Last week’s news that the PN is catching up with Labour in setting up a mobile telephone network holds more significance than meets the eye.
How the venture will fare in practice, or the gossipy leaks that it was embarked upon with trepidation, seem less weighty considerations than the obvious fact that both the major political parties remain committed to behaving like economic operators.
Both are massively in debt and constrained to secure reliable sources of revenue. Depending on donations and subscriptions from the party faithful, their grassroots support, has not been an option for many years. Both have invested in revenue generating enterprises and both have felt obliged to commit to investment black holes in the form of their media enterprises. Although they squirm whenever it is pointed out, neither has been able to refuse outsize sponsorships from the economic powers that be. If we have a housing stock surplus of 24%, it must be because accepting this manna from heaven comes at a price. Property is hard to hide and the distortion in the construction sector will long remain the most obvious legacy of this system. What other economic distortions exist because of this form of party funding nobody dares tell.
While other countries have moved away from private funding of political parties or towards transparency, we appear to be heading in the opposite direction. The mobile telephone investments appear to be less a bid for financial independence from the covert sponsorships than yet another electoral necessity along with ruinously expensive newspapers, radios, television stations and websites.
If this is the case, then there will be less independence from private sponsorship and not more. Unable to trust one another, the political parties seem to be drawn inexorably towards bankruptcy or enslavement. There has been some talk of public financing of political parties but no significant moves have yet been made. Some discussion on the privatisation of television stations appears to have commenced and floundered.
The heart of the matter is the profound and fully justified mutual mistrust that makes them identical twins. The fact that there are just two of them for all intents and purposes, only adds to the paralysis.
Unless they are prepared to submit to even greater dependence on their sponsors than at present, the only possible outcome of their joint crises has to be the collapse of the first rapidly followed by the collapse of the other. Once the creditors of a political party realise that their money is lost, the creditors of the other are likely to hasten the demise of the other by declining further requests for capital.
In either case, the prospects for democracy and good governance are worse than bleak. Already our oligarchs have more clout than is good for us. If they have to bail out the political parties and end up owning them, we will end up worse than many an Eastern European democracy in which the oligarchs bag a piece of the pie by owning one or more of the many political parties. In Malta it is possible to capture a government and swallow it whole.
It could well be that going to extremes in this way is just what we need. Being halfway there for decades has acclimatised too many of us, whether in politics or just watching, to the democratic distortion. Full ownership could turn some otherwise cast iron stomachs.
Of course the matter is further complicated by the financial situation. There will probably never be a good time to tell taxpayers that political parties are going to lay their hands on public funds. This is just the worst possible time to do so.
This crisis has been brewing for decades as the political parties committed to more and more expensive means to brainwash the public. It has been an escalation which has caused some old hands to quip that it is their party that is an appendix to its television station and not the other way around. It is a political arms race distorting commerce, democracy and the nature of political parties themselves.
Sooner or later it will come to an end and the result will not be a pretty sight.
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Both have invested in revenue generating enterprises and both have felt obliged to commit to investment black holes in the form of their media enterprises. Although they squirm whenever it is pointed out, neither has been able to refuse outsize sponsorships from the economic powers that be. If we have a housing stock surplus of 24%, it must be because accepting this manna from heaven comes at a price. Property is hard to hide and the distortion in the construction sector will long remain the most obvious legacy of this system. What other economic distortions exist because of this form of party funding nobody dares tell.
