A new image, the anti-VAT position and the Cittadin Mobil

As soon as you became leader, you embarked on a modernisation project for the party, including the building of new headquarters in Hamrun which replaced the one in Senglea. How did the new HQ help to project a new image for the party?It was modern, s

By: independent.com.mt

Jul 28 2024
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A new image, the anti-VAT posi

It was modern, state of the art and centrally located, signalling that the party was going to be accessible and open. Labour people, including those from Cottonera who had been “dispossessed” of Labour’s presence in their midst, immediately felt that it was “theirs”, because their financial contributions had made it possible... But during our door-to-door exercises we also did get contributions from non-Labour voters, who made it clear they thought the project was bringing out what was best about Labour.

Some felt it was dangerous to locate Labour’s HQ so close to the PN’s as there would be a risk of violence between militants of the two sides. I never thought that was going to be a problem and it never was. Soon after the building was inaugurated, following a debate we had at Mosta one Sunday morning, I invited Prime Minister Fenech Adami to visit and tour the new building. He accepted and did come. I remember the occasion as quite a pleasant one.

You are credited with having removed the violent people who were associated with the Labour Party in the previous years. Did you find any resistance from them, or from others, in your quest? Did you ever receive any threats from them?

The message to one and all was this: There is place for everybody in this party but there’s a new management and there could be changes to where A or B or C are going to be placed and what they’ll be invited to do. Like what happens when a football team changes managers. It was made clear however there would be zero tolerance and support for any violence or threats or appearance of violence. That message was repeated a few times, run down the line and respected. Naturally some people, seeing how the landscape was changing, drifted away. As to threats, there was hardly anything meaningful to report and anyway, it was all in a day’s work.

To be clear as well, let me confirm that right through the years when I was active within the Labour Party and Movement, I never attended a meeting in which violence was on the agenda or discussed or organised or proposed. That there were a few occasions when someone would say that “the other side” needed a display of strong arm tactics in the “squares” that happened yes, but never was such an input (for when it was mentioned this happened in a casual manner) taken up in any way.

Alfred Sant greets Labour Party supporters during the 1996 election campaign

The first local council elections were held, with the Labour Party not officially taking part in them as it believed that political parties should not be involved. Instead, many ‘independent’ candidates who were known to be Labourites contested. The position changed in the later years. Why were you initially against political party representation and why did you then change tack?

When the idea was first launched, there was a much (but not unanimous) scepticism within Labour regarding local councils on the grounds that they were unnecessary in a small island like Malta and that they would increase public administrative overheads. Dr Mifsud Bonnici for instance believed that they would increase the possibilities of corruption by opening up new opportunities for it at a local level. All these considerations were not misguided.

Personally I believed that they needed to be kept in mind and that their claims would be given a turbo boost if political parties got directly involved in the race to elect councillors, as the government wanted. Not only would this immediately polarise/politicise most local council issues; also, many valid potential candidates at a local level, who did not want to get involved with political parties, like employees in the civil service, would be excluded.

The bishops actually came out in agreement. Catholic activists at a parish level would stay away from local elections if they needed to join a political party in order to become councillors. For once, Labour and the bishops were on the same page! Prime Minister Fenech Adami came out virulently against this, using language that had it been deployed by Labour would have caused rivers of horrified ink and holier than thou rhetoric to flow. Nothing like this happened. The Church shrugged aside Fenech Adami’s indignation.

To be fair, he had a point when he said that without political parties in the ring, mobilisation of electors would be limited (but that sounded like an admission the draw of local councils could be feeble) and that local council affairs would gravitate towards parochial band club issues.

From Labour’s perspective as I saw it, another advantage with non-party participation was that Nationalists who disagreed with the prime minister on this matter, would be tempted to vote for independents. And if some did (which happened) we would be creating a first bridge towards people who were no longer inexorably voting PN. Once there was a first time, nothing would exclude a second time.

All this did not mean that we encouraged Labourites to boycott local council elections as candidates or as voters. To the contrary, we ran an exercise led by Dr Mifsud Bonnici, to identify and promote Labour people to present themselves as independent candidates. A good number did. And when elections were held, we stuck to the principle that independent candidates of all hues were to be voted for. I did, for one.

The PN “against” all the rest was placed in a minority. In a number of major constituencies, independents got majorities. Subsequently, the Labour Party rarely if at all, intervened in their business, even if squabbling between councillors was rife (but the same applied to PN councillors). Some localities with independent majorities, like Zejtun and Mellieħa, prospered on their own.

I still think councils with independent majorities did well. But those with PN majorities were tuned to act in line with their party’s national strategy and did it. This happened during the 1996-1998 period when to create trouble, local councils as in Mosta, were weaponised by the PN at the time that the Labour government was facing its final crisis in the summer of 1998. The whole situation demanded a rethink.

Immediately after the 1996 election, the PN had reversed their decision not to set up their own TV station. We did the same with participation as a party in the affairs of local councils. It was inevitable. As a party, that enabled us to counter effectively weaponisation of local council affairs in the national political scrimmage.

Yet, even now, I remain sceptical as to whether involvement by both sides in local council affairs has been a such good option.

Alfred Sant, flanked by his deputy leaders Geprge Vella (left) and George Abela, during a PL activity before the 1996 election

When the Nationalist Party in government, seeing a decline in revenue, chose to introduce VAT, the Labour Opposition embarked on a campaign against it. But were you really convinced that such a form of taxation was detrimental to Malta, or did you just see it as an opportunity to win votes? Were you being what is today known as populist?

Frankly, I do not remember the context and background of this important issue exactly the way you describe it. The decline in revenue you mention actually resulted from the total depletion of the huge reserve funds accumulated by the Mintoff administration as it implemented its austerity policies. They had been exhausted during the years to 1992 by the EFA administration in its pursuit of feel-good policies. They could no longer resort to them, as they had been in previous years and the deficit financing, which was already being adopted, could not be sustainable in the medium-term.

A main source of tax income was that on consumption, mainly derived from customs duties on imports, the bulk of which came from Europe. That meant consumption of services (which were assuming an ever-growing share of the economy) and of locally produced goods were outside the net. With entry into the EU as the government wanted – or the introduction of an industrial free trade with the EU as proposed by Labour – revenue from customs would be wiped out, in the immediate or medium-term. So a different system by which to tax consumption that would not discriminate against imports and that could be extended to services was required.

The government plumped for VAT claiming that it was the best tried system in Europe and the tightest available to squeeze out tax evasion. The real reason for its choice though was that the introduction of VAT was a sine qua non for admission to the EU, since the tax is a fundamental part of the single European market.

In contrast to this, Labour argued that customs duties needed to be dismantled and an alternative tax introduced gradually in step with the implementation of an industrial free trade agreement with the EU. We denied that VAT is/was so effective in curtailing tax evasion and though we were pooh-poohed at the time, its porosity is now well recognised. We noted that VAT was a cumbersome and bureaucratic arrangement that would put administrative strains and costs on micro enterprises and also that it did not suit small island/peripheral economies not least because of inherent diseconomies of scale. There were IMF studies which made the point.

Far from being populist, there was a respectable body of political thought that contested VAT. In Australia during the 1990s, VAT under the label of GST was being turned down time after time. In the US, the preference was, still is, for a sales tax. Indeed, my ultimate preference as a consumption tax for Malta would have been a sales tax and I still believe that that would have been a better option for the island.

Alfred Sant, as Leader of the Opposition, before the 1996 election characterised by the use of the Cittadin Mobil, a bus converted to be used on the campaign trail as he and other Labour officials travelled between one locality and another

The Nationalist Party had turned personal against you in the run-up to the 1996 election. Did you see it as part of the political game or did it upset you to see the way you were being portrayed to the electorate?

At that time, right-wing parties practically everywhere started to emphasise negative campaigning and the PN followed suit. To be clear though, the party is a past master at how to portray itself as a victim and its tactics have always been hard-knuckled, at times underhanded, quite frequently designed to attack the singer much more than the song.

There are two main problems with this “personal” approach. One, in a capillary fashion, it affects negatively the day-to-day life of members of the family of the person under attack, especially one’s children, which is not fair. Secondly, it invites quick retribution which is not difficult to carry out but which then stimulates popular hatred across the political divide and that is certainly not desirable. My reaction was – and I hope it remained like that – to consider such attacks as intended to distract one from the real issues and try to remain focussed on the latter.

I was among journalists you had invited to your house in Birkirkara when you had been accused of avoiding taxation. I still remember you telling us that we will find a swimming pool on the roof, and this “swimming pool” turned out to be a small container of water. The matter had died down quickly because there had been no wrongdoing, but how did this and similar instances affect the way you looked at and interpreted politics?

That story was among the first goofy, and yet vicious reports about me, cooked up by Daphne Caruana Galizia and her friends in Castille who quite clearly, had open access to income tax department files, supposedly private. To turn the matter on its head, I borrowed an idea from Nixon’s famous Checkers 1952 TV speech. He had been accused of diverting campaign funds to his personal account and denied this by providing details about his finances, but admitted he was personally going to keep one campaign donation he had received, a puppy which his daughters did not want to give up. The “small container of water” you referred to during my press conference on the DCG allegations had been a canvas paddling (swimming) pool for my daughter when she was a baby, converted to a “pond” for goldfish.

One “lesson” for sure came out of that experience. When possible, an emerging negative story should be faced out asap. Adversaries and the media would like to spin a story into a soap opera. If there’s a cost to facing out a story, best bear the pain all at once rather than allow its negatives to get compounded.

In the 1996 election campaign, what was known as the Cittadin Mobil was used as you were taken from one locality to another on the campaign trail. Journalists travelled with you. It marked the beginning of the modern way of campaigning, and helped to further the idea of a ‘presidential’ type of election, pitting two leaders against each other, more than two political parties and their ideas. Do you agree that this was the case?

There were a number of rather innovative political “marketing” concepts behind the Ċittadin Mobil project. By going all over the island, we wanted to show that we wanted to be close to the people everywhere. We did this mostly by arriving there with the mobil, but not only, since we even went to Comino, which was the first and only time I’ve been to that island in my life, even after having many years before, written a very long novel with its name as title.

At all places we went, we made it clear we wanted to meet people. We accomplished this to a very tight schedule.

We wanted to break the mould of long political speeches at mass and corner meetings that was still operative. So at the places we went, end of stay speeches would remain terse, well scripted in advance and targeted to reach specific audiences.

The take-off on the Pope’s mobil model was of course obvious but it worked as a gimmick and as an organisational concept. Secretary general Jimmy Magro and his team were largely responsible for the project which in my view was a huge success.

Yet I am not at all convinced by what you say: that it promoted and boosted for the future, presidential type election campaigns. The latter had already become “presidential”, since at least the 1981 election. That had been played out as a head-on-head confrontation between the veteran leader of the MLP and the putative giant killer of the PN. Instead in 1996, we sought to spread out the campaign content across towns and villages. Also, before that campaign started, I was given the advice, which I accepted, not to base the MLP campaign purely on myself as a leader but on the trio of leader and deputy leaders. We actually had huge posters in the streets projecting our trio.

Part 1: The 1981 election and the transition from Mintoff to KMB

Part 2: The 1980s’ bulk-buying system and public sector employment

Part 3: The Church schools battle and the 1987 constitutional amendments

Part 4: The post-1987 election years and the rise to the Labour leadership

Next week: The freezing of Malta’s EU application and the VAT-CET transition