As if we hadn’t had enough enlightenment and political fodder to masticate throughout most of this summer, beginning of course with an early June general election, Nationalist MP Karol Aquilina’s “Freemasons” salvo on social media was certainly the bright red cherry on the surreal cake.

The whole comic situation that quickly followed his tirade took lyrics-enamoured me to the late Fifties when, still a boy eagerly discovering the facts of life, I remember parents, uncles, aunts and the local Teddy Boys’ sweethearts singing Neil Sedaka’s hit “Oh! Carol”. It also instantly flashed into my mind the very appropriate second line to that title – “I am but a fool” – for I really still cannot understand how and why the usually sombre Nationalist MP chose to bring up that topic (not a favourite one among politicians on both sides of the House, I assure you) at the very time his party councillors, love them or hate them, had just chosen the two horses to stay in the leadership race.

Even worse, was the connotation that the remark was exclusively (and popularly perceived) as not a very oblique remark on the choice that the PN rank and file have to make in a week’s time – either one candidate or the other, his personal preference long known.

Needless to say, given the incredible ambience that has engulfed the PN leadership election, Aquilina’s remark brought an immediate downpour of colourful confetti in the form of insults from supporters of the front-runner, Adrian Delia, who, not surprisingly, also did not take too kindly to the Freemasons reference from a high official within the party’s administration – I almost said establishment.

Karol’s reaction to all this was no less phantasmagorical, including his later claim he would be willing to serve under whoever gets the leadership, which took me back to another piece from Sedaka’s 1958 song:

Oh! Carol
(I am but a fool)
Darling, I love you
Though you treat me cruel
You hurt me
And you make me cry.

Aquilina’s ill-chosen theme for the thousands of PN supporters entitled to vote in the second round of the leadership election is, of course, not new to Maltese politics. It goes back to the Thirties when Gerald Strickland was the PN’s declared “enemy”, to use a choice Adrian Delia term, and had been hounded by the political lawyers of the judiciary system. He was pushed out of power with election-eve accusations of being a member of the Freemasons on the evidence of just one Ettore Bono, nicknamed Terinu, who, it turned out later, had been lying through his buckteeth, for a pocketful of silver no doubt, when signing an affidavit swearing he had seen Strickland in full Masonic regalia.

Under his watch, former Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami also had a spat with Freemasons diluting the Maltese law courts, but there were claims that he did not necessarily have to walk far from his office to find them.

Local freemasonry has always been a sore issue, involving politicians, judges and big businessmen. When Aquilina declared publicly “the worst thing that can happen to a party is to be usurped by Freemasons”, he was simply reopening a major wound most people often prefer to overlook or pretend it does not exist anymore. For all I know, he could have said “Illuminati” or “Opus Dei” and he would have got the same reactions.

Harry Potter next?

 

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Cash back for your plastic bottles

Many people still remember children and “strange old” men collecting glass bottles off the streets and the piazzas to have them returned, getting some welcome change for their chores. It was a positive scheme that sadly died away with the introduction of plastic bottles for water and fizzy drinks that now litter our seas.

This plastic calamity torments the Maltese territorial and maritime environments. While people, not enough people, have been gradually nurtured into recycling, there is still a sizeable portion of the population that not only refuses to recycle, but is also arrogantly wont to litter its plastic waste. When all manners of public persuasion fail, including well-produced educational campaigns in the media, authorities need to go back to the drawing board. Sometimes the simplest, proven schemes work better, like yesteryear’s cash back for your bottles.

In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, whose government is not one-track-minded on independence, has declared she will commit to the introduction of a deposit return scheme the way it was so many years ago. The initiative is aimed at cutting single-use plastic waste, glass bottles and aluminium cans.

It has been calculated that 60,000 plastic bottles are littered every day in Scotland. We cannot be too far away from that, particularly during the summer months. Most of them are blown by the wind or flushed by rainfall into the sea. The bottles, which make up a third of marine plastic pollution, then break down into tiny pieces over many decades and end up in the food chain. The Mediterranean has been regurgitating “plastic” fish for consumption for who knows how long.

Offering cash back for your plastic deposits would go a long way towards solving this gargantuan environmental dilemma, as results elsewhere have shown. In Norway, for example, small-change deposits have helped retrieve no less than 96 per cent of bottles, and supermarkets there even have “reverse vending machines” which give out cash or a charity donation in exchange for the bottles.

How would local fizzy drinks producers react to such a scheme? The Scottish initiative has actually led to a breakthrough with Coca-Cola, the world’s biggest soft-drinks producer, dropping its opposition to a deposit return scheme. The company had previously always opposed such schemes when they were introduced elsewhere.

While current lottery schemes for returned plastic bottles and light bulbs are indeed commendable here, bringing back the bottle deposit scheme could go further. Let’s go for it, WasteServ!

 

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Disbelieving

I see that in Pakistan, where gang-rapists go scot-free and female minors are wed to dirty old men every day, a private school in the capital, Karachi, has decided to drop John Lennon’s “Imagine” from their student concert following someone’s complaints about the song’s “atheist lyrics”.

I always thought that wonderful song was about peace.