The latest survey results tell us that 40 per cent of electors are not interested in who gets a seat in the European Parliament. I must say that until a few weeks ago I was among them, but as the day draws closer I’m changing my mind.
I know that it’s been a given for the last few months that Labour is going to get three of the five seats and another one on top of those if Malta gets its sixth. This is going to be an even worse showing for the Nationalist Party than it was in 2004, because in that election many thousands of people who had voted for the Nationalist Party in the previous year’s general election voted for Arnold Cassola of AD and they’re not going to do the same this time, whatever he might think. Instead, they’re staying home and leaving the decision to the rest of us.
It’s a decision I don’t mind making at all. Despite knowing the outcome well ahead of time, I’m going to savour every minute of yet another opportunity to vote against those who fought like hell to prevent Malta from entering the European Union. When I think how hard they worked to achieve that reprehensible end, and what the consequences would have been for the country, and especially for my children’s generation and for generations to come, I break out in a cold sweat. I think I must be suffering still from the post-traumatic stress brought on by those few hours of waiting while the referendum votes were counted.
So yes, I am going to enjoy voting not so much for the Nationalist candidates as against every single one of the Labour names, because what they did then was unforgiveable. They treated our future like a joke, like a game that could be turned around and the results of which didn’t really matter. They took it all so lightly that they were among the first to scramble aboard the EU gravy-train, some of them not even having to switch principles to do so because they didn’t have any to start with. It was all the same to them and it still is.
The insults to our intelligence keep coming thick and fast. There goes Marlene Mizzi in The Times, telling us with a hostile tone that we have no right to ask her how she voted, but for our information and if we’d like to know, so there, she voted Yes in the referendum and then Yes to rabidly anti-EU Sant in the general election a few weeks later. And don’t you tell her that was a potty thing to do because she’ll jump right down your throat.
There goes John Attard Montalto with his I’m-all-right-Jack attitude, taking cruises and popping in to the European Parliament occasionally to press the wrong button or the right flesh. There goes Glenn Bedingfield, hot out of Super One where he spent year after year relaying incessant messages about the dangers of EU membership. Now he’s been magic-carpeted into the European Parliament and doesn’t seem to have a clue what to do or how he got there, though he’s so damned glad that his former boss’s Partnership plans didn’t work out that he’s gagging for another stint in Brussels and is nagging at us like hell to vote for him. If I could vote with some cartons of rotten eggs, I would do so.
And what to say of Joseph Muscat, who’s not standing for the EP election because now he’s got what he wanted and has one thing left to go – prime minister and running the country? One minute he was researching and presenting a Super One show called Made in Brussels, telling us all about the dangers of invasion by Sicilian hairdressers and hawkers from Catania, and the next he was blinking in disbelief in the European Parliament. Plan A (Partnership) goes down the drain and quick, quick, it’s on to Plan B (EU Membership: Let’s Grab What We Can for Ourselves).
The great, perverse and twisted irony is that Muscat owes everything he is (perhaps that should be everything he isn’t) today to the magnificent and determined efforts of all those who toiled like dray-horses to get Malta into the European Union. How so, you might ask? European Union membership allowed him to raise his profile by becoming a member of the European Parliament, and this in turn gave him something with which to impress the Labour Party delegates when it came to choosing their new leader. But even the leadership vacuum arose out of EU membership: had Sant been successful, he would not have had to resign. With Sant’s Partnership – not that there could have been such a thing – Joseph Muscat would have been just another party functionary presenting Super One shows by night and trying to make a living in some back office by day.
So there it is. Joseph Muscat worked like the devil to ruin our future, while those he was fighting against were beavering away creating the conditions that would allow him to become prime minister within the space of a decade. And all while watching him on television, heckling and insulting prime minister Fenech Adami and telling him – as Mary Spiteri so memorably did, may we forgive her for doing so – that he and his government would sink like the Titanic. Oh, famous last words.
A stew of mixed messages about Europe is coming out of the Labour Party and its many spokespersons now. Muscat owes his current position to EU membership, and so he is opportunistically grateful – though it doesn’t mean that he has grasped the full significance of how close he and his party bosses came to pushing Malta over the brink into disaster and catastrophe. Yet he has made George ‘Allahares nidhlu fl-Ewropa’ Vella spokesman for EU Affairs, and he didn’t do it to be humorous. He did it because he just doesn’t understand. Vella continues to bristle with anger against the reality of EU membership. He just can’t come to terms with it, let alone embrace it. And then there are the Labour Party’s 140,000+ electors, who were brainwashed for years about the evils of the European Union, and who cannot now be made to change their minds, because that process would involve the party leaders saying the magic but extremely embarrassing words: “We were wrong. What we told you was hogwash, but even we believed it at the time, if that’s any consolation."
And then there’s Edward Scicluna, a nice man and pleasant to speak to and work with, but for heaven’s sake. Where was he in 2003? Voting No in the referendum? Voting for Sant in the general election that followed? Or trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds and falling flat on his face like Mrs Mizzi?
I find all these people just unbelievable: the sheer nerve, the utter gall, are too much. Marlene Mizzi and Edward Scicluna, fully aware that electors in Swieqi, St Julian’s and Sliema might identify with them and choose to overlook the reality of their party, are doing a lot of targeting among the disillusioned, trying to get the votes that in the previous EP election went to AD. Because they are not consistent themselves – well, Mrs Mizzi certainly is not, and by her own admission – they can’t understand that others might actually like consistency.
Had they done a bit of research, and Professor Scicluna, who does this sort of thing for Super One at every election must have done it for himself, they would have understood that practically all of those who voted for an AD candidate in the last EP election had voted Yes in the referendum the previous year, and then for the Nationalist Party or AD in the general election that followed. The common factor? They were all pro-EU membership votes for pro-EU membership politicians by pro-EU membership electors.
AD was part of the Yes movement, and not part of No2EU like Sharon I-hate-the-EU-but-I’ll-make-my-money-there Ellul Bonici, and certainly not part of CNI or Partnership or Made in Brussels or Super ‘Allahares nidhlu fl-Ewropa’ One.
By campaigning around the ‘smart’ crowd, what these two are saying is: “We know you think of us as People Like You, unlike Joseph Cuschieri, Glenn Bedingfield and the rest of them. So why don’t you vote for us?”
Well, here’s their answer: because just six short years ago you tried to keep this country out of Europe. You tried to deny me an EU passport. You didn’t care if everyone else was locked within this microscopic territory because you were all right, Jack, and you didn’t give a damn about the rest, still less about the generations to come. And now you come asking me to stick you in the European Parliament so that you can have a good time and give one last gasp to your faltering career, a salary that you don’t deserve, and a pension on top of that? Here’s my answer: Get lost.
I’d rather use my vote to scrape out the sludge at the bottom of the dishwasher than use it to vote for somebody who said No in the referendum and/or voted for Sant in 2003, when so much hung in the balance. But that won’t give you the message I want to give you for your unforgiveable behaviour and your abysmal sense of judgement, so instead I’m going out to vote for every last one of the Nationalist candidates – yes, even for Vince Farrugia, though he’s getting a 10.
Then, when Labour gets its three seats and maybe even its fourth, my conscience will be at peace that I played no part in rewarding those who tried so hard to ruin my sons’ futures. I can rest easy in the knowledge that I didn’t let pique get in the way of commonsense, refusing to vote so as to make some stupid point about water and electricity bills or a promotion, and so indirectly electing the specimens who tried to stab us all in the back with their fictitious Partnership. I want to have no hand in giving that bunch of No2EU campaigners a leg up into the European Parliament. There are enough people who think with the seat of their pants who are going to do that.
The folks in government may have sent you a couple of bills you don’t like, but they were also the ones who went through hell to get you that EU passport you’re tossing around. You have to be really nuts to consider spiting them by rewarding the ones who did their best to keep you locked on this non-EU rock with no prospects to speak of. You’ve really got to have no pride at all to do something like that. And I’m damned if I’m going to be one of them.
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com