The government has made a step backwards by announcing that it will remove the secrecy clause in the Citizenship Act that was approved in Parliament last Tuesday.

But this is not enough.

That Joseph Muscat chose to backtrack a few days after adamantly refusing to accept changes to its proposals by the Opposition – which included the elimination of confidentiality – is a sign that the government is in panic mode after seeing the negative reaction that Malta is getting, both locally and most of all on the international stage. If the government could not anticipate that such a scheme would generate such an outcry, then it must be cut off from reality.

Malta’s name was splashed in the most negative way in all corners of the world after Parliament passed the law that will enable the sale of Maltese citizenship to anyone with a €650,000 cheque. With Malta forming part of the European Union and the Schengen zone, it was to be expected that the news would be picked up by the foreign media which, inevitably, went on the attack against the scheme.

A Maltese passport is a European document and the sale of Maltese citizenship is – to all intents and purposes –the sale of European citizenship, too. The decision taken by the government does not affect only our tiny nation but the peoples of 27 other countries with a combined population of 733 million. And so the opening of our doors to people from all over the world is effectively giving them the green light into all other EU nations. It is as if Malta is giving every interested party the key to Europe, and this at a time when security measures are being stepped up because of growing terrorism fears.

Joseph Muscat did not want us Maltese to have a European passport, but now, almost vindictively, he is ready to give it to everyone else, in order to make a quick buck. He who fought so vehemently against European membership a decade ago now wants to sell this European membership. Perhaps it does not mean much to him, and so it was easy for him to put a price-tag on it.

I just wonder how other European leaders will treat him next month when he goes to Brussels pleading for burden-sharing on immigration. He wants the rest of Europe to give Malta a helping hand when it comes to people coming in on boats, but then is ready to flood Europe with individuals whose intentions might not be the best, to put it mildly.

The sale of our identity is, on its own, already something of which the government should be ashamed, more particularly since such a scheme was not part of the Labour Party’s election programme. The PL had no mandate to make such a move, and yet it chose to bulldoze its progress through Parliament, hastily passing a law that found resistance from all quarters, not only from the Opposition benches.

That this sale is intended merely to make money in the short term, and not without any long-term binding conditions such as investment or residency, is even worse. First of all, it shows a lack of decent ideas on the part of the government for generating income and boosting the economy. Secondly, and more importantly, it devalues the importance of our nationality. Putting a price on something that is invaluable, such as a country’s nationality, annihilates that same identity.

Those who are likening this legislation to the registering of ships under the Maltese flag do not appreciate what it means to have an identity and forget what our forefathers went through in order to attain it. Those who defend the law, saying that in the last 10 years nearly 7,000 people have obtained Maltese citizenship through marriage, adoption or naturalisation are comparing apples to oranges in a desperate attempt to justify the government’s position. Those who argue that the Opposition has orchestrated an attack in the international media against the Maltese government are simply trying to find every blinkered excuse not to see things as they really are.

It is really pitiful that such ridiculous arguments are being made.

All the pressure of the past few days has pushed the government to make one concession – the removal of the secrecy clause, an announcement entrusted to Deputy PM Louis Grech. But, I repeat, it is not enough, and the Nationalist Party would do well to keep insisting that the government is wrong on this.

The best way out of this mess would be to repeal the citizenship scheme in its totality, something that the Nationalist Party has pledged it would do if elected to government, while also withdrawing any citizenship documents sold up until then. But, until that happens, and if the government remains sufficiently hard-headed to publish the legal notice that will effectively turn a piece of paper into law, the PN should use the last tool it has at its disposal to try to modify the legislation.

This last tool is a motion that the PN could present in Parliament after the legal notice is published and tabled in the House, and through which there could be amendments to the law passed last Tuesday. These amendments would be the same as those the PN put forward in the committee stage in Parliament yesterday week, and which were shot down by a government that was elected on the premise that it would listen.

Let’s hope that the government does listen at the second attempt.

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