Souls for sale (two for the price of one)

This blog originally appeared in MaltaToday Midweek on Wednesday 11 October.

Well, we now have it from the horse’s mouth. Had the Nationalist Party won the election in March 2013, the Valletta monti would be operating from Ordnance Street right now. Indeed, it would already have been there – selling panties, keychains, and Quadruple D-cup bras designed for the Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon – for over a year now.

Since 1 December, 2013 “at the latest”, to be precise. We even have this in writing: former Lands Secretary Jason Azzopardi sent the hawkers an email to assure them that he had been ‘authorised’ to offer the exact same slot – i.e., Ordnance Street, between the ruined Opera House and Piano’s parliament extravaganza – that the PN is now sworn to defend from a barbarian invasion of ‘hamallagni’.

And just to maximise the impact of this astonishing act of political hypocrisy – by far the baldest and most glaring example I have ever seen – Azzopardi’s e-mail happened to surface at almost exactly the same moment when his party leader, Simon Busuttil, accused the Labour Party of ‘selling its soul for votes’.

That’s right. Busuttil even gave a news conference outside the Piano parliament this week, to illustrate how shocking and appalling he found it, that another political party would promise the hawkers the EXACT SAME THING that his own party had promised them before the same election... at a time when Busuttil himself was the PN’s deputy leader, and (more poignantly, seeing as we are talking about an electoral promise here) also its campaign manager.

And like a certain songbird which sings in a certain tree by a certain brook… it makes me wonder.

One of the things it makes me wonder is… did Jason Azzopardi ever get round to actually informing his party’s campaign manager – i.e., the person responsible for making electoral promises on behalf of the PN – about this little arrangement he had struck with the Valletta market on March 9, 2013? And if not (hey, we’ve all seen the PN suffering from internal communications problems before)… didn’t it occur to Azzopardi that it might be a good idea to raise the issue with his party leader in the past few days… when the monti relocation suddenly became the focus of an outpouring of emotional indignation? 

You know, just in case Busuttil got all excited (again) at the prospect of another anti-government bandwagon to jump on… and in his haste to chime in with the popular mood, made the fatal leap onto that wagon before checking to see which tune the band was actually playing. 

I guess not, huh? But in any case. Let’s take a closer look at what Busuttil actually said once he had already jumped onto the bandwagon. This is from his news conference last Saturday:

“It is clear that Joseph Muscat entered into an agreement with the monti hawkers before the last election, that he would relocate them to Ordnance Street if they voted for him… This shows that for Joseph Muscat, votes, power and winning elections are more important than culture… Muscat sold his soul for votes, but I won’t …”

Ouch. OK, thanks to Azzopardi’s email, we now know that the above sentence would remain every bit as factually correct if we substitute ‘Joseph Muscat’ with ‘the PN’. Like Muscat, the PN also entered into an identical agreement (with the same people, offering the same thing). And it did all this for the same reason, too. Votes.

But wait, let’s not be too hasty. Let’s also hear how the PN leader reacted when the email was (predictably) leaked:

“The relocation wasn’t in our electoral manifesto…. Besides, I’m a new leader and I don’t agree with the monti being anywhere on Ordnance Street…”

Hmm. OK, perhaps I read too deeply into such things, but… what exactly is Dr Busuttil telling us here? So the proposed relocation was not set down in writing in the PN’s manifesto. Well, that’s not exactly a big surprise: the promise was made on the day of the election itself… there’s a date on that email, remember?... which makes it just slightly late to be included in an electoral programme that was actually published on the first day of the campaign. 

But leaving that aside for now: the fact that this promise wasn’t included in the manifesto means only one thing, really. It means that the agreement was made in secret. Just like Joseph Muscat’s analogous promise, the PN had also entered into a “secret pact” with the hawkers… of the kind it now describes in tones of such supercilious shock and horror. 

Which of course raises a small question. If Muscat’s actions before that election were tantamount to ‘selling his soul’…. what did the PN do with its own soul, if not offer it up for auction at a cheap and tacky Valletta monti stall? 

And that, I fear, is not all, or even the worst to emerge from this latest deflated mess. There is also a sinister undertone in the logic behind the PN’s justification. Why does it make a difference that this promise was not among the official PN electoral commitments, as detailed in the manifesto authored by Simon Busuttil? What is the PN leader actually suggesting here? That all along, the PN had no intention of actually delivering on that promise? That it was nothing but a cynical, calculated ploy to deceive the hawkers into voting for a party that had no intention of honouring its commitments? 

In the specific context of the argument at hand, that is in fact the only realistic interpretation. The PN evidently considered it fine and dandy to make any amount of outrageous electoral commitments (‘outrageous’ in that party’s own view today, please note: it saw nothing ‘outrageous’ about relocating the monti to Ordnance Street on March 9, 2013)… because, in the unlikely event that it went on to win that election, the incoming government knew it could always sidestep its obligations on the pretext that it had conveniently ‘forgotten’ to include such obligations in its electoral programme.

At this point, one also has to ask: what does all this tell us, exactly, about the worth of any spoken (or even written, in an email) promise made by the Nationalist Party before an election? 

I don’t know about you, but the message I get from this is that the national standards of political integrity and honesty in our country – which were never high to begin with – have just been lowered a few dozen pegs or more. Just when you think things can’t possibly get any more farcical than they already are… the Nationalist Party itself suddenly turns around and says: Oh, that? We didn’t really mean it, you know. It’s just something we said to get into power, that’s all. You should all know by now that our word is worth jack-shit anyway…

Seriously, not even the PN’s worst enemy could have so utterly annihilated its credibility as a party that always keeps its word.

And that’s before we remember the context within which all this came about: an argument about whether an unassuming little street market should be permitted to bask in the glory of a Parliament designed by the greatest architect in the world, and occupied by…

…well, by people who might not sell tacky items imported from China, true; but what these people sell is infinitely more demeaning to the ‘cultural standards’ of our entire country than any amount of fake watches or CDs. They sell their own souls… and cheaply, too. (In fact the PN sold its soul to the monti hawkers’ for a handful of votes… which, in the end, it didn’t even get anyway.)

And that’s not all our Parliament sells, either. Jason Azzopardi’s email represents but a tiny fraction of the cynical, barefaced horse-trading for votes that takes place before every election. In fact, Malta’s biggest (and tackiest) market by far has never been the ‘suq tal-Belt’ at all. It’s always been the Kamra Tad-Deputati.

When all is said and done, the monti’s great crime is to sell cheap clothing, leather goods, CDs and key chains. People can complain all they like about the quality of goods on offer … but at least those items do actually belong to the hawkers, and can therefore be legitimately bought or sold at will. 

Parliament, on the other hand, sells things that do not even belong to it at all... things that belong to the public, but which are happily traded every five years “for votes, for power, to win an election”. Things like immense tracts of public land… Armier being the obvious example, but there are others… to be occupied by illegal squatters. 

I need hardly add that the effects of all this political mercantilism go far, far beyond offending the aesthetic sensibilities of Malta’s self-appointed cultural elite. The Valletta market stalls may well cheapen a (very expensive) House of Parliament by its mere presence in the vicinity; but the shameless ‘souls-for votes’ trade that the same House of Parliament is guilty of… that cheapens the entire country.

So who’s the biggest ‘insult to our culture’ now, aye?