Dogs of War (DeLorean Unveiled)

They say that a week is a long time in politics. In that case twenty years must seem like an eternity. Churchill is often attributed the quote “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart, show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Time and experience changes people. Under normal circumstances and outside the partisan fog of war it is considered normal to weigh your options every time an election comes around. Of course your own political preferences and outlook might give you an automatic preference towards one party or another but there is no shame in changing.

It’s not change for change’s sake that I am talking about though. That’s plain stupid. Sadly many voters will be voting for change for change’s sake next Saturday and, yes, I do think that it is plain stupid to do so. What I am referring to is the possibility of having evolving politics and ideas, of having the opportunity to compare parties who in turn have evolved their ideas and projects. That is important for a healthy representative democracy. That voters get to choose between parties healthily vying for their trust by proposing good plans for the nation, its citizens, their rights – that is healthy.

For a long time this blog has advocated the idea that our bipartisan system is geared to becoming a race to the bottom. It is a race to mediocrity that promotes populism, contradictory promises to everyone and everything and – because of the inevitable entrenchment of a political elite – it weaves an intricate web of inter-dependent interests that are conducive to corruption. In short the PLPN method sanctioned and strengthened by the constitutional amendments that kicked off with a Government White Paper in 1990 is wrought in such a way as to kill off (or greatly minimise) any terzo incomodo and strengthen the stranglehold of the bipartisan duality.

The combination of a series of amendments since 1987 (1987, 1996, 2007) to the sections of the constitution has continued to strengthen the PL and PN positions to the detriment of a possible third party. This has been one of the main criticisms directed from this blog – particularly at the phenomenon called “The Wasted Vote” that ends up killing all hope for potential third party voters on the eve of elections. It’s simple really – the PL or PN spinmasters wait till the last moment and then shoot the “you’re wasting your vote” argument : from Austin Bencini’s traditional “constitutional” article to Daphne Caruana Galizia’s “setting yourselves up as objects of hate”. It’s the death knell for AD.

Back in 1991 when the proposed amendments were still under discussion we had one particular columnist who got rather hot under the collar about these changes. In an impeccably written article the columnist presciently summarised all that was wrong with the system and even managed to predict one of the inherent dangers of the system. I copied out the second half of the article yesterday as a guest post under the name DeLorean (smart geeks among you will have recognised the car from Back to the Future). You can see the full article here in “Voting like it’s 1992” – actually it’s the second half of the original article, the first half was full of not so kind descriptions of Austin Gatt and Eddie Fenech Adami.

The whole philosophy of the importance of electing a third party to government is encapsulated in the second half of this article under the subtitle “The Argument”. Gems of thought such as the importance of representation over and above governability leap at you conspicuously. The article includes a prescient worry:

What if we find ourselves, in 20 years’ time with the choice of two absolutely disreputable political parties? What if the Nationalist Party disintegrates into the kind of sagging, soggy, useless mess of the Sixties… a heap that gave rise to the joke “Tgħajjatx għax tqajjem il-gvern!”? What is a traditionally Nationalist supporter supposed to do… vote for the Labour Party, vote for a mess, or not vote at all?

20 years from 1991 … that’s just two years off the mark, yet it is still so very tangibly relevant. The complaint by the author is clear – are we to end up with a Hobson’s Choice? A gun against our head? Are we to end up being blackmailed with the haunting idea of the “wasted vote”? A Daniel I say, a Daniel.

Most intriguingly one of the most telling paragraphs remains the following – and this mainly because of the author’s subsequent metamorphosis and absorption into part of the Leviathan that is so aptly described:

Third parties cannot be created out of nothing. They must grow, and their growth must be spawned by a real need within the people. Even if this need exists – and there is no doubt at all, it does – all growth will be warped by Malta’s all-pervasive fear and ignorance, which has effects similar to that of radiation on a growing foetus. Through this fear and ignorance, the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party survive, thrive and continue to grow.

Fear and ignorance. We were so close weren’t we? Fear and loathing we described it, plus an incredible propensity to abuse of ignorance. 20 years down the line and we have observed a campaign imbued with fear and thriving on ignorance and misinformation. Half truths are mixed with political assassination of the cruellest kind and yet even when you work out your sums and eliminate the two possibilities – the two podgy kids on the see-saw – you find out that your remaining hope has been nipped in the bud. Yep. the wasted vote argument. Not only that. The moment you boldly announce that you are determined to be represented because governance is not the be all and end all, because representation is just as important – that is when the dogs of war are unleashed.

Which is where the sweet irony hits home. Yes. It is time to reveal who DeLorean, writing with so much passion against the death knell that was writ into our constitution two decades ago is. Well it is none less than Daphne Caruana Galizia – the passionate put-downer of the third party, currently engaged in a character assassination of Michael Briguglio (last time round it was Dirty Harry) through a mixture of half-truths and the usual dose of “wasted vote stupids”.

As I said in the beginning, there is nothing wrong with change in a person. Daphne has already commented on this article this week : “Probably filed with the article describing Eddie Fenech Adami as a villager lawyer in a folder called ‘Mistakes I made at 25’. There are a lot of them. Fortunately, I had the good sense not to persist in error.” (it was actually the same article but she has to feign that it is not important so she would not remember would she). Probably the folder of “Mistakes I made at 45” includes backing JPO to the hilt in the 2008 election and actually voting him number 1.

People change. Daphne has every right to change her opinion about what makes the country tick. It makes you wonder what the motivation of this change is though. From a passionate advocate for third party systems to a staunch defender of the PLPN dichotomy.  I do hope this is not considered “calling names by the AD crowd”. It is sad though to see the transition from what was evidently a motivated young liberal to a dog of war baying for Briguglio’s head – and why? Because voting Ad will get you Labour according to Daphne. But Daphne…

Alternattiva is not the crux of the problem. The hypothetical small party is. Many people might disapprove of Alternattiva, but they should not be so shortsighted as to assume that they will disapprove of any other political party that might grow out of unrest and discontent over the next two or three generations. We must be unselfish enough to think beyond the next two or three generations. We must be honest enough to admit that we do not want our children to live their adult lives as we are now living ours. We must stop thinking in terms of our immediate future, because many of us will live for a great deal longer than that, ….

Unselfish. Honest. At what point did those kind of values stop being important, I wonder. Still, I found a good maxim in that article, it fits my philosophy perfectly, and it seems of many others:

Governability is not the Holy Grail, and we should not allow the government to sell it to us as such.

And we won’t Daphne. We won’t.