The Labour Party has continued to develop its commitment to liberal and progressive causes by renaming its organisational ghetto for women, rather than dispensing with it altogether. Ghaqda Nisa Laburisti (literally ‘the Union of Labour Women’) is now simply Nisa Laburisti (Labour Women), which has a nice, clean, minimalist ring to it though its objectives remain just as atavistic.

The Labour leader – and Prime Minister – said that Nisa Laburisti will focus on “issues involving women, families and careers”. Why it should be a women’s organisational ghetto that speaks about these matters, rather than the mainstream Labour Party itself, is beyond me. Labour is supposed to be the party of the future, but instead it speaks like the party of the 1960s: women = families, women’s issues and ‘careers’. Also, why does the Labour Party persist in talking about families as though they are the preserve of women, and something which men needn’t get involved with? Labour is supposed to have moved away from Mediterranean working-class chauvinism, but the roots apparently go too deep and even the party leader leads by the wrong example.

The new President, the Prime Minister said, will be a role model for many women. Heaven forefend that should be the case, because Mrs Coleiro Preca does not necessarily have a past to be proud of, and her present is contentious too. Doling out favours to supplicants is not contemporary politics in an EU member state, but village patronage designed not so much to help the favoured as to shore up the strength of the dispenser of favours.

The group is led by Claudette Abela Baldacchino, who faces fraud charges for some alleged airline ticketing scam related to her work in Brussels, and so will not be standing for re-election as a member of the European Parliament. The committee members include Nikita Zammit Alamango, who tweeted to mark the occasion of International Women’s Day, “A girl must be two things, classy and fabulous”, and immediately had her progressive and liberal quotation retweeted by the Prime Minister. In a Labour world where women are girls and the priorities are fabulousness and whatever passes for ‘classy’, other members of that committee include Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s already estranged post-divorce-law second wife, Carmen Ciantar, the mayor of Qormi, Rosianne Cutajar, who thinks feminism is ringing the Police Commissioner to flirtatiously persuade him to let her queue-barge for the Gozo ferry, and Veronique Dalli, whose sister Miriam seems determined to sail into the European Parliament on yet another pair of hooker heels and laden with enough make-up, which she doesn’t need, to sink the Titanic. Perhaps that is what passes for ‘classy and fabulous’ among the ‘girls’ at Nisa Laburisti.

***

And in other news from the Labour Party’s really confused liberal and progressive front, the party’s gay icon, Cyrus Engerer, has teamed up with the bird-shooters and trappers to collect on their behalf 1,600 signatures to a petition in their favour. And how did he justify his decision when pursued by the press for an explanation? He said that he is “all out in favour of safeguarding minority rights”. Rationality was never his strong point, but perhaps he should be reminded that there is a minority of people who are insistent on their right to live in a society free of people like him. But the right they claim for themselves clashes with his real right to live freely in the same society. Bird-shooters and trappers may well be a minority but they are rather an unsavoury one and their rights, such as they are assumed to be, clash directly with ours, to live without the sound of guns going off and able to appreciate birds in the natural environment.

Bird-shooters and gay rights campaigners make extremely odd bedfellows, but then Labour has never been progressive and liberal in truth, only in name. To make matters worse, Engerer told the press, supposedly in his defence, that he is not in favour of hunting. So exactly why did he collect signatures for a petition in favour of hunting? I’d better not push him on this one, or he’ll be quoting Voltaire next.

 

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com