The talk of the town the past few days was the finance minister’s abysmal performance before the European Parliament, when challenged by one of his erstwhile colleagues on those benches (for we forget that only last year he was sitting among them as an MEP and as their equal, and they know him well).
He hemmed and he hawed and he used various hand and arm gestures as aids to speech, but the net result was a total failure of communication. Or rather, he communicated a message all right: the message that he, his prime minister and the government had bungled this one badly and are now trying to mop up the mess but making that mess even greater.
Supporters of the government and others who are inclined to have a high tolerance threshold for the sins of the Labour Party, where they are completely intolerant of even the most minor blip in that party’s rivals, have come out in force spreading the word that Edward Scicluna admitted it was a mistake. But if you listen to the video recording again, you will see that he did no such thing. Instead, he blamed it all on “Henley and Something Associates”, which made the situation worse: a finance minister delegating responsibility for something so major to a company whose name he claims not even to remember, and then, like a bad workman, blaming those tools.
In any case, it wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate. It was so deliberate that the government fought all opposition to the bill right to the bitter end, calling critics “negative” (the Prime Minister) and “jealous” (the home affairs minister), and defying all requests at having the bill amended. The Prime Minister even stopped to challenge MZPN protestors outside Parliament the night of the vote, and lest we have forgotten already – because, really, there are too many birdbrains about – Members of Parliament who sit with the government voted in toto for the bill and not against it. That includes Edward Scicluna.
His querulous protestations in the European Parliament therefore beg the question: exactly why did he vote for the scheme, in its every aspect, if he now thinks that it needs to be changed? Surely, as a grown man in his late 60s, with a lifetime of experience in economics and public policy, as a former member of the European Parliament and a current member of our Parliament, and more crucially, with the full weight of the finance portfolio on his shoulders, that is an assessment he should have made before he voted in favour of the scheme and not afterwards?
Of course they don’t think it was a mistake. They think the scheme is just perfect the way it is and that is why they voted for it. Or is Edward Scicluna saying that he voted for something that he doesn’t agree with, because – you know – he is a man of principle and correctness? They haven’t changed their minds about the sale of citizenship scheme at all: the government has simply found itself hit by a tsunami of international criticism, hostility, worldwide negative press coverage and mockery (but above all, mockery – that was the killer, which their pride couldn’t take). They were thrilled with their cunning plan, were ultra-defiant at home on the ranch in Malta when faced with criticism, and then the morning after the vote woke up to find that their fantastic plan was being laughed at in Colorado, Chile and New Zealand. Oh, and there were headlines about Malta having developed “a new form of human trafficking” on the front pages of Germany’s most influential newspapers.
Let’s get this straight: the only mistake the government thinks it made here is in failing to foresee the depth and scale of the worldwide response to its behaviour. It does not think it made a mistake with the scheme itself. It still loves the scheme and is furious at having been made to compromise against its will. In fact, we do not even yet know whether it will compromise, or whether there is going to be a stalemate in negotiations.
As for those who are praising the finance minister for ‘admitting a mistake’, they are one sandwich short of a picnic. This is not the sort of thing you make mistakes with. Finance ministers don’t work on a bill, spend months discussing it with their own people, vote on it, make it law and then – after international criticism – begin to climb down bit by bit not because they want to but because they are forced to. The reality is that we are dealing with individuals who are not fit for purpose. They thought running a country would be easy as pie but have spent the last nine months finding out with shock that it isn’t – that they can’t actually do as they please because for every action there is a reaction and sometimes, when you are the finance minister of an EU member state, that reaction is international and not just domestic.
I, for one, found it extremely distressing to see that Malta’s finance minister faced the European Parliament without notes, without a prior briefing, without the facts at his fingertips, and with no prepared response to the obvious questions he was bound to get. That alone speaks volumes about his level of attention to detail and worse, about his inability to think clearly, sharply and quickly while on the spot. It was not disappointing, because it is exactly what I expected. But actually seeing it happen was painful.
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