Permanent revolution
The Nationalist Party’s councillors will tomorrow cast their vote as to who they prefer to lead the party in the next five years.
On them rests the responsibility to send two candidates to the second round when approximately twenty thousand party members will be choosing the next PN leader.
This has been an extraordinary long electoral campaign characterised by the very essence of what needs to be changed if the PN yearns for a new lease of life. I have been the subject of a character assassination by people who want the PN to continue in its ways, the same that led to four massive electoral defeats, MEP elections included.
Because I’m an outsider from party structures and because I’m pledging a new way of leadership, heaven broke lose and the country was exposed to five weeks of verbal violence, infighting and undercutting tactics from a party that had always stood for hope, democracy and freedom of association.
I’m not a Trotskyite. Even those who are making most fuss about my politics have understood this by now. But Trotsky’s notion that energetic change and re-invention is the only way forward is certainly a fair description of where I stand on many themes surrounding political life. Take education as an example. Educators are understandably wary of politicians speaking of reform. They are exhausted by generational attempts at transformation that have at best been only partially successful and in some cases were catastrophic. But we can’t just give up.
Still to this day, too small a portion of our students continue their education beyond compulsory age. Too many leave school barely literate and numerate. We produce too few scientists and mathematicians. Too few artists and social scientists. Too few researchers and holders of doctorates and achievers in advanced studies.
To this day our community struggles with basic notions like shared interest, fundamental ethics, public spiritedness, enlightened citizenship, human understanding and environmental solidarity. Only education can mitigate our amoral familism and replace it with a collective ethos and individual selflessness. Only education can build a national culture of compassion and responsibility. And yet, let us face it, it hasn’t quite yet.
We have come far. Twentyfive years of the PN have transformed most people’s outlook to learning. But the approach remains utilitarian, minimalistic, reductive and insufficiently transformative.
If we are to solve our problems we must face them and understand them.
At the root of all things, as I see it, is the fact that we make false economies with the most important economic, social and political investment we should be making. Teachers are the professionals to whom we entrust the dearest things in our lives: our children. In their hands we give the future of our country. And yet we pay teachers and school administrators poor salaries that have no relationship with the importance of their work.
That just doesn’t cut it anymore. Our teachers are underpaid, under-resourced, under-trained, over-worked and over-stretched. They put in hours of dedicated service and we reward them with embarrassing salaries and appalling career prospects. To make ends meet they use every free hour they have to give supplementary lessons in their own time ironically compensating in the process for the gaps the formal educational hours leave because of the limits we impose on our resources.
As aspiring prime minister I am expected to give details on how I will address this problem and by necessity it will have to involve sustainable funding and a reshuffling of our budgetary priorities as a country.
I will deliver on that expectation as I promise to deliver on all the other proposals I have made throughout my campaign for party leader but I must first engage with all stakeholders, with the people those for whom we are doing politics. I need to understand their hopes and aspirations and with them build a shared national vision for the changes we need in all sectors.
I know where I want to get. And I know it’s not going to be easy. None of the huge steps of our past were easy. And neither will the important steps ahead be.
We need to open wide the doors of our party first to embrace change, new ideas and aspirations. We need to feel inspired and then to inspire those who are ready to listen and vote for our programme.
Since Labour took over the running of our country, a false sense of prosperity has settled in our society. Its here-andnow attitude throughout its policy programme of quick wins and quick bucks has no patience for investing and planning the future.
The PN is in it for the long haul. We are not afraid of change and we are not tired of it. I promise to lead a permanent revolution if elected to lead the PN and I will do it by working with all those who have the party and country at heart.