During one of my last campaign events last Saturday, President Emeritus Guido de Marco, a long time friend, colleague and political mentor of mine stated that a good politician must equip himself or herself with three crucial attributes: insistence, persistence and consistency.
Not only do I fully endorse this statement, but I also believe it to be the central criterion we must adopt in electing our representatives in the European Parliament this Saturday.
Over the past five years, my colleague Simon Busuttil and myself have fought tooth and nail to put forward issues which were vital to our national interest. Together, we insisted on tabling topics and subjects that the Maltese hold close to heart.
Foremost among these concerns was the Working Time Directive and our position against the European Socialists’ attempt to eliminate the opt-out clause of EU Member States with respect to capping the working week to a maximum of forty eight hours. Within the European Parliament, we have insisted on not interfering with the workers’ right to choose how much they want to work every week.
I am proud to say that my final speech during the closing legislature focused on how we should focus on creating more job opportunities rather than interfere with workers’ overtime.
Similarly, over the past five years we insisted on getting a good deal for Maltese fishermen by drafting the Parliament’s report on the European Fisheries Fund, which will see the distribution of e3.849 billion over a seven-year period among EU member states.
We defended our business community by drafting the Parliament’s report on Business Directory Scams, as in the case of the European City Guide, which utilised misleading advertising to draw small enterprises into listing their names in a business directory which cost them up to e1,000 per year.
Returning to workers’ interests, Simon and myself spoke out for the former employees of VF and Bortex when they found themselves redundant back in June 2007. Almost 700 workers found themselves without a job after the two textile companies decided to move their production wings to other countries. In this case, it was through the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund that thousands of euro were passed onto the Employment and Training Corporation to provide for the profiling, retraining and support of workers in their bid to re-enter the workplace.
When I served as the European People’s Party’s negotiator on the European Globalisation Fund earlier on this year, I stressed on the need for a better deal for Maltese workers who might unfortunately find themselves in a similar situation in the future due to the current economic and financial crisis. Our insistence served to cut the red tape and bureaucracy which were characteristic of the system, and we lowered the threshold of workers that had to be laid off so that funding would become applicable from 1,000 to 500 workers.
Overall, insistence must be accompanied by the capacity to be persistent, to the point of stubbornness, in our demands. And if anyone was persistent on crucial issues such as illegal immigration, it was the Nationalist Party MEPs. For while five years ago Malta was not even mentioned when the topic of illegal immigration came up within European Parliament committees, we can safely say that today Malta is a pivoting factor when it comes to this sensitive topic.
While Labour MEPs played around with their voting habits in the European Parliament, your two Nationalist MEPs were directing Parliamentary delegations to Malta so as to exhibit the dire situation we were in and, at the close of the legislature it was Nationalist MEP Simon Busuttil who drafted the European Parliament’s report on the Common Immigration Policy. Malta today clearly leads and steers Europe’s position on illegal immigration.
And Labour’s dubious voting record brings me to the last important attribute which I believe we should reflect upon when we enter the polling booth this Saturday: consistency.
The Nationalist Party is not perfect and, like all other political groupings, fields candidates and representatives that are susceptible to making mistakes. But it is also the political party which can proudly claim to have always been consistent and, more importantly, correct when it came to the important decisions that had an effect on the future of this country, as in the case of EU membership and the adoption of the Euro.
So I appeal to you: this Saturday choose that political party which has been insistent, persistent and consistent in the European Parliament.
David Casa is a Nationalist MEP
[email protected]
www.davidcasa.eu