The most unedifying sight in this spectacle of corruption, other than the corruption itself, is the small battalion of individuals barracking from the back row that both parties are corrupt. Perhaps barracking is too strong a word for the sound they are doing, which is actually carping and whining. The individuals concerned, exchanging views – if you can say ‘exchanging’ about opinions that are identical – on Facebook timelines clearly think that they are amazingly cool and above it all, that political parties are beneath their contempt, and that they will have no truck with politicians only because they themselves are infinitely superior.
They don’t quite understand that far from coming across as super-cool and superior, they sound like they never quite grew up and are still setting the world to rights over a joint and a can of beer at some bottle party in a grotty flat circa 1978. And when they really get going, they sound like those two grouches in the theatre balcony in Sesame Street. The one thing they do not sound like is decent folk and people with backbone. In fact, they sound completely spineless, as though they are afraid to take a stand against bad people in case that stand comes back to bite them in the backside.
The trouble for me is that I know most of these people, or at least many of them. So it is difficult for me to divorce their views from their personalities or their level of intelligence, powers of analysis and how informed they are. I don’t like to be brutal about it, but when I hear or read somebody banging on about how “all politicians are corrupt” (except AD, it goes without saying, possibly because they have never been in a position to be corrupt) and how “both the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party are the same”, it is invariably somebody who I know for a fact is not quite bright.
They might have university degrees, they might even have high-powered jobs, but they lack the spark which makes for real intelligence: the ability to analyse information and garner insight; the ability to see in a flash what the essential problem is. People who lack that level of intelligence don’t have the ability to get to the core of the matter in an instant. They don’t even have the ability to get to the core of it after much thought. And it’s not only a problem for them, but a problem for others.
Is the current crisis about politics and political parties? That’s the ‘shell’ of the problem, to borrow a word from the current Panama debate. The essential crisis is about bad people, about people with no moral compass and no boundaries, who have wormed their way into positions of power simply to be able to make as much money for themselves and their mates and cronies, illicitly, as they can. That is what the issue is. And that is why talking about how the Nationalists are no better is ridiculous and shows that you are not bright at all and don’t know very much about people.
It is patently obvious to anybody who has gone past the age of 20 and is not actually intellectually subnormal that Simon Busuttil is not motivated to become prime minister so that he can take 10 per cent off deals struck by his government. It is patently obvious that he would never even think of setting up a secret company in Panama for illicit purposes, and that he would never organise things so that these companies are set up by his henchmen. It is patently obvious that if he were to discover that his chief minister and chief of staff had set up top-secret companies in Panama for reasons that can only be illicit, he would boot them both out on their ear. And it is patently obvious that he would never have, as his chief of staff, a man who runs a business with a multi-million turnover, shady operations in Libya, and, at the time of his appointment, secret companies in yet another tax haven, the British Virgin Islands. Those who equate Simon Busuttil’s morality to Joseph Muscat’s are, quite frankly, absurd. And that is the charitable description. The more uncharitable one is that they are nuts.
People might think me odd for saying this, but I have never really bothered about politics and policies, except for the sole matter of European Union membership. I divide people up in politics exactly the same way I do in the rest of my life and experiences, when I meet them and when I decide whether I want to have anything to do with them: good people and bad people. I’ve made some mistakes, of course, and have had to pay the price for them, but on the whole this approach has served me well. I would, in every area of life, much rather have to contend with a good and decent person who isn’t terribly competent than with one who is essentially bad (or worse, amoral) and who is terribly competent. At the best end of the scale would be a good and decent person who is terribly competent; at the worst end are bad and amoral individuals who are totally incompetent. And tragically, that is exactly what we have got now in government.
I didn’t argue against voting for Joseph Muscat because he is Labour. I did so because he is a bad person, or rather, an amoral one. Amoral people frighten me, because the boundaries of common decency which stop the rest of us from doing certain things don’t stop them. People have been asking, how on earth they set up companies in Panama when they are in those politically exposed positions, so close to the Prime Minister. And you have the answer right there: they are amoral. The boundaries of normality do not exist. The only boundary they acknowledge is the boundary of getting caught. They assess the risk of that, and then they proceed. They set up those companies in Panama, even though they are a chief minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, because they never in a million years imagined that the Fort Knox of Panamanian secrecy would be breached, and more so by people to whom the names ‘Konrad Mizzi’ and ‘Keith Schembri’ meant anything at all.
This is not about Nationalist versus Labour or Labour versus Nationalist. This is about the difference between good people and bad ones; about how important it is, when casting your vote, to assess not the person’s politics but his character. Joseph Muscat was immediately identifiable to me as what used to be known, among the elders of my clan, as a “bad character” and Lawrence Gonzi as a “decent chap”. Only the truly confused would choose the bad character over the decent chap and still hope for the best. The inevitable has happened, and here we are, just three years down the line, demonstrating against government corruption at the door of the Auberge de Castille.