Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/835410
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 11 JUNE 2017 17 News personally introduced those poli- cies – battled and won the eco- nomic argument against the party which supervised the economic transformation of our country, the opening of the European mar- kets, the fiscal discipline to align with the euro, and the unscathed survival of the 2008 worldwide crisis. Labour convinced voters it was the safe pair of hands that would, to stretch Joe Saliba's 2008 meta- phors, have a tight grip on the rudder. It is true that old faces come with many warts, but ultimately it's the economy, stupid. Nobody wants complete novices to run their affairs on their behalf. A healthy mix and balance between innovative and energetic young Turks and wary, responsible older ones is simply a better formula. Joseph Muscat knew this instinc- tively when he took over as La- bour leader in 2008. Does anyone doubt the hurt the Joe Grimas, the Karmenu Vellas, the Leo Brincats and all the other Mintoffian grandees caused over their time in power both to Labour supporters and detractors alike? But in bringing them on board, complemented by Edward Sciclu- na, the theorist of post-colonial protectionist economics of the 1980s but with a disproportion- ate reputation for competence, Muscat compensated publicly for his own personal inexperience in public finance. It was one of his many tactical masterstrokes that the PN did not learn from in 2013. There was another battle Labour waged during the 2017 campaign, which the PN did not even realise was happening, let alone that it was losing. Labour knew full well it could not win the good governance ar- gument it had exploited so well in attracting switchers four years before. But it did not have to im- provise as a result. Very early on it worked out the risk of relying on switchers to stick with it after a term in government. No one knew better than Labour just how fickle these voters are. Easy come, easy go as they say. For each vote that was likely to be lost to the changing wind, La- bour used its time in power to a more secure shift in its direction by people who will feel indebted to Labour preferably for lifetimes ahead. Many former supporters of the PN were targeted by the gov- ernment, charmed and seduced by similar initiatives: mostly re- lated to public sector sinecures, promotions, favouritism, unjus- tified breaches of planning rules and other rotten compromises with proper governance. Jobs to former proper National- ists in the senior public sector did more than achieve their silence. It recruited their silent support. It was also happening in far larger numbers with small time hard- core PN supporters whom the PN assumed would remain loyal while it focused on winning the floaters back. And that effort was not making the press and therefore was be- ing completely missed by the PN. Like the fictional foreign minis- ter in Yes, Minister, the PN was gathering its intelligence from the Times… rather than the other way round. As it did so, Labour nibbled at the PN's base: that base which is neither Catholic nor liberal; nei- ther pro-Europe nor anti; neither pro-hunting nor against it. These people are tepid on corruption and only vaguely aware of what it means to have a bank account, never mind one in Panama. These people voted PN all their lives because they never felt they had a reason not to. And now they were given one. While no one was watching the PL was actually chasing them to solve problems for them they did not even know they had. It went beyond having courte- ous customer care. Clientelism became a pro-active business where the unofficial motto be- came "għandek bżonn xi ħaġa?". Those of us who got mistaken calls was because of a four-year nationwide campaign to throw the net as widely as possible and gather whatever bites. We thought the callers were looking for Labour supporters and mis- took us for one. They weren't. They were looking for PN sup- porters to give them a reason to switch allegiance. Forgetting the lessons of the past In decimating the legacy of party officials with decades of experi- ence working with the grassroots and gathering information about what was happening in our soci- ety over the last five years, what was left of the new post-2013 PN did not have the intelligence in- frastructure to understand what was going on around it. The personal human relation- ship between voter, street leader, section committee veteran and party HQ was severed. This was a relationship nurtured over decades of mobilisation. Al- ready in 1996, when Austin Gatt's team was scapegoated for that loss, the infrastructure built in the organisational years of Gatt and his predecessor Louis Galea had started to weaken. Post-Joe Saliba it got even weaker until what was left of it was destroyed in 2013 and the party became a professional organisation concerned with fighting battles in the media and in boardrooms but had lost sight of the streets. I have read many facile descrip- tions of the 'echo chamber' of Facebook where the PN enjoyed a false sense of security from its supporters within that space and lost sight of what was happening outside it. I think that's unfair criticism. The PN's echo chamber was much wider than my sanitised Facebook friends list. The PN crafted a position for itself that found the support of all of these. And it rightly expected that sup- port to be reflected on and be a reflection of the public's opinion. In all this time the PL was ignor- ing that wider echo chamber and focusing on the people who were not looking but to give them the right reason to shift their alle- giance and do so for the long term. And here is my third reason that I consider as consequential of the 2013 pogrom (and the trend that had preceded it all the way back since 1996): the PN forgot where it had been in 1976 and what it had to do to get to 1981 and the many years after that. That hav- ing secured clarity in its political programme and crystallised its political reason for being, built new structures to professionalise its own administration, finding a voice using its own media, having argued successfully why it was a better option for the country… it also had to go through the tough slog of mobilising the support of more than half the population. Argument, structure and media alone do not do that. They are re- quired but insufficient. It is like expecting a business to succeed because it crafted a brilliant mis- sion statement. National mobilisation of that extent requires a social network that permeates every workplace, street, club and every society. In its instinct for normality, the PN post-1987 started a long pro- cess of withdrawing from people's lives. The less politics, the better. By the time the generation that was working in the party in 1987 had retired or was made to retire, subsequent generations adopted the timid policy of smaller gov- ernment and the reservation of politics as a spectator sport for the committed loons at the service of the ungrateful wider community. Muscat's Labour capably filled that vacuum. It claimed to be imi- tating Obama's popular mobilisa- tion and volunteer engagement. What it was really doing is imitate the methods of Louis Galea and Austin Gatt, from Peter Serracino Inglott and from Richard Cachia Caruana, from Lawrence Zammit and from Joe Saliba – ultimately what they learnt from Eddie Fene- ch Adami – how a population is successfully mobilised, how sup- port is secured, how elections are won, again and again. While Labour was learning its lessons from those grandees, the PN was busy forgetting them. A rich tradition of experience in do- ing the business of parties, was knocked down in favour of new- ness and unwarranted embarrass- ment of the older. Don't repeat 2013 errors It seems the PN is intent on repeating the 2013 mistake and burn down what was even built since then. In this self-imposed collective political suicide, a huge empty cave is being created for some people whose only credential is their relative newness and unat- tachment to previous party ad- ministrations. Not being experi- enced, not being endowed with the rich legacy of the party's tra- dition, not having any real knowl- edge of the business of party poli- tics and public administration, have according to these people become job requirements to run the PN. That will satisfy the thirst for blood of the party activists who were sharpening their knives within minutes of the result. It will satisfy the press's apparent obsession with heads rolling and cause a twitter of an applause to- day in the midst of the crashing pillars around our ears. But the question the PN should be asking itself today should not be whether the decisions its lead- ers take today will be welcomed in Sunday's newspapers. The ques- tion is how will the voter who we will probably never actually speak to in the next five years deal with those decisions at the next ballot. So I am not so keen in seeing the 2013 errors repeated and see- ing everyone leave for a fresh new completely inexperienced band to come in. The party is not just a brand built from scratch after every election. If that's the case then it isn't the same party. And stand- ing from within the PN, I do not understand why we should be em- barrassed of our history and our leaders when the causes of our losses were tactical, not ethical. So please let's make these changes carefully and let's mine the wealth of our experience and history in order to empower our party with the ability to not only be a model of competence, lead- ership and innovation which it consistently has been right up to today, but also once again the sin- gle most powerful mobilised force for good this nation has ever had. Manuel Delia was a member of the political secetariat of Nation- alist minister Austin Gatt and a former PN candidate in 2013 After Joe Saliba, the PN became a professional organisation concerned with fighting battles in the media but it lost sight of the streets 'The personal human relationship between voter, street leader, section committee veteran and party HQ was severed. This was a relationship nurtured over decades of mobilisation'