Editorial | Wednesday, 29 October 2008

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

Mintoffianism rules, OK

As former Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici picked up Dom Mintoff’s Human Rights Award from Ghaddafi last Saturday, Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt was busy reminding us all that the 92-year-old firebrand’s legacy is still alive and well, and currently residing in Castille.
Ever since Lawrence Gonzi was returned to power after the March 8 election – and more to the point, ever since the formerly moderate and soft-spoken Christian Democrat took a back seat, allowing his most arrogant ministers to run the show in his place – we have seen a full-scale return to Mintoffian politics at its most rudimentary.
Two examples of the government’s heavy-handedness since the last election should suffice to illustrate this point.
The first instance involves a half-day strike called by two unions – the Malta Union of Teachers, and the University of Malta Academic Staff Association – in response to the government’s failure to renew a collective agreement which had expired in 2003.
Unlike its dealings with other, more sensitive sectors – such as the medical profession, which was in a sense aided by a ‘force majeur’ situation brought about by the financial woes of Mater Dei Hospital – government chose to bully an already unpopular profession into submission, by turning the general population against them: a Mintoffian strategy if there ever was one.
Taking a leaf straight out of the old Socialist warhorse’s book, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech took the cynical step of exposing the unions’ demands to the general public: or at least, his own interpretation of their demands, which assumed (among other exaggerations) that all performance bonuses would be paid out in full.
There can be little doubt as to the motive of this underhand ploy: to galvanise a popular reaction against the university lecturers on the basis of jealousy. Preying upon Malta’s inherent class division, and its people’s automatic envy towards anyone in a higher income bracket – in itself, a legacy of the Mintoff era – the Nationalist administration once again employed the same “divide and rule” maxim that proved so successful in Mintoff’s time.
In fact, the tactic is identical to that used against the medical profession when it similarly went on a half-day strike in July 1977.
Like Maltese medics 30 years ago, university academics have been humiliated and exposed to public contempt and hatred, and for much the same the reason: so that government can sidestep its own legal obligations as an employer, without losing face with the electorate.
It is a shameful and dishonest strategy, of the kind the Nationalist Party itself would have fought tooth and nail, in those far-off days when it still occupied the high moral ground. Perhaps the only significant difference between the 1970s and today is that while Malta’s academics fought bravely against the excesses of the Mintoff regime back then, today they appear only too eager to accept humiliation when it comes from a Nationalist administration.
From this perspective, the words “serves them right” immediately spring to mind: but this, of course, is also part of the government’s intended aim. After all, Mintoffianism may be unpleasant, but it is certainly effective.
This brings us to the second and most immediately apparent example of Mintoffianism in action: the arrogance with which the government has steamrolled over the social partners on the issue of the revised water and electricity tariffs.
Again the pattern remains the same – the government is trying to turn various sectors of society against one another, in order to misdirect popular outrage and spare itself the flak it would otherwise almost certainly receive.
Faced with unanimous opposition by the social partners, both Tonio Fenech and Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt attempted the most classical Socialist strategem in the book: pitting domestic against industrial consumers.
In the words of William Wait, deputy CEO of manufacturing company Toly Products, there appears to be no difference between the intransigent position adopted by Austin Gatt last week, and the antagonistic politics of Dom Mintoff in the 1970s and 1980s.
“It seems that the Minister is using very populist approaches in a very sensitive economic scenario, saying to the general public that they are subsidising the big industrial players. I hope we are not going back to the old Socialist days where private businesses are demonised,” he told Business Today.
With his Human Rights Award worth quarter of a million dollars under his belt, and the Nationalist administration now adopting his most controversial policies one by one, Dom Mintoff himself must be laughing all the way to the bank he once nationalised.

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below.
Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.