The Archbishop delivered a sermon at the usual High Mass to mark Independence Day yesterday, to a congregation of politicians, constitutional leaders and the assembled forces of the government. That government, he said, should make a “concerted effort” (I quote the newspaper reports) to “raise the moral fibre” of the Maltese. I was impressed by the extent of his well- meaning innocence. Or is it wilful blindness? People who have no moral fibre themselves see no need for it and are the last ones to bother with building it up in others. And even if they do see the need for it (which clearly, and going on the available evidence, they do not), the Labour Party and the government it has formed are hardly the best placed to lead by example – which is exactly what you have to do in these situations.

What the Archbishop should have done is excoriated the members of the government assembled before him for their own lack of moral fibre and the exceedingly bad example they have set to a Maltese society already all too predisposed, as the Archbishop himself noted, to admire blackguards and knaves and to think of despicable and disreputable behaviour as “wajs”. In Malta, cunning sociopaths who know no boundaries in getting their own back, and the politicians who encourage and enable them so as to get what they want, are ‘smart’, while good people, the correct and the ethical, are regarded as a soft touch if not exactly soft in the head. Either that, or they are disbelieved and suspected of having their snout in the trough because that is what the suspicious would actually be doing in their place. This is why the Labour Party was elected to the government of which the Archbishop spoke: because it was made, by the nature of those who inhabit it and by consultants and fascist insight into propaganda psychology, in Maltese society’s own image, as the embodiment of spite, envy, greed, vengefulness, sav- age aspiration, mercenary pragmatism, and the urge to destroy those who we would wish to be ourselves. Of course, the Archbishop would never have been so forward with guests in the house of

the Lord as to tick them off severely for using dastardly means to bring down the previous government and replace it, or for using false- hoods, half-truths and character assassination to persuade the electorate in their favour so that they could raid the sweetshop themselves. Yet this is what happened, and this is the behaviour that has continued to persuade Maltese society that the means justify the end. It is obvious from the Archbishop’s rhetorical question as to whether Maltese people’s moral fibre has become stronger or weaker that he believes it to be the latter. But quite frankly, unless a speaker is specific in such circumstances, nobody takes any notice. If he had said that the very public rewarding of those who helped the Labour Party, using public money and public positions for the pur- pose, was not the greatest example of moral fibre and that it gives Maltese society precisely the wrong message, then he would have struck home. And if he had said that the land- grab, trolley-rush, free-for-all, let’s-make- the-most-of-it push by government members and their families and associates is not quite a show of moral fibre, then his congregation might have – perhaps – shifted in their seats. The Archbishop was a little more specific

when talking about refugees and how the way we behave towards them, speak about them and consider them is evidence of our lack or otherwise of moral fibre. But even so, it was too wishy-washy to have any real effect. And even here, we’re back to the government leading, or not leading, by example. All of that talk in early summer, of returning people rescued at sea without first allowing them to apply for asylum, all that chat by our tubby Minister of Homeland Security, or whatever he calls him- self nowadays, about separating the healthy men from the rest and sending them back to Libya, presumably because they are fit enough to withstand ill-treatment, was hard- ly a show of moral fibre. Yet that is exactly how the government presented it, largely because it is convinced of this itself – as a show of moral fibre – and how great swathes of people read it, as a show of moral fibre or strength. For this is the real problem: not so much that we lack moral fibre, but that we think we have it when we don’t, and that we think getting what we want by whatever means is, indeed, that very moral fibre itself, rather the polar opposite of that.

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