As Labour lurches from one insane proposal to another, I begin to sympathise with the man who told me that he’s moved from praying that Labour won’t be elected to praying that if elected, they won’t implement their electoral programme.

So far, we have had the ingenious solution of giving people household utility bills that are 25 per cent cheaper (or so they claim) by spending €600 million on a new power station, LNG terminal and vast gas storage-tanks. We have also had the fabulous idea of causing strife in every household that contains an eight-year-old by giving this child an iPad and leaving his or her siblings out of the loop.

And now we have today’s amazing technicolour dreamcoat of a plan, something that can only have been written by that leftover from Mintoff’s cabinet of government, Karmenu Vella. Yes, it’s taken him this long to come up with the brilliant wheeze of having members of the public (because you know how well roughly half the population chooses its government) vote for directors on the boards of state corporations.

Let’s see whether I have understood this correctly. Joseph Muscat and that bunch of sexagenarian 1970s commies who serve as his kitchen cabinet are promising us – and they think we will be thrilled – a situation in which the directors of Enemalta, Air Malta, the Water Services Corporation, Malta Enterprise & c & c will be chosen by Antonella tas-Snoopy and you and me and everyone else in a popular election. And we will also get to nominate the people who stand as candidates.

Worse still, the members of regulatory boards, like the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, the Malta Resources Authority, the Data Protection Authority, the Broadcasting Authority and more, will also be elected through a popular vote, and the candidates will be “nominated by the people” too.

When people like me say that Joseph Muscat’s Labour is Mintoffianism in a suit with a smile (it’s not as though he hasn’t actually spelled it out to us himself) others mock and say we exaggerate. But that’s just what it is, and even Mintoff didn’t go this far in the destruction of real democracy through cheap populism. He got no further than the ‘direttur-haddiem’ or worker-director, and that was bad enough.

In typical ‘people’s courts not law courts’ fashion (and I’m quoting a former prime minister of Malta here – Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici), Labour now presents us with commie totalitarianism and dresses it up as democracy. And so many people are so flipping daft that they actually think this is democracy.

We get to choose our representatives in parliament/government/Opposition because states, if they are not to be dictatorships or kingdoms, must be run by democratically elected representatives of the people. But there is no similar democratic requirement to have state corporations run this way, for the simple reason that we have already democratically-delegated these decisions to parliament/government. That is the whole purpose of representative democracy: the delegation of all such decisions. It is crazy that they just don’t understand this, and deeply worrying if they are only pretending not to understand so as to do an Eva Peron on the people.

Muscat says he will use publicly listed companies as his model. Indeed – but he misses the point that publicly listed companies have actual shareholders who vote for those who will represent their interests on the board. With state corporations, ‘we the people’ have delegated those choices to our democratic representatives. If we are going to whittle away at the decisions that the government is delegated to take on our behalf, through democracy, then we might as well have a plebiscite on every last decision, including what colour to paint the windows of the Auberge de Castille when Muscat moves in.

Muscat almost certainly does not know this, but his way of doing politics was satirised as long ago as 1970, in a film called ‘The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer’, written by and starring Peter Cook. I urge you to look up reviews and a synopsis while you’re on the internet, and to watch the actual film if you can somehow find it for download. It is eerily evocative of the situation we face today, but with the marked difference that Joseph Muscat is nowhere near as elegant and glamorous as Peter Cook.

Muscat also said that he will use Facebook and other social networking sites to “solicit and receive policy suggestions” (I quote a newspaper report here and not his words, verbatim). I am quite sure that he means all this to sound fantastically progressive and liberal, but it actually has the opposite effect of coming across as frighteningly Orwellian and sinister – just like the situation described, in fact, in ‘The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer’.

There was no Facebook or internet in 1970 and the only social networking took place at cocktail parties, but Prime Minister Rimmer had other means. He had dedicated communication systems installed in every household, and each time his government needed to take a decision – which meant very many times a day – the loudspeaker would come on in your home and a super-friendly voice would ask whether you think the British government should raise its investment in nuclear programmes or reduce the cost of dog licences. The net result was that people, faced with months of this persistent canvassing for their opinion and decisions, were desperate, by the end of it, to relinquish all decision-making and hand over total, permanent power to Michael Rimmer (and thanked him for it).

Satire makes its point by taking an argument to its extreme, logical conclusion, but we have a watered-down version of that to look forward to: government by Facebook and members of state boards and regulatory bodies chosen by popular plebiscite.

Yes, it’s scary.