The Labour Party has set up a website dedicated to Super One videos and ‘comments’ about what it would have us understand are the government’s multifarious crimes. See it to believe it, at www.gonzi.pn. This is over and above what is pretty much the same service, with similar levels of semi-literacy, provided by its other website, maltastar.com. Then there are the various official websites for Super One, Joseph Muscat, the Labour Party as an organisation, Forum Zghazagh Laburisti, and the websites run by its candidates and Members of Parliament.
Beyond all these websites, there are Facebook profiles and Facebook pages and Facebook groups, all telling us what Labour and its die-hards and try-hards think of the Prime Minister, the government, the Nationalist Party and key government officials.
We are less than a year away from a general election and still the Labour Party has no website telling us why we should vote for it, what it plans to do and how it will do it. The message Labour has consistently given out until now is ‘Vote Labour because the Nationalists have got on your nerves’ or ‘Vote Labour because Gonzi ha z-zieda’ or even ‘Vote Labour because Daphne’s a witch’ (sad, eh?). You have to laugh. Or better still, cry.
In the same week that the Labour Party launched with great fanfare its website of Form IIC-literate criticism of the government and its ministers (“The Mater Dei it has no pillows!”), the Nationalist Party launched its own www.mychoice.pn, which couldn’t be more different. About the Labour Party, there’s not a word. Instead, it reminds you of the reasons why you vote Nationalist, lists some new ones, and asks you what you think. While the Labour website is 100 per cent negative (and in a humourless fashion) about the enemy, and says nothing positive about Labour itself, the Nationalist website is 100 per cent positive in feel and outlook, seeks feedback on where things have been negative, and doesn’t mention the enemy at all.
I had only to look at the two websites in quick succession to remark out loud how they encapsulate the very essence of the political parties they promote. The Labour Party’s site is amateurish, ill-conceived, badly thought out, barely literate and really slapdash. They didn’t even check the Super One videos before uploading them, and one of them opens with the legend ‘You don’t want to f*** with me do not f*** with me’, splashed across the screen, quite obviously placed there by one of their hare-brained video editors or cameramen (I know just the one – he has more or less the same legend on his Facebook profile).
Partnership for Peace
The website, of course, is a metaphor for the party in general. Encouraged by Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s sudden interest in the supreme power of Parliament to do everything but vote against his Mistra project, and tempted by the prospect of Franco Debono being overcome by his all-consuming envy for Richard Cachia Caruana, shadow and former foreign minister George Vella and pointless stooge Luciano Busuttil trotted off to Parliament and there brought a motion demanding his resignation.
Within hours, the government had released a statement explaining that Vella and Busuttil had completely misread the situation by failing to put the contents of a Wiki-leaked US cable into the factual historical (for this was four years ago) context. Quite frankly, the newspapers shouldn’t have waited for the government to tell them this. They could have worked it out for themselves by assembling the facts, which – rather than repeating one official statement after another – is their real job.
It goes without saying that there have been no embarrassed blushes in the Labour camp and that George Vella, the man who was and would yet again be our foreign minister but can’t put a diplomatic cable into context, did not resign or apologise. As for Luciano Busuttil, forget it. This is the man who shouted on Facebook that ‘we’ should hold Libyan funds hostage until ‘they’ pay us what they owe. When he was roundly sat upon and rubbished, he told us that he was only making a suggestion to see what people think.
And in all of this, we still don’t know the answer to the most pressing question: what does the Labour Party think now of Malta’s participation in Partnership for Peace, and will it pull Malta out when it gets into government? I think George Vella’s current motion is a giant clue. He wouldn’t be demanding Cachia Caruana’s resignation for having worked to get Malta back into Partnership for Peace if he didn’t hate the fact that Malta is in. After all, the first act of Alfred Sant’s government in 1996 was to pull Malta out of Partnership for Peace. George Vella was foreign minister, and he flew out with Sant to do it, making a dramatic statement for the television cameras and press photographers.
I don’t expect he’s changed his mind, and I imagine that he’s still seething at how his Great Act of Neutrality was undone, partly by the efforts of the man for whose resignation he now calls. ‘The personal is political’ was the rallying-cry of feminists in the 1960s. They were so right, though this is not quite what they meant.
www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com