Dr Joseph and Mr Busuttil

Maybe it was news of an imminent sequel to ‘Trainspotting’ that got me thinking about weird pastimes of the ‘spotting’ variety. You know, hobbies which involve observation from afar (usually through binoculars) of assorted categories of… erm… things, for no apparent reason other than that they happen to exist.

OK, I know there wasn’t any actual ‘trainspotting’ going on in the film. That’s why so many of us spent 20 years wondering why Irvine Welsh chose that particular title in the first place. But the activity does exist, and evidently attracts thousands of people around the world. They loiter around train stations and ‘observe’ trains: which, in this sort of hobby, means developing a detailed mental profile of every last detail pertaining to this means of transportation. Make, model, serial number, date of launch, last known operational route… and, of course, any peculiar features that may distinguish one train from the next. 

A dent in the front left side of the rear carriage will immediately inform the trainspotter that this specimen was indeed the same one he had observed in another station several weeks earlier, on the clean other side of the country. And for reasons unknown to me personally, this sort of realisation brings immense gratification to the trainspotter: the equivalent of an ornithologist identifying a rare bird hitherto unseen in this part of the world, or at that time of year, etc.  

I have never met any trainspotters myself (largely because I missed the last train that actually operated in this country – it left the station around 1937) but I have seen the aviation equivalent of the same obsession. Once I sat in an airport café overlooking the runway, and observed one such specimen taking detailed notes of various planes as they took off and landed.

Every now and again he’d pause for a sip of Cappuccino, and comment aloud. “Ooh, an Airbus 360… interesting!”

Of course, for all I know he might just as easily have been a terrorist planning a hijack. I didn’t actually ask him what he was doing. But he looked just the type who might somehow get a kick out of being privy to the sort of arcane information that only he – and a few other initiates within the same secret circle – would conceivably find interesting.

And I partly understand the attraction, too. There is a sense of confraternity, of belonging… and above all, a sense of reassuring consistency. Planes, trains and automobiles are general predictable machines. Sure, they crash sometimes, and are more often delayed. But once duly recognised, a train remains very recognisably a train. And though I might be wrong, I suspect it is in part this sense of permanence and immutability that the typical trainspotter finds so comforting. 

This also explains why there are so few politician-spotters in this world. Clearly it is not for lack of politicians to observe. On the contrary, this category seems to outnumber all other known observable things in the Universe; and by an order of magnitude, too. (In this country, there would in fact be more skill involved in avoiding the sight of a politician, than actually observing one.)

Yet unless you count journalists – who are professionally motivated – you don’t generally get oddly-dressed weirdos loitering around parliament, obsessively taking notes as they observe politicians’ movements with keen interest. There is, in brief, no equivalent arcane hobby for Irvine Welsh to name another novel after. 

And I might have worked out why, too. If people did keep regular tabs on the constantly moving positions of this particular category… they would not encounter the same illusion of permanence and reassuring consistency you get with trains. Make, model, serial number… with politicians, these things are here today, nowhere to be seen tomorrow: by which time they would have been adjusted to reflect whatever identity was needed at that specific moment; only to be discarded in their turn when no longer of any use.

To some of us, that only makes the spectacle more interesting. It doesn’t matter that the politician you observe today happens to be the same you observed yesterday. Whatever the occasion, he or she will be saying and doing completely different things… even to the extent of directly contradicting his or her last known position on the exact same issue.

One of the issues of the moment – and I stress it’s only one: the same general inconsistency applies across the board – are the repeated calls for a ‘response’ to the Syrian refugee crisis. Now: just imagine you derived some form of personal satisfaction from observing the sheer consistency of an unwavering belief or principle (as others might derive from the unwaveringly monotonous regularity of their country’s railway system). What on earth would you make of the multiple mixed messages – almost all contradictory – making up 90% of all political statements on that subject today?

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, for instance, has spectacularly contradicted himself on the Syrian crisis within less than a week: though nobody seems to have noticed. 

This is what he said at a recent press conference flanked by Italian PM Matteo Renzi: “It is not about a solution found by an individual country, but it’s about Europe coming together with countries of origin, transit and destination. Malta is doing its best to support Italy in its rescue operations, but this is not the end solution. Europe has to give money, resources and legal means by which they can access Europe.” 

Got that, folks? ‘Europe has to give money, resources and legal means’. And who is this very generous ‘Europe’ fellow, anyway? By any chance, was Muscat referring to the conglomeration of 28 European countries, grouped together under the banner known as ‘the EU’… of which Malta has been a member since 2004?

If so: how much ‘money, resources and legal means’ is Muscat’s government going to provide, as part of a bargain he himself is pushing for the entire EU to accept? Reason I ask is: well, last I looked Malta was passionately arguing at EU level for more money and resources to be given to itself (not unreasonably, one might add: both were needed, and in short supply). 

Leaving aside the first two items Europe must provide – we can all agree that Malta isn’t exactly rolling in either): and what about ‘legal means’ to get here ‘safely’? This is something that clearly falls within Muscat’s own power to grant, without any help from the EU. It would involve tailoring immigration legislation to allow for humanitarian visas to be issued and processed: just like Germany and other individual countries are doing as we speak.

There is evidence that such a measure could save untold lives at sea, too. Many of the refugees currently dying on Europe’s eastern borders had tried to apply for a visa to get to Europe legally… but were denied because of border policies similar to Malta’s at the moment. We know this from the experience of those who succeeded in getting here illegally. And besides: Muscat himself evidently agrees with the idea of issuing humanitarian visas, seeing as he suggested it himself. So what’s stopping him from doing it himself?

But hey! That was last week. Today is a whole different ballgame. So when directly asked if he intended to put his (or rather, our) money where his mouth was regarding the humanitarian visa business… this was his reply:

“It is not always easy to balance the necessary bureaucratic processes and the humanitarian needs… We face many challenges in this regard because it is often difficult to obtain and verify information about applicants to be sure there are no abuses.”

Erm… yes, I think the same would safely apply to all the other countries currently issuing humanitarian visas, too. Not to mention all the other countries Muscat himself was urging to provide ‘legal means’ until just last Saturday…

But when it came to Malta actually fulfilling all the obligations Joseph Muscat seems to exact of other countries… nope, sorry. That’s just something it felt right to say at the time. It wasn’t intended to be taken literally, you know…

So much for the Prime Minister. The Opposition has arguably been even more interesting to observe from the same perspective. Here, it’s not so much a case of simultaneously holding down two completely contradictory positions on the same topic. Here, it’s more a case of one day having infinite, multiple positions on everything under the sun – from whether the price of diesel should have fallen by 2c5 or only 2c, to the onset of a new apocalyptic plague of scandalous corruption every frigging week – to suddenly not having any opinion at all.

Last known Nationalist Party position on the issue? As I recall, it was when Simon Busuttil came out guns blazing against the EU Commission’s refugee resettlement, arguing that ‘Muscat could have got a better deal’; and that Malta had been ‘treated unfairly’ for having been made to take in additional refugees. That was last June. Before that, Busuttil had similarly objected (in October 2013) when a group of shipwreck survivors were brought to Malta after being rescued off Lampedusa last April, arguing that Italy was the closer port of call.

You can more or less glean a sort of policy direction there. How many refugees would the PN be willing to resettle in Malta? To be consistent with its previous statements, the answer would have to be ‘zero’. Never mind that Italy has accepted tens of thousands of such cases, thus reducing arrivals in Malta by around 100% – emptying out our detention centres in the process. The Nationalist Party’s last known position was to object to any arrangement whatsoever that would bring more refugees to Malta.

It would be interesting to know what the PN’s views are today: seeing as the number of refugees Malta is to take according to that programme has now risen by 74. Will Busuttil argue that Malta is being treated ‘unfairly’, by having to take in an additional 74 Syrian refugees in a one-off arrangement… when Germany is taking in 800,000 this year? Again, to be consistent he would have to. But then, we all saw how consistent Muscat has been on the same issue. Let’s face it: it would be irrational to expect his possible future replacement to be any different. 

If those are the sort of ‘unwavering positions’ and ‘immutable principles’ we are to expect from politicians, I’d pity the poor bugger whose sanity actually depended on observing their consistency. No, indeed. Much safer to stick to trainspotting: where the inanimate object under observation doesn’t suddenly transform before your eyes recognition from one day to the next…