Malta’s cold war

The Indipendent
5 March 2010
EDITORIAL

by Josie Muscat

Salus Populi Suprema Est Lex. So wrote Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman lawyer and orator in De Legibus: The welfare of the people is the ultimate law.

Last Sunday’s protest against the utility bills has led to a flurry of accusations and counter accusations. The Malta Union of Teachers seems to have drawn most fire. Should it?



What is public protest?

Whenever there is any form of public protest, it is bound to be some government policy or other. That taken for granted, it follows that every such protest is political. This is obvious and needs no elucidation surely. The high utility rates everybody faces, but which not everybody can afford, are bound to be a bone of contention. Moreover a trade union is there to protect the interests of its members.

The MUT is both a trade union as well as a professional body dedicated to the advancement of education and the protection of the teaching profession. So is the nursing union and all the others involved. As trade unions they have every right to stage an orderly and disciplined national public protest in the interests of the well being of their members and the public at large. Of course not everybody sees welfare in the same way.

Unions that decided not to take part, after first declaring that they preferred to try and settle the problem by sitting around a table with the government (did this tactic really stand a chance?) then rounded on the MUT by claiming that what they didn’t want to do was to take part in a protest march in which the PL and other political parties, large and small, intended to join, for that made it political. And here we go back to what I said at the beginning. Unfortunately, in this detail lurks the devil.



A time for sitting;

a time for walking

The government’s reason as to why this protest should not have been held was that the country must concentrate on safeguarding jobs. This was strangely echoed by some of the unions. The government also claimed that it had dedicated millions of euros towards helping people meet the cost of the new bills.

Both statements are true. But they are not the whole story. If the government’s policy is to eliminate subsidies, then the grants intended to help cover part of the costs are probably intended only for this year. That is a reasonable supposition. More ominous and less reasonable is the excuse given out by some that this protest would not achieve results and therefore there was no point in holding it.

Which is strange reasoning in a democracy. Why? Because the cause is unjust? Because the problem does not exist? Or because government has forgotten to listen? PN backbenchers have claimed that one reason for the unrest in the party is that even they have been side-lined by the government. If that is true, can one really expect an administration that ignores its own supporters in parliament without whose support it cannot govern to really understand the woes of ordinary people?



Malta’s cold war

The bitter truth is that we are suffering the effects of a cold war in Malta. Two political tribes, increasingly at odds with each other, view anything that is critical of their leadership as treason and to be dealt with as such. The jitters in the tribal elders that such a situation creates make the slightest ripple seem like a tsunami and the prelude to an all-out attack. Muffling protest then becomes a matter of life and death. There is a protest by environmental groups coming up and already the same accusations have been made in their regard. It is absolutely amazing to see people who go to so much trouble to safeguard what many consider worth preserving being accused as having an anti-government agenda. Can these groups really accuse anybody else with the destruction they see around them?

Hindsight is said to be a twenty-twenty vision. Perhaps it would have been better for the Ghaqda Unions Maltin not to involve the political parties. But that wouldn’t have made their protest any less political. It might, however, have prevented political parties from using the occasion for their own stated ends. It would also have made the protest weaker. When asked why local councils had to be political, the reason given by the government is that they would not manage otherwise. That kind of reasoning should equally apply to the recent protest.

If Voltaire’s dictum that I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it is of any value, then the sooner all those who claim to be working to improve our lives learn it and apply it, the better it would be for each and every individual of this sadly divided nation.
http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=102547