Muscat’s speech at his Floriana celebrations was reported as inspirational, but in reality, it was frightening to those who know their history and their present, who can read the subtext of anti-democracy. “The political map of this country today shows that we started something in 2013 that didn’t end in 2017. When progress begins, it forms a wave that sweeps aside anyone who tries to hinder it.”
The sweeping away of “opponents” by “progress” is the historical jargon used by dictators across the globe posing as revolutionaries. Real progress does not seek to destroy – for that is what “sweep away” means – different voices. Because real progress cannot take place without democracy, divergent voices and criticism even of the harshest kind are not just a tolerated part of that, but also an essential counter-balance.
Frightening, too, are the facile lies in this rehash of mid-20th-century dictatorial rhetoric. What progress has been achieved in just four years? None, for the simple reason that it is impossible in practical terms, even if there is the will to do it, in a country that is a European Union member state already and not part of the Third World. Selling citizenship is not progress. Building a power station that is wholly unnecessary, and which has not even begun to function yet, is not progress. An anything-goes attitude towards the environment and the rule of law is as far from progress as you can get. Civil unions for same-sex couples – yes, that’s progress. But you can’t build an argument about progress on that alone.
The real progress in Malta took place under the governments led by Eddie Fenech Adami post 1987. That year, the country was on its knees, wrecked economically and socially, a quasi-Albanian backwater despised by the free world as a satellite of the Soviet Union and Gaddafi’s Libya. It was a mess with no infrastructure, the courts of justice reduced to a joke, constitutional authorities left unconstituted, endemic human rights violations and massive unemployment. By 1992, Malta was unrecognisable, already functioning like a normal country, following huge investment in a sound infrastructure, telecoms, the airport, everything created from scratch. We went from begging Cabinet ministers for a landline in our homes to brand-new (at the time) mobile telephony, in just four years. That’s real progress. Set that against Muscat’s progress in the last four years: selling passports and civil unions, no hassle, no investment, no stress.
In the four years between 1992 and 1996, when Fenech Adami lost the general election, the country had changed so far beyond recognition that people felt it was ‘safe’ to vote Labour again. There was so much progress – teeming wealth, boats packing the marinas, expensive cars on the roads (for those who judge progress in material terms) and above all, the real gauge of progress, incredible social mobility brought about by immense investment in education, making higher education and vocational training available to all, and paying people to go to university, that for the first time in Maltese history something remarkable happened that truly constitutes progress: in one generation, people shifted out of socio-economic group DE to ABC1. The sons and – more crucially if we’re talking progress – daughters of manual workers achieved, thanks to real progress in political decisions and Nationalist government policies in education and training, jobs in information technology, financial services, telecoms and positions at senior level in consultancy and management that their parents would never have thought possible, that were never available even to the children of so-called social privilege in the Labour government years 1971 to 1987.
But the real, true progress came about in the years 1998 to 2003, when Sant then lost the general election to Fenech Adami and the Nationalist government used that five-year stint that came about like a ‘god out of the machine’, totally unexpectedly, to overhaul Malta completely, its laws and systems, in preparation for European Union membership. Malta became a proper, functioning European state. That was real progress, and again I say, set that against Joseph Muscat’s past four years and think about what he has achieved – selling citizenship and a power station that is made redundant by the interconnector – that can in any way be compared to that. And while you are resetting your Reality Check button, keep in mind that during those very years, the man who is now claiming to be the Sultan of Progress was on the wrong side of history, working hard to hinder that progress or halt it entirely with a vote against European Union membership.
The Nationalist governments of the time achieved all that tremendous progress without “sweeping away those who stood in its way” – because they are fundamentally democratic. And that is exactly why Joseph Muscat, who stood in the way of every progressive step made by the Nationalist governments over several years, including the ultimate progressive step of joining the European Union and then the Eurozone, is still here today, and leading a government of his own. Not only did Nationalist governments not sweep anybody away, but it also brought supporters of the Opposition on boards, knowing full well that because Labour is a religion and not a political choice, they would never change their vote – which is not the case with those who Muscat’s government brings on board precisely because they will change their vote.
Muscat accuses other people of lying, but his own lies – because they are told from a stage before a crowd of tens of thousands from an assumed position of absolute power – are the most dangerous lies of all. They are the lies of somebody who would happily go down the route of untrammelled power. As somebody said to me the other day: “People are worrying because we have no Opposition. They should worry because we have no government either. There is no balance left in this country. Corruption is out of control from top to bottom, and instead of a government led by a prime minister, we have a sultan and his court.”
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