A little after the general election debacle, Joseph Muscat wrote that the Labour Party should have taken inspiration from what the Chinese were doing on the internet in the run-up to the Olympic Games – organising themselves to trawl through the international blogs and websites and post comments counteracting the criticism of China’s human rights abuses. He didn’t mean that Labour elves should be sticking up for China. He meant that they should have taken a leaf out of China’s book and maintained a strong elf presence in the ether.

By “Chinese”, I didn’t suppose Joseph Muscat meant Hu Jia, who blogged about land and environmental abuses, and ended up thrown into prison for “inciting subversion of state power”, a catch-all crime used to round up dissidents and those who use the internet to raise awareness of what’s going on in China. I don’t suppose Muscat meant, either, Yang Chunlin, who has been jailed for organising an on-line petition against the illegal seizure of land by government officials.

After all, Joseph Muscat didn’t think twice about citing Cuba and other repressive states as examples we should follow when allowing 16-year-olds to vote. So 16-year-olds can vote in Cuba, but they still end up with Fidel Castro and communism. They can vote, but they have no freedom. Our Joseph doesn’t see the inherent contradiction there. Telling us that we should follow Cuba’s example doesn’t strike him as odd.

Now Joseph Muscat has done something else which shows us just how limited his understanding is of life in a secular democracy in the west. He knows the motions, he makes all the right noises, he picked up the soundbites while in Brussel, but the fact of the matter is that he still doesn’t understand. It’s like somebody who learns mathematical formulae without grasping their purpose or proper application in the real world. Give this person an examination question and he’ll work out the answer using all the right methods. Ask him to apply that formula to a practical situation in the real-life workplace and he can’t, because he doesn’t understand how or even why.

Muscat seems to understand civil liberties and freedom of expression, in theory, but in practice he seems to have a little difficulty getting to grips with it. Let’s face it: if he really understood all that, his political party of choice wouldn’t be Labour, and Super One TV and radio wouldn’t have been his stomping-grounds before he hit the big-time and started hanging out with all the big cheeses.

So what’s new from Labour? Something quite typically Chinese, but the party buried its own embarrassing news beneath the even more excruciating announcement that Jason Micallef had been elected secretary general once more. Read it, and believe it. Labour MEPs have to toe the line at all costs, discarding their personal beliefs on issues and parroting the party mantra even if they don’t agree with it and think that it’s wrong or just plain rubbish. If they fail to do this, the Labour Party will punish them, fining them e15,000. Yes, you read that correctly: it will punish them for not doing the Chinese thing, hoping that at least two of them are defiant enough to give them the wherewithal to pay Jason’s salary.

The Labour Party’s statute has from the beginning provided for the punishment of MEPs who maintain their integrity and vote or speak according to their views, even if those views are not consonant with the official party line. But under Joseph Muscat’s stewardship of the party, the statute was amended some days ago to put up the fine to an eyebrow-raising e15,000. The concept itself – punishing MEPs who are not party parrots – is eyebrow-raising in itself, of course.

No doubt, Muscat’s army of elves will now be out in force to say that it was the Labour Party conference that voted unanimously for this amendment to the statute, and that it’s not his fault. Baby, he had nothing to do with it, they’re going to tell us. Oh, really? It was in his power to scrap the original clause from the statute book, and he didn’t. It was in his power to stop this amendment from being put before the delegates for their vote, and he didn’t. For all we know, he was the one who proposed it in the first place.

It looks like the Labour Party, far from becoming more liberal, is gearing itself up to make its new international secretary feel right at home. Alex Sceberras Trigona, despite his overbearing prominence in the hated governments of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, is really best remembered for wearing a naval cap with HMS Brazen emblazoned on it, showing off for the news photographers in the summer of 1986, when he was foreign minister, and for signing on Malta’s behalf a secret agreement with our friends the North Korean communists, this time behind the backs of the news photographers.

So there you have it. The Labour Party has found a way of ensuring that its MEPs always act in the party’s interest, even when they disagree and believe that the best interests of the country are not being served.

The Labour Party is totalitarian in its thinking, methods and application. It has a Vigilance and Discipline Board to process and punish party members who stray from the officially-designated paths. It has astronomical fines for MEPs who refuse to be Joseph Muscat’s hand-puppets. It has serious, really serious, problems handling the reality of freedom of speech, and displays the most astonishingly rabid anger and intolerance towards its most vociferous critics, myself among them. Now that they can no longer incite mobs to burn down some newspaper buildings and get the police to raid others, you can sense the barely controlled panic at the rise of the blogs, of the internet news sites, of the on-line comments boards, packed with people mocking the Labour Party and its leader, poking fun at Labour’s delegates and criticising Labour’s so-called policies. What to do? How to stop them? Libel suits? Character assassination on Super One and in L-orizzont? Unleashing secret weapon Manwel Cuschieri? Threats? Insults? Rousing the rabble to hatred? Doing the Chinese thing and shutting down the blogs?

Somebody hacked into mine on polling-day, when traffic stood at an unbelievable 120,000 visitors, and put it off-line for as long as it took to shift it to another server. I have no doubt as to the preferred political party of the person or persons who did that. If the message coming out of the Labour Party is “if it doesn’t agree with us, fine it and if it laughs at us, shut it down”, then it’s no surprise the party’s supporters share this way of thinking. I’ve noticed that what the Labour Party hates most – what, to paraphrase the Spice Girls, it really, really hates – is not being criticised but being mocked. And that, I suppose, is why I have ended up in the No. 1 position on Labour’s hit-list. I laugh at them in public, and they can’t take it.

Let me remind the Labour Party of something. Members of the European Parliament do not represent their political parties. They represent the people who voted for them and put them there – just as with our own little parliament down home. The seat belongs to the MP. In the same way, the Euro-parliamentary seat belongs to the MEP. Whether he is elected on a party ticket or not is irrelevant. The seat does not belong to the party. MEPs, like MPs, must therefore speak, act and vote in what they consider to the best interests of those who they represent: the people who voted for them, and not a political party.

The Labour Party thinks nothing of demanding that its MEPs compromise their integrity or pay out e15,000 instead, because integrity hasn’t been the most highly rated virtue in the Labour Party since the early 1950s. I don’t remember the Labour Party ever being big on integrity. Do you? The interesting thing is that Joseph Muscat, the party leader who allowed this hideous amendment to go before the delegates, and perhaps even encouraged it, is himself an MEP. He hasn’t resigned his seat yet. He’s waiting, like Chicken-Licken of my childhood story-books, for the sky to fall on his head. So while still an MEP, he has arranged for the severe punishment of MEPs who step out of line. Hmmmm.

More and more people are beginning to think that Joseph Muscat is little more than a political hand-puppet himself. The man who appointed Joe Azzopardi of Xarabank to a committee for the ethical review of Labour’s media – the political equivalent of wearing a fake Rolex watch with empty insides (and probably over the shirtsleeve) to impress the folks at a job interview – has at the same time provided for the severe punishment of Labour MEPs who dissent.

Labour can never, ever get it right. The situation is verging on desperate.

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