It’s safe to say that the Labour Party’s news website, Maltastar, hasn’t yet got to grips with the fine art of the leading article. Its ‘leaders’ are invariably among the most inept, badly written and ill-thought-out pieces on the site – which is rather tragic, because the leading article is considered to be the proper voice of a news medium, and this particular news medium is the official voice of the Opposition party.

Maltastar’s leading article yesterday made the extraordinary claim that government minister Austin Gatt has begun to model himself on the Nazi concentration camp victim played by Roberto Benigni in the film Life Is Beautiful. Anything less likely than Gatt playing the vulnerable victim led off on a tumbrel is hard to imagine – Adrian Vassallo dating the star of Bambii Gets It On, perhaps? Yet what really astonishes is the facile manner in which the leader-writer draws this comparison, belittling the horrors of the death camps and the suffering of those processed through them.

He or she – the writer commits the ultimate error of using the first-person ‘me’ and ‘my’ in an unsigned leading article – is not alone in this equation of the Nazi death camp with victimhood. It is rife among the unimaginative, the small-minded and the not-particularly-bright, whose range of knowledge is not broad enough to allow for more skilful and apt descriptions and who, therefore, reach for the facile and the obvious. Nazis are, like Che Guevara T-shirts and bedroom posters – among the great clichés of political metaphor.

A daft woman of my acquaintance recently described me on Facebook – where else, given that she is 50 and thinks that a conversation on Facebook is like a conversation in the Marsa Club bar after tennis – as doing to Labour supporters what Hitler did to the Jews. I rang her immediately to enquire what she had done with the few brain-cells that were left at her disposal after she had fried the rest with LSD circa 1978 (and she was born with precious few to start with anyway). When, I asked, had she caught me rounding up Labour supporters to gas them, burn them, cook them in ovens, use them for slave labour or mass-murder them? If any attempt at burning human beings had been made, I reminded her, it was against me and my family, and police suspicion fell at once on – bingo – admirers of Adolf Hitler. Or was she too thick to have gathered that? But the thick, like the poor, will be with us always, so let’s leave her aside and concentrate on another candidate for the Nobel Prize for Science.

Maltastar’s leader-writer begins with the words “There is no cinema lover who hasn’t watched Roberto Benigni’s La Vita E’ Bella”. Well, I am one, for starters. At the time of its release, I wrote an article explaining why I would not watch the film, and drew a barrage of criticism. To this day, Benigni irritates the hell out of me. I didn’t watch his opus for the same reason that I object to the facile drawing of parallels between real or perceived victims in politics and those who were persecuted by the Nazis.

But this is not a discussion about Life Is Beautiful. That’s over. It’s the past. This is a discussion about silliness and stupidity and how they should have no place on the political parties’ official organs of mass communication. A website like Maltastar, because it is the party’s shop-window, should be run by the party’s best minds and most skilled thinkers and communicators. I hate to think that this might in fact be the case.

I suspect that Maltastar has been left in the hands of a few students and others of that sort of age. It is quite possible to be young, sharp, literate, knowledgeable and a fluent writer, but Labour appears not to have understood this, and seems to assume that poor thinking and writing skills are the default position among people in their lower 20s, perhaps because this is their sole experience of that age group. I imagine the Labour Party reasons that anything to do with the Internet is for the younger generation. That is not the case at all. The Internet is for everyone of any age – even for daft housewives who think that Facebook is a private space where they can gossip with their friends about people they bump into socially, like they do over coffee. The important thing for the Labour Party to remember is that immature thinking and inept reasoning (to say nothing of poor writing) will strike a chord only with others of similar inadequacies.

Spoilsports

The suspension of EU funds for students was just waiting to happen. It wasn’t a case of ‘if’ but of ‘when’, and it certainly has been a long time coming.

The administrative system is rife with hitches and difficulties for students, who must approach an application to travel overseas for a semester with the trepidation of a commando facing an assault course. It appears to be designed to put off and discourage as many students as possible, when it is supposed to do the opposite. Demand for places overseas is low enough as it is with the whole gamut of parental objections, anxiety about living alone, fear of the unknown among those who never travelled much, and lack of character-building and self-reliance skills in the typical Maltese upbringing. You’d think that once a student has got through all that, he or she is home and dry – but no. There’s still the major obstacle course of the administrative system to get through, the guiding principle of which appears to be ‘let’s trip them up and put them off’.

Several of the young people who went through the system told me that it seems to be designed to frustrate their plans for a term or a semester at a university elsewhere. Some of them got the impression that the administrators they had to contend with were simmering with resentment of the ‘I had no opportunities so I am going to spoil yours’ variety. “They seemed to get a perverse pleasure out of finding reasons to be as unhelpful as possible,” one told me. “I got the impression that she (one administrator who was mentioned by name) delayed the process on purpose. She even claimed to have lost my transcript three times.”

In other cases of which I was told, students received the funds which were supposed to help them survive abroad after they had returned to Malta, or when they were due to return shortly. Meanwhile, they got by on interim loans from the Bank of Mum and Dad – and if there is no Bank of Mum and Dad, as there often is not, students are left with no choice but to stay in Malta, because funds which come through in November when they are due to leave Malta in September are not of much use.

How difficult is it to understand that funds which are there to help students to study abroad should be made available to them at least a month before they leave, and not a month before they are due to return home?

I didn’t think that the accusations by students of deliberate sabotage because of passive aggression are farfetched at all. After all, I’ve been around longer in Malta than people who are half my age and know that bitterness, simmering anger, envy and resentment – summed up in the brilliant Maltese words ‘hdura’ and ‘lanzit’ – are characteristic of this society, which is precisely why we have specific words to describe the sentiments.

I suppose it is too much to expect of the authorities that they place in those positions public servants who actually like young people and who share their enthusiasm for the opportunities that they themselves never had. It’s not the fault of today’s students that people who are older than they are did not have the same choices. So why are people who are older than they are taking it out on them? They should just be happy for them and help them make the most of it – but that would be going against the grain.

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