Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1528159
11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 20 OCTOBER 2024 PEOPLE the working class inside the ŻĦN. And then he rode on to Damascus, specifical- ly via the London School of Economics where his socialism would have come in- to shape, delivering him to the General Workers Union upon his return home in 1969, to fight against the Nationalist government's anti-strike laws, together with Dom Mintoff. Shaped by Mintoffianism It matters little to know any individual truth about a man – everybody has their own version of Karmenu and the memory of the administration he stewarded from 1984 onwards. So, it is only the circumstances that turned KMB into prime minister that can surely carve out the real picture of the persona. Mintoff despised the 'perverse' electoral result that gave Labour power by a ma- jority of electoral seats and not votes in 1981; his Cabinet opposed an early elec- tion with Constitutional amendments to the electoral law before the end of the standard five-year term: "Maybe that's when Mintoff thought he should crown a successor who could guarantee continu- ity for his socialism, and keep the party united," Mario Vella, former PL presi- dent, writes. Not the corrupt Lorry Sant with his ambition for power. Mintoff instead had the Labour general conference desig- nate KMB as his successor, a sheer tactic meant to stem any unwelcome ambitions, recalls George Vella, President emeritus and former Labour deputy prime minis- ter. But by the time KMB was co-opted to the House, made education minister and deputy prime minister in 1983, the die had been already cast. Labour's plan for a new vocational col- lege with a different type of graduate at MCAST, had been coupled with an as- sault on the University of Malta's pro- gramme of studies, severely limiting ad- missions to degrees which apparently were not conducive to Malta's needed industrial development (Mintoff wanted to dead-leg Nationalist and conservative influences in the traditional fields such as laws and the arts). It became the source of clashes with students, inspiring a mini diaspora of young men and women. Soon, KMB's bid to make fee-paying Church schools free of charge ("jew b'xejn jew xejn" – the battlecry that threatened a withdrawal of these schools' licences) was to put Labour on a historical collision course with professionals, intellectuals, and a new middle class that recoiled at the government's heavy-handedness. In tandem with a teachers' strike over the dilapidated state of government schools, and the withdrawal of Church school licences that saw secret class- rooms organised inside private homes, KMB's legacy was sealed. "Morally, he won on principle," Mario Vella says – today Church schools are free, in a deal with the Vatican that ex- changed Church lands for the govern- ment's annual disbursement of teachers' salaries. "Politically he had lost it." And KMB kept on losing politically when dock workers ransacked the Curia; when he denied the PN a police permit to organise a political rally inside the deep-red Labour stronghold of Żejtun, which led to a street battle and tear-gas missiles from the police force; the Egyp- tair hijack fiasco; and with the murder of Raymond Caruana in 1986. All the while, Dom Mintoff had been putting into shape a constitutional deal with Fenech Adami and Guido de Marco: electoral reform, and constitutional neu- trality. KMB too enabled this endgame, ensur- ing the swiftest of concessions in the 1987 election. Even the new generation that served him in the Labour executive – Alfred Sant, Marie-Louise Coleiro-Preca, Evarist Bartolo, George Vella, and Mario Vella – had stepped up to the plate by marking a definite schism from the Mintoff years. They credit KMB as having softened a transition from Mintoffian socialism to 'Labourism', all the while tarnished by the mayhem of the 1980s. But KMB did not kill Mintoffianism – he was its palliative nurse. Fatal errors Sant says KMB's mistake was to remain beholden to Mintoff. "I knew he was crit- ical of aspects of Mintoff's acts… he did take steps to prevent them. But there were times when he allowed them to hap- pen, or even supported them. It is diffi- cult to explain why he did, unless he felt himself morally obliged towards Mintoff and to his persona and political accom- plishments." George Vella rues KMB's weak leader- ship on Tal-Barrani, an event that had the island at the cusp of a civil conflict. Vel- la, then a Żejtun MP, says he gave KMB the wrong advice when he suggested that the Nationalists should not be allowed to hold the Żejtun meeting in anticipation of a Labour backlash by locals. "Karmenu could have said, 'We'll give them the per- mit. If the Nationalists come to Żejtun, we tell everyone to stay put indoors. In- stead, there was more goading, and the rhetoric became: 'No, they will not enter Żejtun.' It was a senseless decision." KMB – the hated and loved version – was the man whom Mintoff had tasked with the epilogue to the story he started back in 1949. And in cradling this legacy, former PL president and now Judge Toni Abela says that KMB's trademark inflex- ibility turned him into "the most misin- terpreted Samaritan in the country's his- tory." Perhaps his Christian devotion, folded into Mintoff's socialism, had created what Mark Montebello says was a Manichean vision of politics – as had happened with the church schools question, or later the revanchist blockade of the Ark Royal: "No form of personal gain, be it private or na- tional, was a criterion to bend principle. He was truly Manichean: either black or white, yes or no. Anything else was the devil's work." George Vella agrees. "He lacked political nous. Karmenu would take the route he chose to when he was convinced, he was right – but the political world does not work that way." Karmenu: Il-verità, xejn anqas mill-verità will be launched at the SKS Stand at the Malta Book Festival for the special price of €20 or from local booksellers or from the online bookshop www.skspublishers. com. The book contains 24 contributions from people straddling the political spectrum, who knew Mifsud Bonnici. From left: Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, Sammy Meilak and Dom Mintoff