Time to start planning for the ‘post-PN’ scenario

Seriously. The Malta I returned to this week just isn't the same Malta I took a break from at the end of July. There has been a seismic shift - I was about to say "imperceptible" but it's hard not to spot really - which has left us in the unenviable and quite frankly dangerous position of a single-party state.

If you find that hard to believe... well, take a look around and tell me what you see. On the one hand there's the Partit Laburista - no doubt about its existence: there it is, red in tooth and claw (as it has always been) - but on the other? Nothing at all. Just a gaping black hole on the spot where a political party once stood, proudly claiming (over and over and over again) to be morally, ethically, politically and possibly even genetically superior to the rest of the entire goddamn human race.

Remember? Always on the right side of history? Always 100% correct about absolutely everything... yes, even when the electorate voted one way, and the Prime Minister voted another? And above all, the PN was the only party (or so it endlessly argued) that could ever really be trusted to 'weather the global economic crisis': not because of any grand economic strategy of its own, but simply because they were Nationalists (and therefore automatically bigger, better, smarter and even better-looking than everybody else), while the alternative was always ugly old Labour: the party of 'chavs', 'hamalli', 'hoi polloi', 'the great unwashed', and so on.

At which point the question practically asks itself. Where is all that smug, conceited, self-congratulatory Nationalist posturing now? Nowhere to be seen. Instead we have awkward, painful, embarrassing moments, such as when Secretary-General Chris Said - whom I don't really blame for the disaster, by the way (like so many other loyal party foot soldiers, he has been lumped with the onus of having to clean up the mess left by others) - casually informs Medialink employees that 'Oops! Sorry folks, but we were so goddamn busy boasting about our safe pair of economic hands that... erm... we never actually got round to figuring out how we were going to remunerate you for all your hard work. So... do you mind if you continue working for free? Just a couple of months, you know. Because that's how long it will take for the newly installed Stamperija Café to sell enough cappuccinos to raise the €7 or 8 million we still owe in unpayable debts...'

Honestly, though. To think that the party so many of us once looked up to would crumple like a paper bag before our very eyes like this. Earlier I used the word 'nothing' to describe what the PN has now become; well, I now realise that may be a little unfair on nothingness.

Last I looked, the quality of 'nothing' was never such that it  employed people and then expected them to work for free because it couldn't afford to pay their salaries. Nor does nothing' spend a tidy €2.2 million on an election campaign in the full knowledge of impending defeat, only to suddenly discover that it doesn't have any money for anything else.

Yet at the same time, we can still realistically call the PN 'nothing' because - unlike all the 'somethings' that occasionally find themselves in the same situation, from Enron to the Lehman Brothers all the way down to Priceclub - the party formerly known as the PN can get away with behaviour that would land an ordinary mortal directly in jail, without passing go and without collecting $200.

Unlike ordinary businesses, the PN (and Labour too, if it ends up in the same straits) can simply absolve itself of the obligation to honour its own financial commitments... and not be forced into liquidation as a result. It can default on its debts - which I am told go well beyond the Medialink salary issue: even I know random individuals here and there, mostly in the copywriting business, who did work for their campaign and have now kissed goodbye the prospect of ever getting paid - and yet also retain all its assets and immoveable properties... including club houses occupying prime locations in every single town and village, the least of which could probably generate enough revenue to pay off those debts and possibly even leave a little something extra in the kitty.

But no! The party that once boasted about its 'safe pair of hands' now expects to retain all its core operations, all its employees (who have suddenly been demoted to 'volunteers') and all its assets, without bothering with the financial commitments that all such assets entail. And it gets worse, too: because while Medialink employees are informed that they 'might' get their July salary next January, party functionaries are busy knocking on doors with their begging bowls in hand - not to raise money to pay those same employees, but so that the PN can organise its annual Independence Day festivities and finance next year's European election campaign.

And what is that, if not the equivalent of spending a fortune to doll up the façade of your home, while your children silently starve in squalor on the inside?

And this brings me to the true nature of the seismic shift I referred to earlier. If we can now almost talk about the PN in the past tense - as in a party that 'used to' exist, 'used to' represent something, etc. - it is not merely because of its very visible state of bankruptcy. It is because the same party has slipped into a moral black hole, too. The days when it could (and did, ad nauseam) claim to occupy the moral high ground are now firmly over. You can't preach po-faced morality one day, and then go on to almost literally rob your own loyal foot soldiers blind, in order to finance an extravagant political shopping spree. To be honest, you can't do that even if you'd never been guilty of overselling your supposed 'moral credentials' in the first place... let alone after you spent the last 10 years repeatedly trying to project yourself as the Government of God. 

Naturally from the perspective of an increasingly cynical media commentator such as myself, this is more grist than my mill can actually handle. Good Lord, what fun we could all have digging up all the old campaign slogans and applying them to the present scenario. Remember? 'Gas down ghal gol-hajt', and all the rest?

Sadly, however, the underlying implications cease to be even remotely amusing when you give the matter more than just a fleeting moment's thought. I for one never imagined I'd ever feel sorry for Medialink journalists... who, let's face it, have not always been thoroughly deserving of sympathy... But though we have disagreed fiercely in the past, they remain my colleagues in the broader sense, and quite frankly it is a disgrace that they or anyone else should be treated this way.

But the real problem is quite another. The PN does not only owe money to its employees and creditors. It owes the nation a political debt, too. It can't just go belly up on us like that and leave the Labour Party with a blank cheque to rule the roost precisely as if the entire country were an extension of its own headquarters in Mile End. This would be grossly irresponsible on the part of the PN, even if the Labour Party didn't have an entire natural history museum of fossilised skeletons locked away in its closet. But seeing as this is the same Labour Party that remains associated with an alarming array of human rights infringements dating back to three decades ago - all neatly swept under the carpet since then, yes, but hey! Some of us have retained the faculty of memory, you know - the same political irresponsibility displayed by the PN in allowing itself to be run into the ground is little short of criminal.

I for one am not comfortable living in a country where the party in government is now practically plenipotentiary in all matters - appointing its minions to every single supposedly autonomous power-node the country has to offer, and all the rest - without even so much as a functional Opposition to keep it in check. And now that we can all more or less safely agree that the Nationalist Party is no more - that, like Monty Python's parrot, it has "kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-PARTY!!" - well, there is urgent need of a replacement, and pronto.

Personally I have always argued that there is still plenty of room on the political spectrum for a moderate, centre-right party with liberal leanings: you know, a secular party that actually respects individual rights, and that doesn't pry into matters which are none of its concern. A party that is careful when spending other people's money, and that espouses a pragmatic commonsense approach to issues, instead of always falling back on an antediluvian, Opus Dei-inspired set of 'values' which invariably turn out to have no real value at all.

As it happens, I didn't have all that much planned for the next five years anyway (except maybe writing Malta's first Eurovision Song Contest winner... but that's another story). So... any takers? Don't all speak at once, I can't hear you...