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Comments by a Labour MP this week about ‘all these klandestini’ have once again raised the question: how can a left wing party like the MLP tolerate such radically right wing opinions in its midst? Raphael Vassallo on Labour’s migration to the conservative right
“…Marsa has become a no-go zone for Maltese. I refer to the area by a former school, which has become dangerous for Maltese because it is dominated by all these ‘klandestini’…”
OK: hands up whoever can identify the politician responsible for the above observation. Paul Salomone? Philip Beattie? Jean-Marie Le Pen? All good guesses, but all equally wrong. In reality it was Joseph Sammut: Labour MP for Zurrieq and B’Bugia, addressing the House of Representatives during adjournment on Wednesday.
And if you think the above sounds slightly just too right-wing for an exponent of the Maltese left, it gets even better.
“It’s become impossible to get on the bus…. Literally, any bus numbered 13, which is there for the benefit of B’Bugia residents, is always packed with these ‘klandestini’. (The government) must either increase the service on this route or come up with something else. Introduce a bus service just for them, but our citizens cannot be ignored…”
Admittedly, it was more of an impromptu comment than a serious proposal in favour of racial segregation of public transport. But by evoking images of the American Deep South in the 1950s, Sammut placed his finger squarely on the profound malaise currently gripping the Malta Labour Party. Far from being Socialist, the MLP has become something of an “open centre”, attracting all sorts of political castaways suffering from acute political schizophrenia.
And in a break with tradition, MLP secretary Jason Micallef this time publicly distanced himself from the gaffe, arguing that Sammut was talking in his personal capacity, and not on behalf of the party. But this disclaimer only made Labour’s identity crisis more visible. For if Sammut’s views are so radically different from the party’s, then why is he allowed to remain in its ranks?
At a glance, it appears that the MLP can no longer conceal the fact that it has long lost touch with its left-wing roots. It all started as a pendulum swing away from Mintoff’s firebrand Socialism in the 1970s: after three successive electoral defeats, incoming leader Alfred Sant repositioned and reinvented the Malta Labour Party, shifting the emphasis to business-friendly policies in a bid to build bridges with his party’s traditional nemesis, the middle class.
The reforms can be likened to Tony Blair’s “New Labour” some years later, but with one significant difference. For while Blair found himself facing open rebellion from Britain’s old school socialists – who were understandably dismayed at their party’s apparent capitulation to economic liberalism – Sant’s reforms only succeeded in antagonising a handful of Old Labour warhorses: mainly, Mintoff himself.
At grassroots level, however, there was never any question about whether “New Labour” was any less or any more left-wing than its predecessor. And the reason is simple: Labour’s grass-roots have never been unduly concerned with left-wing ideology to begin with. Instead, there is a deep-rooted sense of party allegiance for its own sake, coupled with a PapaDoc-style “cult of the Leader”… be that leader Mintoff with his enormous belt-buckles, Karmenu with his wild-eyed anti-Western rhetoric, or Alfred Sant with his economics doctorate from Harvard.
From this perspective, ideology finds it difficult to even get a foot in the door. It is no use pointing out that all the major international emancipation movements – from Abraham Lincoln and abolitionism, to Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights movement, to Nelson Mandela and the Soweto uprising – originated in manifestly left-wing political philosophies. In Malta, the only ideologies that have ever counted are the ones that win elections.
In this context, Joe Sammut is but one of a number of examples of ostensibly Socialist candidates, past and present, who fit neatly into the quintessentially right-wing stable that also gave us the staunchly conservative Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana. And it’s not just the Malta Labour Party, either. Its bedfellows in Socialism, the General Workers’ Union, have likewise allowed rampant xenophobia to seep into their midst almost without even realising it. Alarmist headlines such as “Prostituti Suwed F’Hal Far” and “AIDS Fost Prostituti Suwed” (both from the GWU-owned It-Torca in 2004) still reverberate uncomfortably in a media landscape which still cannot seem to distinguish between a boatload of African asylum-seekers and an influx of jellyfish.
But there are other issues apart from immigration on which the MLP is manifestly less than Left… starting with that other great traditional Labour battlefield: Religion.
Looked back upon today, all the old 1960s confrontations now sound like distant echoes of a long-forgotten secular past. San Gorg Preca-itis appears to have infected the entire organisation from the very top to the very bottom; far from advocating Church-State separation, the Labour Party’s television station now sells holy pictures, relics, and Preca memorabilia via teleshopping.
More poignantly still, the same Alfred Sant who once incurred the wrath of pious columnists for failing to kiss the cross when sworn in as PM in 1996, now publicly lectures us all on the “God he believes in”, for all the world like a born-again Christian Democrat. But while the Leader looks visibly uncomfortable in these new ecclesiastical robes, it must be said that the same trappings of Roman Catholic piety appear to suit some of his parliamentary colleagues to a T.
Labour MP Adrian Vassallo, for instance, has recently made social issues such as prostitution, gay rights, decadence and drugs the mainstay of his personal election campaign. But unlike most of his colleagues in the European Socialist Party, Vassallo’s views on these subjects resemble something straight out of the Bible Belt at the height of the 17th century witch hunts in Massachusetts.
Echoing evangelists such as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Vassallo has delivered hellfire sermons in Parliament about the dreaded “Amsterdam-isation” of Malta’s cherished family values. He has even threatened to resign from the party if it dares introduce divorce on its electoral manifesto… making one wonder where Vassallo actually was, when his own government appointed a commission on the subject in 1997.
No matter: with credentials like these, Adrian Vassallo would grace the backbenches of any ultra-conservative Christian right party, alongside Paul Robertson, Rocco Buttiglione and even Giuseppe Mifsud Bonnici.
The fact that nobody has ever so much as raised an eyebrow at his and Sammut’s presence within the Maltese “Left” itself speaks volumes about the deep-seated schizophrenia that plagues all aspects of Maltese Socialism today.
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In a sense, it is apt that “Bus no. 13” would epitomise the Malta Labour Party’s disorientation regarding the immigration issue.
Public transport is after all a great social and racial leveller: a place where people from all walks of life, classes and diverse ethnic backgrounds rub shoulders and share seats. Often, buses provide the only point of contact between diverse groupings which would otherwise exist in blissful ignorance of one another… and it is partly for this reason that so many of the great emancipation struggles have been fought precisely on the battlefield of public transport.
The origin of America’s Civil Rights movement is often traced to a single incident in 1955, in which a young black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested and tried for refusing to vacate her seat to make way for a white passenger. This symbolic gesture captured civic imagination and inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott, crippling the Alabama transport service and paving the way for the historic social reforms of the 1960s.
Forty years later, public transport once again provided the thematic underpinning for Spike Lee’s 1996 documentary “Get On the Bus”, about racial tensions on a Greyhound bus to the Million Man March on Washington DC.
In South Africa, too, transport issues played a key role in the end to institutionalised segregation. In 1987, P. W. Botha’s government bowed to pressure and deregulated the national taxi service. The sudden sight of black taxi drivers taking over a previously white-dominated sector quickly became a symbol of African empowerment, hastening the end of Apartheid in the early 1990s.
In Malta buses have also been the scene of occasional manifestations of xenophobia. Recent reports of bus drivers refusing to admit African passengers have been highlighted in the press; elsewhere, the bus from Balzan to Valletta has been dubbed “The Baghdad Express”.
The irony, however, is that in other countries it was Left-wing movements such as J. F. Kennedy’s Democrat Party to move away from segregation towards social inclusion. In Malta, the “Socialist” party, with its imprudent anti-‘klandestini’ rhetoric, appears to have caught a bus heading in the complete opposite direction.
Perhaps the time has come to rethink the entire route on the issue of immigration
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