Political programmes on the Labour Party’s propaganda channel, ONE, are produced as if aimed at children. All nuance, controversy, and complex issues are stripped out so the audience can watch without engaging much grey matter. Too much grey matter ay hurt the audience.
Karmenu Vella, previous EU Commissioner and Labour Minister from Dom Mintoff’s days told a story on ONE, which was supposedly funny. He mentioned the story about how in the middle of the 1980s, Dom Mintoff convinced the Soviet Union to purchase two new vessel from the then newly formed Malta Shipyards in Marsa which was aimed at producing ships. It was a very ambitious venture but which was prepared and organised without the necessary capital investment and the technical expertise to make it successful.
The order for the two ships Karmenu Vella spoke about ultimately proved disastrous, laying the groundwork for the failure of Malta Shipyards and its eventual closure. I have the details about the order of these ships somewhere stacked in the massive pile of papers that include Dockyard and Shipyard annual reports and I remember the abstracts about the ships very well.
The vessels were over-budget and Malta Shipyards made a massive loss on the order. They were also late with the order and eventually had a problem with delivery as the Soviet Union collapsed. The deal was a massive failure which cost the shipyards a lot of money and their future.
The problems with the Dockyard and the Shipyard were mainly centred on the issues that they were not modernised and workers’ management also made it inefficient: the Dockyard was Labour’s experiment to demcoratise the workplace and socialise company ownership and these experiments failed as these principles were over-ruled by nepotism and corruption. At the end of the day, the Dockyard became an excessively inefficient company with a conservative work-force that was resistant to change. The Shipyards were so inefficient that they didn’t even last the Dockyard and were closed much prior.
Malta’s ship-repair industry was saved by Labour as much as it was damaged by it. Both political parties share blame for depriving the Maltese economy of this industry. You can watch the video below.
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