Indeed Labour will have big problems once Joseph Muscat decides it's time to pack up and leave. Much of Labour's present compactness is due to his strong leadership, by which I do not mean good leadership but exactly what I wrote, strong leadership. In other words, he manages to impose his will and push his own (neo-liberal) agenda forward.

I base my prediction on different little episodes or incidents I observe. The latest was a comment made by Mario Philip Azzopardi in an interview published last Sunday in another part of the press.

Talking about the theatre scene in Malta, Muscat acolyte Azzopardi made this priceless pronouncement: "Every play we present ... is researched and sells out. Why? Because [the Maltese] are seeing their experiences, not the foreign ones. ... [T]he Maltese experience is what we are living in. Unfortunately, the elite don't want to deal with this, but want to deal with what happens in London, Germany..."

Mr Azzopardi's statement is both enlightening and instructive.

Needless to say, he is right. The Maltese want Maltese art. They want to experience the cathartic effect of art by having art discuss Maltese situations and predicaments.

(Ideally, the artistic message should also be universal. This is what the academics (the "elite") who Mr Azzopardi hit out at are saying - they're saying, many Maltese productions are weak because they fail to give Maltese experiences a universal dimension. But let's not go down that path, at least not for now. Let's accept Mr Azzopardi's assessment at face value and declare that so far, so good.)

The glaring contradiction is that whereas Mr Azzopardi speaks of Maltese experiences, as opposed to English or German experiences, the Labour government for which he travails and to which he gives blindfolded support is completely ignoring Maltese experiences and imposing foreign (mostly Anglo-American) ideology on Malta.

This is the true Maltese experience Mr Azzopardi should be analysing in his theatrical forays: the imposition of a foreign ideology - conceived and bred in other countries - on the local population, without any real demand for it except from fringe groups.

Moreover, it's not an ideology universally accepted in the countries from which it originates. This airy-fairy notion that there is one, homogenous Europe or West is just that: an airy-fairy notion. The West is made up of different hues of opinions, and, as keen observers have been noticing for some time now, the dominant ideology Premier Muscat has decided to embrace is beginning to lose its dominant position. The election of Donald Trump bears witness to this. The millennial generation sees things differently. The pendulum of history is swinging back to a conservative/communitarian position, slowly, painfully, but surely.

But let's keep to our point and consider an illustration of this dominant ideology being imported from abroad and imposed on Maltese society.

Premier Muscat's government is now tinkering with one of the most fundamental notions of the Maltese family, namely that the family should be the first institution to teach the child. The proposed notion now is that the State can intervene and even take over that function completely from the parents if the parents do not agree with the dominant ideology. We're not referring here to schooling (maths, English, Maltese, and so on), but to ideological teaching - one of the exciting novelties this neo-liberal government is introducing, by sleight of hand, into our legislation through the Bill which purportedly deals with domestic violence.

At this juncture, I think it useful to quote a particular excerpt from The God Delusion, a book I reviewed some 10 years or so ago for this same newspaper. I have not moved an inch since then, and still dislike it and regard its author, Richard Dawkins, as a brilliant biologist but a charlatan philosopher.

"In 1858," writes Dawkins, "Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old child of Jewish parents living in Bologna, was legally seized by the papal police acting under orders from the Inquisition. Edgardo was forcibly dragged away from his weeping mother and distraught father to the Catechums (house for the conversion of Jews and Muslims) in Rome, and thereafter brought up as a Roman Catholic. Aside from occasional brief visits under close priestly supervision, his parents never saw him again."

This boy, Edgardo, had been informally baptised by a maid when he was ill as she feared he would die. In the Inquisition's "mental world," continues Dawkins, "to allow a 'Christian child' to stay with his Jewish parents was not an option, and they maintained this bizarre and cruel stance steadfastly, and with the utmost sincerity, in the face of worldwide outrage."

Now replace "Jewish", "Christian" and "Inquisition" with "traditional", "neo-liberal" and "State", and - as much as I dislike him and his ideas - apply Dawkins' assessment of the Inquisition to the new inquisition which is being hatched in our midst.

Intervening in the values parents teach their children is nothing short of thought policing. True, some parents do teach absolute rubbish to their children, but shouldn't it be the role of the community to correct them, rather than the State's?

This Labour government has inherited from Mintoff a visceral discomfort with a clergy made up more of nosey parkers than shepherds and fishermen of souls. But Mintoff lived in different times and while he viewed the Archbishop as an obstacle to whatever his plans were for Malta, Mintoff still quoted Christ and Christian teaching to his followers. So out of historical ignorance (I'll never tire of inviting them to read Mario Vella's Reflections in a Canvas Bag), the present Labour ruling coterie have a completely messed-up notion of Mintoffian anti-clericalism, which they translated into anti-religious legislation. Not too different from shooting at the Red Cross.

But then - irony of ironies - while "liberalising" the artistic scene to accommodate those who want to blaspheme and produce offensive theatrical representations, they also want to impose legislation which mimics the mindset of the Inquisition!

What a mess!

This is perhaps what Mario Philip Azzopardi might want to deal with in his theatrical experiments.

Otherwise, sorry Mario Philip, but the academics are right, and you should stick to English and German productions. At least, you would be coherent with the government you support.