On Tuesday, soldiers brought ashore 116 people who had been drifting in a 50-foot boat after running out of fuel. Nine of them were described by eyewitnesses as shaking uncontrollably and barely conscious. The rest had trouble standing. One woman in her 20s had died, and her corpse lay among them. There were three babies on board

The soldiers said the boat-people might have been at sea, fully exposed, for as long as a week. They had been reduced to drinking seawater. Some of them appeared to be, said those eyewitnesses, from south-east Asia. They are likely to be some of the expatriate workers who fell through the evacuation net and were left trapped in Libya. At least 400,000 such expatriate workers have crossed the land borders from Libya into Egypt and Tunisia. Others on the boat, the army said, were from Chad and Somalia.

The boat was seen first by Italian fishermen last Monday at night. It was 45 miles from Malta and 47 miles from Lampedusa. The traumatised people on board burned their clothing to be seen in the darkness. Then the unseemly bickering began again. The Italian authorities contacted Malta, saying they would not be sending out a rescue team because the boat was two miles closer to Malta. The Maltese army responded with a request for help, saying that cooperation increased the chances of saving more lives, but ended up going it alone.

Back home on the ranch, there was more of that unseemly bickering, this time between the government and the Opposition. In complete contrast to the way they closed ranks over Libya, for reasons that are obscure and almost certainly have more to do with myriad vested interests than any higher purpose like siding with life, they are now busy carving each other up on the matter of whether or not to rescue dying people drifting at sea.

The leader of the Opposition thinks we should not. The prime minister thinks we should. All manner of insults have been traded and all sorts of accusations levelled. But what remains, when this is distilled, is that Joseph Muscat’s brand of liberalism looks more like the politics of the Italian far right. This is one matter on which cooperation between the parties would be justified and would never be construed as suspect collusion, but they are having none of it.

The failure to cooperate is entirely the Opposition’s, because the government’s stance is the correct one. You cannot expect – unless you share Joseph Muscat’s thoughts – the government to cooperate with the Opposition in letting people drown, out of pique with Italy. The thing is that many thousands of electors share those thoughts of Muscat’s and that is why he is speaking the way he does. Having given up on lassoing liberals into his corral, after all that initial glory-talk of gay rights and divorce and making Malta truly European, which came to nothing (because if you squeeze Labour, a rightwing bigot squawks) he has gone back to basics: Rounding up the rednecks.

The prime minister has been consistent in speaking clearly about our duties and obligations towards boat-people as human beings, which are quite distinct from our obligations at law. Fighting our battles with Italy and with the European Commission, for more cooperation and support, is one thing. Letting people drown while we squabble with Italy over a mile here and there is another. Even when Malta is right in saying that the responsibility is Italy’s, this does not mean that if Italy refuses to go to the rescue, then the Maltese army can stay in bed and comfort itself with the knowledge that it has adhered to the letter of the law and that the failure was Italy’s, while a boat goes down with 150 people on it. Those lives are on the conscience of those who can do something to save them, regardless of what the law says.

The prime minister was weak, ineffectual and extremely disappointing in the way he cooperated with Mintoff’s political descendants to hide behind neutrality as an excuse for staying out of the Libyan crisis. He was wet, he prevaricated, and he lost a lot of respect. It is good to see that where the boat-people are concerned, his behaviour is nothing like that. The manner in which he says repeatedly that he is proud Malta saved those lives has a touch of defiance about it. That is exactly what leading by example is all about. It is certainly a lesson many Maltese need to be taught.

Of course, much of the impetus may come from the desire to make Joseph Muscat look even worse than he does already, but the prime minister sounds as if he genuinely believes it. And I believe that he does: I remember a particularly impassioned speech he made to parliament on this subject, around 18 months ago, when Muscat was on another of his let-them-drown bandwagons.

Perhaps Labour hopefuls have learned by now that it’s going to take a lot more than a new emblem to change the party’s fundamentally redneck take on life.