This last week has been rife with political overtones with the Nationalist Party’s traditional Independence celebrations running in tandem with the Labour Party’s first-ever Congress, but in reality nothing much that was new was said by either party.
We will not go into Labour stealing the PN’s September thunder, the cross party attacks, or the PN’s insistence on staying the full legislative term. Instead, what bears underscoring was possibly the one interesting statement to emerge in this last week: Labour leader Joseph Muscat declaring he would be against raising the minimum wage.
Dr Muscat has in this instance not played to the gallery or sought political mileage from a populist sentiment that would be difficult, if not downright dangerous, to implement. And he is quite right, tampering with the minimum wage, especially when the country is by no means out of the woods of the economic crisis, would distort the labour market and wreak havoc on the country’s all-important competitiveness, particularly in the more labour-intensive industries in which many minimum wage earners are employed. The very real risks of such a course of action are that a lot of people could end up without a job and the economy could be plunged into a serious recession.
Such a measure would beyond doubt be a shortsighted approach to tackling the rising cost of living, which is impacting those working for a minimum wage in a particularly hard way. There is no doubt that minimum wage earners are finding it particularly hard to cope, as evidenced by a recent report on the subject by Caritas, but any sudden increase in the minimum wage could very well send shockwaves through the economy that it may not be able to withstand.
Ways need to found to make work pay better by setting the right economic conditions in place and not through simply imposing a raise in minimum wage, while at the same time the cost of living increases that are crippling segments of our society need to be addressed, and addressed properly.
Closing Labour’s Congress last night, Dr Muscat remarked that it would be better, for the benefit of workers and their children, to ensure sustainable economic growth before turning to the minimum wage. In the meantime, he is promising to reduce electricity bills and has pledged to work to improve the country’s overall standard of living – neither of which are mean feats by any stretch of the imagination.
Dr Muscat advocates first building a strong economic foundation − an overall rational, realistic and non-populist standpoint that deserves to be commended.
It is only minimum thinking that would lead anyone to believe that raising the minimum wage is the right thing for the country at this point in time. Minimum wage workers certainly need to be helped, but not helped in a way that only causes still more hardship.
New hope for Lockerbie truth
The Lockerbie atrocity has and perhaps always will hold a special place in the Maltese collective conscience, with the country, perhaps wrongly, identified as the place where the bomb began is fateful journey. But irrespective of which side of the Lockerbie divides one stands, it is beyond argument that the case that convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the atrocity has more than few gaping holes in it. And with a recent furtive request by Scottish prosecutors for the Maltese courts to gather more evidence in the case, the chances of those holes being filled once and for all have seen a new light of day.
This fresh push for evidence raises hopes that justice and the answers to the many pending questions could at long last be delivered to the Lockerbie attack’s victims, al-Megrahi’s family and to Malta as well, which many believe had been erroneously labelled as the bomb’s point of departure.
A Maltese court this week heard evidence from several witnesses behind closed doors with even the courtroom’s peepholes blocked from prying eyes. Both the Maltese and Scottish judicial authorities have been reticent about revealing details of the new line of inquiry. All the Scottish authorities would say, according to press reports, was that they were working in conjunction with American law enforcement on yet to be disclosed lines of inquiry and that “This is a live investigation to bring to justice the others involved in this act of state-sponsored terrorism”.
Authorities in the post-Gaddafi Libya have said that they have in their possession previously top secret documents related to the case, while the capture last month and ensuing interrogation of Gaddafi’s intelligence chief Adbullah al-Senussi could, it is hoped, also shed further light on what many still believe to be an unsolved mystery.
Malta’s name has been much maligned over the years for its connection to the case in which Megrahi was convicted of placing the bomb on a plane leaving Malta International Airport, where its fateful journey to the skies over Lockerbie was said to have begun.
With his death last May, al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, the victims’ families and the world runs the risk of the truth behind the Lockerbie bombing going to the grave with him, but this new inquiry could finally clear Malta’s, and al-Megrahi’s, name.
The man died protesting his innocence, despite having dropped a planned appeal against his conviction so as to clear the way for his release and return to Libya under Scottish law, which grants compassionate release for the terminally ill.
Should the whole truth die with al-Megrahi, Malta would suffer a gross injustice – its good name has been tarnished over these last 23 years as the point of departure of the lethal luggage that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland on 21 December 1988, killing 270 people.
There are so many questions about the case that are still lingering or, rather, festering, that one questions whether the truth behind the Lockerbie bombing will ever be known, new lines of inquiry or not. Real justice, however, will never be served until those questions are answered once and for all and this new line of inquiry, however vague it may be at the moment, offers a new ray of hope.