Labour – a trial balance

It is maybe too early to draw up a balance sheet for Labour’s time in office under two prime ministers. Or maybe not early at all.

What has Labour to show for its years in power? The only public works projects I can think of are roadworks – the spaghetti junction at Marsa which did solve many problems, the Central Link, which I have always defended but many disagree, and the yet unfinished but needed skein outside the airport.

These are all to the credit of the Labour administration just as the preceding Nationalist administrations claim recognition for the quite good roads in the North, some of which like at Burmarrad Labour delighted to tweak, not with any improvement.

Still about public works I cannot remember anything else. It was PN which built the new hospital and which created the new entry to Valletta with the new Parliament. Again, Labour seems to like leaving PN projects unfinished like the Valletta ditch.

Governments are not just roadworks or national monuments. There is the social side and here Labour can boast of a raft of social legislation that allowed gay marriage etc and that previously had put divorce on the statute books.

Labour would probably argue that the economy has been doing well, people had jobs and unemployment was at record lows.

But I beg to differ. What we are seeing now is the unravelling of a myth. To obtain these results the country has had to run up a huge deficit which we must now bring down to a more acceptable level.

To obtain these results the country has had to allow entry to hundreds of thousands Third Country Nationals and in so doing has created a new class of under-proletariat which has contributed to drive down standards all around. This is quite inelastic – if they lose their jobs they stay around and it is very hard to persuade them to go back.

Then again such an influx of TCNs and a government lax in regulation have boosted the construction sector to such an extent as we can see around us with excavation and construction going on in practically every street.

But there is far more to a country than roadworks and public works. There is education, to begin with. The PN had widened entry to the university and created that university-lite that is MCAST. Labour just coasted along with a succession of ministers who did not even manage to continue to build a new school every year as PN had been doing. It is only now that some are proposing to reinstate the trade schools that PN perhaps too hurriedly removed.

Meanwhile the general level of education, as established by international benchmarks has continued to go down and this has not been addressed by the country as a whole. I include in this the church schools ever since they were made to lose their autonomy in exchange for the government subsidy. And of all institutions it was the university that was targeted with austerity cuts. Not the many people with obscene packages.

Education leads to culture and here again Labour, for all its efforts to enter and dominate the sector, has been a sorry spectacle. Just consider the still-fledging cinema sector where a clumsy State intervention almost killed off the independent filmmakers. We are still without a proper concert hall and the badly conceived open air theatre on the old opera house ruins remains without a ceiling. Nor do we have the promised museum of contemporary art while the government seems more interested in running a cafeteria in the still unfinished restored museum of fine arts.

This brings me to the main point: the Labour government has been successful in one main area – looking after its own. Whether this was in recruitment in some ministry as persons of trust, or in some other post is immaterial. People were promoted because of their party allegiance, given huge packages many times on a direct order when there was no reason to curtail the proper procedure.

One could perhaps argue that the Nationalists too chose party activists for such posts but it was never so blatant. And they even picked some non-party persons and even some from the other side. Now try and find anything similar in this government.

Fundamentally however this government’s real claim in history will unfortunately be tainted forever with the massive corruption that has been uncovered with its perpetrators still battling to obfuscate and clear their names at court.

It’s sad, but this is the truth. Those who now try to distance themselves from what was going on, usually after leaving the government, have only themselves to blame – that they did not fight the rot when they still had power.