest politicians, tax cuts and a greedy class of ‘supermarket politics’ investors that allows Labour (and the PN) to prosper.

The party faithful blinded by greed make the most of it while the party is in power; those in love for their party are oblivious to the fact that today’s republic is no better than it was in the past. The rest switch from one shop to another.

Malta’s political parties have occupied the State and other institutions for far too long: local councils, social welfare institutions, public companies, government agencies, cultural institutions, hospitals, most of the media and public TV. They are all expected to carry out functions exclusively in the interest of the party in government or the financiers in charge.

Can things ever change? In democracies the people can send the parties packing, but only when they free themselves of the parties’ blackmail.