Reverse engineer the discourse of Labour Party politicians to work out what’s worrying them in the data they’re reading. Worrying is relative. They’re not worried they will be losing the election. But they are worried about trends in their support base that could prove to be the thin end of a wedge that could lift the ground from under them.
Consider yesterday’s speeches at the Labour Party’s Mqabba event. Clint Camilleri was wheeled out to speak to promise hunters they will continue to break EU animal conservation laws under the pretext of a scientific experiment. Hunters are in considerable numbers in this greener part of the country. Speaking about their passion for driving birds to extinction gave Clint Camilleri the platform to go on with antediluvian us and them, class struggle rhetoric.
Hunting is often looked upon with disdain in urban centres where of course most Labour supporters live. When did sociological contradictions ever come in the way of a self-pitying politician moving his audience to tears?
“They call us ħamalli because we’re not born with a silver spoon in our mouth” he told the enthusiastic crowd. They weren’t born with a rifle under their arms either, but there it is.
Ħamalli is who ħamallu does and being ħamallu tends to be an expensive habit. The adjective is properly attributed to crassness, poor taste, wilful ignorance, gaudiness, obtuseness. It’s not an appropriate adjective for poverty. I have never heard it used that way.
The term ħamallu has been thrown in the general direction of Clint Camilleri’s colleagues but not because of social depravation but rather because of their moral depravity, for misuse and overuse of expensive clothing brands, crass profligacy, and an inordinate fascination with bigger, taller, impossible to miss from anywhere construction all over the place.
Let me give an example. The Imrieħel Towers are ħamalli. They are a small forest of cladded phalli built to blind anyone within sight of them miles way. It doesn’t matter their owners are millionaires. Whether silver spoons were in their mouth at birth or they took them out of the drawer when they ran out of credit cards to line up the cocaine, wealth doesn’t exempt them from the hard-earned status of ħamalli.
Ħamalli are the parties of the demi-monde that bring together the bribers and the bribees, the boat getters and the cash spenders, the criminals and the politicians, the people who think they own the place because they were flooded in money when the Labour Party came to power.
Ħamalli are the Malta Film Awards that cost more than the government spends on the films it was supposed to be celebrating.
And the hard-working, ordinary supporter of the Labour Party who grew up with the narrative that Labour belongs to labour and the “rich” vote Nationalist are starting to see through this. That’s what Robert Abela is reading in his surveys.
Eight years ago, they saw Michelle Muscat’s ostentation like her fans saw Evita. She was a patronising symbol of socialist social climbing. Fine. Whether you like that or dislike that you can argue that socialism is after all about the levelling up of the masses and someone’s got to lead the way.
But it’s turning sour now. If Labour (the party) is for labour (the workers), only labour (work) can lift Labour and labour up.
The workers are starting to think the Muscats played most foully for their glory. Well, a few are. Not most of them, mind you. Just a few. Just enough of them to start showing in the polls. They’re not going to go Nationalist. But they’re showing a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for the “moviment”. They are starting to grunt at the Muscatian coalition between traditionally proletarian supporters of the Labour Party and the greedy opportunists who are profiting millions from their marriage of convenience with Joseph Muscat. I use proletarian in its neutral meaning of dependence on work for wealth, not in the loaded and misguided sense that Clint Camilleri wanted his audience to understand yesterday, of ħamalli.
Consider Robert Abela’s speech that followed Clint Camilleri’s. “They want to destroy the Labour movement,” he whined. A party that is dead certain to obtain 56% of the national vote, a party that enjoys support far greater than when Malta voted to join the EU at the height of Eddie Fenech Adami’s popularity, the largest political party in the scale of support it enjoys within its country in all of democratic Europe: it is absurd to speak of any risk of destruction.
Robert Abela is not speaking about any risk of disintegration for the PL. Even he knows such a notion is laughable.
His concern is for trouble in the paradisiacal alliance between ordinary, working, tax-paying people who vote Labour out of habit or out of the genuine albeit misinformed conviction that the Labour Party represents their interests better, and the corrupt bastards milking the country dry.
It is an alliance forged in Joseph Muscat’s lies. And it depends on continuing to focus the anger and hatred of traditional supporters on faceless “nazzjonalisti”, the enemy that holds them in contempt for being ħamalli and that works constantly to destroy the only party that would represent them.
This system works as long as supporters of the Labour Party hate people outside the party more than criminals within it. Ensuring that remains the case will be the central theme of the Labour Party’s election campaign. Their primary mission is not to recruit people who voted PN in 2017. If any come along, as they’re bound to with the auctioning of favours that’s going on, they’ll be a welcome bonus. But the core focus here is to make sure that people who have voted Labour all their life are galvanised into supporting this morally empty cash cow along with the criminal ħamalli sucking at its teat.