Considering that Labour intends to change its official appellation it might be worthwhile to record the many, albeit unofficial, name changes of the Party.
It all started off as Camera del Lavoro, then “Labour Party Club” and, finally, “Partit tal-Haddiema” in time for the 1921 election. The emblem was a surprisingly dark-skinned, bare-chested worker wielding an industrial hammer.
Changes were to occur in the split of 1949. Mintoff reorgaised the Party as “Malta Labour Party” (occasionally inaccurately translated as “Partit tax-Xoghol”), separate from the “Malta Workers Party” founded by former leader Paul Boffa. The monicker “Mintoffjani” to distinguish MLP supporters from MWP (the “Boffisti”) dates from this time and survived well into the 1980s. The previous homoerotic emblem of the party was ditched in favour of the torch for Mintoff’s Party (ironically, also the symbol of the British Conservatives, an irony which was certainly not lost on Mintoff) while Boffa’s chose a handshake.
The disappearance of Boffa’s Party in the mid-1950s meant that Mintoff’s again became unequivocally Malta’s “Partit tal-Haddiema”. In the 1970s and 1980s, unschackled by the ideological scruples of the 1950s and 1960s, the Party often referred itself as “Partit Socjalista” and to what it was doing as “socjalizmu”. And between 1977 and 1992, when the Party and the GWU were in statutory union, it was common to refer to the union as “Moviment tal-Haddiema”, a particular favourite of Mifsud-Bonnici.
“Partit Laburista” well and truly came to prominence in the early 1990s. It was a safe bet in a time when socialism, of both the communist and of the democratic variety, was suffering setbacks both in Malta and abroad. “Partit tal-Haddiema” too started to sound like something from yesteryear.
The Party’s detractors, of course, continued to refer to the party as “Partit Socjalista” to the point that the then Party Secretary-General Jimmy Magro issued a reminder to the press that the Party’s name was “Partit Laburista”. Needless to say, the detractors gleefully ignored Magro’s reminder and it took some years until they too started to refer to the Party as “Partit Laburista”.
The official change name comes at the right time. Both supporters and detractors are comfortable with the new appellation which, incidentally, finds a way around translating the untranslatable English word “Labour”.
