An Orwellian campaign that has led into an Orwellian government

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 2 June 2013, 09:49 Last update: about 11 years ago

Joseph Muscat, who actually did work against the much-vaunted national interest with his five-year single-minded campaign to keep Malta out of the European Union, and with his malicious collusion with self-interested MPs of the rival party over the last three or four years, has now seen fit to accuse the new Opposition leader of doing just that.

Simon Busuttil is working against the national interest, Muscat has said via a statement his party issued and a tweet (how ridiculous) his party sent out the day before yesterday. This is all so very shades-of-Dom-Mintoff-and-the-Golden-Years, and because of that, we can’t exactly expect his fellow Cabinet members to try to restrain him. Seven of them are the genuine Mintoff article, leftovers from the 1970s/1980s Labour Party: Louis Grech, Edward Scicluna, Leo Brincat, Marie Louise Coleiro, Karmenu Vella, Evarist Bartolo and George Vella. If they agreed back then with identifying people as enemies of the state who worked against the national interest and colluded with evil and untrustworthy foreigners, they are bound to agree now. They are way too old to change their views.

The Labour Party was almost certainly dying to add something accusatory on the subject of ‘foreign interference’ to that statement and tweet, but might have thought it a step too far. After all, even they know that they can’t go about in public describing our fellow EU members as interfering foreigners who don’t have Malta’s best interests at heart, though that is obviously how they think of them. The subtext, however, is just that. The accusation is not so much that Simon Busuttil is working against the national interest, but that he is doing so by engaging nasty foreigners in the same project, none of whose business it is, to trip up the smooth process of what should be Malta’s own private affair: the purchase, installation and operation of a power station and LNG terminal.

Our 100-day-old government has made it amply clear already that it is frustrated by having to operate within what it views as the restrictions and ‘interference by outsiders’ that come with EU membership. This is the political party that fought tooth, nail and claw to keep Malta out of the EU so that we wouldn’t have to put up with foreigners telling us what to do, and so that ‘Malta could be master of its own destiny’. This was another way of saying that Labour governments should be free to do as they please while the democratic west looks haplessly on, unable to help, as they did in those Golden Years so beloved of the seven Mintoffian fossils in Muscat’s Cabinet. Muscat himself actually led, with his boss Alfred Sant, the campaign against EU membership. He likes to tell us that he knows how the EU works because he was an MEP for four years (if only knowing how the EU works were that simple), but do take note of the fact that he has never said he is pleased Malta is in the EU. He says something else entirely: that now we are in the EU we might as well deal with it – as though it’s a problem rather than a blessing.

So Simon Busuttil has been accused of using his contacts in the European Parliament to have questions asked about the way the Maltese government is setting about striking a deal (I actually think a deal was struck before the election) on a new power station. His accuser’s tone is shrill and Stalinist – the very essence, in fact, of the real Labour Party beneath the sham, shiny, marketing facade of Malta Taghna Lkoll and I’m In.

The Nationalist Party responded yesterday by calling the Labour Party “hysterical”, which it is, but I would have added that it is also paranoid and behaving as though it is holed up in a turret under siege. “It is the right of every MEP to raise questions on the actions of member states, their relationships with the EU and compliance with EU directives and regulations,” the PN said. “The Opposition has behaved responsibly throughout the process, and has not adopted Labour’s tactics in Opposition, which left no stone unturned in hindering major projects like the power station, the waste treatment plant and other important projects, at every stage of the process.”

The PN pointed out that its MPs have been asking pertinent questions about Labour’s power station plans, in the Maltese parliament, but the government has refused to answer them. It also made a point which is relevant to all of the government’s behaviour and its underlying attitude: that Labour behaves as though Malta is a self-contained unit and a world unto itself, cut off from the rest. You will notice that when our ministers speak, they do so blissfully oblivious to the fact that they are ministers of an EU member state and not part of Mintoff’s government in 1980. Their words are picked up and relayed across the world by embassies and the news media.

A few unwise sentences by our finance minister triggered off major speculation in the European media as to whether Malta would be the next Cyprus, and only a couple of days ago we had the foreign minister, fresh back from discussions about lifting the arms embargo against Syria, that it “pains him” to see Britain and France exerting pressure to have the embargo lifted so that they could sell arms. Does the foreign minister not realise that he shouldn’t be saying things like that, that Britain and France are his EU colleagues and that this is no longer Mintoff’s “Ewropa ta’ Cain u Abel”?

“The government seems to be ignoring that there is a world outside Malta that includes international bidders who have contacts with MEPs from various EU member states, and with whom they might have spoken and raised responsible questions, which the Maltese government has in turn failed to answer,” the Nationalist Party said in its statement. “The government needs to respect democracy both at a national level and at the European level, and must do away with its agenda of attempting to silence anyone who questions it by labelling them “inciters” (xewwiexa) and accusing them of working against the national interest, to use Joseph Muscat’s choice of words.”

Quite frankly, I don’t know why anybody expected otherwise or any better. There’s a Maltese aphorism which strikes me as particularly apt in relation to the Labour Party and people’s expectations that Joseph Muscat and his band of worried-looking Mintoffians would somehow be any better now than they were when they were fighting against EU membership a decade ago or making a pig’s dinner of government under Mintoff, KMB and Alfred Sant: “Do not buy vinegar in the expectation that it will turn into wine.” Wine may well become vinegar but vinegar can never become wine.