One day I will understand, perhaps, the Labour Party's version of liberal progress, or progressive liberalism. It seems to involve over-egging the pudding where gay people are concerned, especially if they are men (because misogyny raises its foul head even in this sphere), making a token gesture towards Muslims around election time as long as they are Maltese and have a vote, and pandering to racist and xenophobic sentiments where African people are concerned.
"It is not because they are African, but because they are illegal immigrants," is the justification used by many. But they are not illegal immigrants at all: they are allowed out of detention only once they have legal status and their papers to prove this, which means that once they are moving about in the economy they are by definition legal. In this way, they are no different to the thousands of Serbs and Russians and citizens of ex-Soviet states who are here in Malta on flimsy work permits. But those who object to Africans don't similarly object to Serbs. Maybe it's because they don't notice them?
The subject is in the news again because a Labour Party candidate has cluttered up Facebook with his calls to the rest of us not to donate money to the annual Christmas fundraiser L-Istrina. This is because, he says, the money will be used for African people who come to Malta illegally, and to support illegal immigration, and not to help Maltese people. That's not much of a lesson in Christian charity at Christmastide, but then I've not been under much illusion that many of these donations to charity are driven by anything like that. Rather, they are motivated by the feel-good factor: the need to feel good about ourselves and not so much the wish to help others. It's another form of shopping: shopping for positive feelings.
Robert Henry Bugeja is in the running to fill the seat recently vacated by Karmenu Vella, in the Maltese parliament. If that happens, I suppose it would be entirely fitting. Had the pronouncements he has been making on Facebook been about gay people (sorry, gay men) the Labour Party would have rushed to disown his views and to say that they are entirely his own and not the party's. But making offensive remarks about people because they're black and African (and really not because they are coming in on boats) is apparently all right.
The thing that really gets to me about people like this Robert Henry Bugeja, and there are so many of them, is that complete lack of empathy. They literally cannot connect with suffering. They have no concept of these being people who have endured what to us, in our comfortable sheltered lives, is truly unimaginable. Unimaginable, yes, but we can at least try by assembling the available information. We might have no concept of what it means to trek across a desert in convoy with people who are ready to kill us, or to hang about in Libya, where there is no rule of law, being pushed about and beaten until it is time to be herded into a small and dangerous boat by armed men who, again, are ready to kill us. But this is an island. We all have experience of the sea. We have a pretty good idea of what it is like out there on the Mediterranean, which everyone in Northern Europe thinks is so calm, like a pond, for days in the dark and the sun, the cold and the wind, rough seas and strong currents, on the point of drowning. Yet Bugeja thinks it very amusing to upload a photograph of real people, crammed into a boat that is almost sinking, and give it the caption: 'President's charity ride'.
At the time of going to press, the Labour Party had not yet spoken about the views of its politician, who may soon be one of its backbenchers. I think it should. The party bosses were unequivocal in that there is no room in their organisation for people who are homophobic (though I suspect that has always been largely a matter of vote-catching convenience rather than real belief). So are we to infer from this that there is plenty of room for those who preach hatred and marginalisation based on skin colour and place of origin?