Louis Grech told the Labour Party’s annual general meeting on Friday that the party survives because it is always conscious of the changing mood. Let’s leave aside the fact that this sounds really odd, coming as it does from the deputy leader of a political party that spent the years 1987 to 2013, bar 22 months, on the Opposition benches, and which had lost even the 1981 general election before that, but got more seats than the winning party due to a systemic quirk.

The Labour Party does not change to survive, but exists in a toxic bubble which it believes extends to the rest of society, all of Malta, and the world beyond it. Many exponents of Labour Party politics do not quite understand how weird and disconnected from reality their behaviour is when viewed through the eyes of normal people and the outside world. You have all these malicious people backbiting others and doing their best to undermine their critics and people they consider their enemies through actions that would be considered completely anti-democratic, unethical and beyond the pale anywhere more civilised, perhaps even illegal. You have the party and the government themselves engaging in extreme cronyism, brazenly guzzling at the trough, and insulting scorn for public opinion, with no respect for the electorate. The behaviour of many supporters and party apparatchiks is, over and above that, reprehensible.

The most dangerous aspect of all this is that they think they are normal and have no idea how they are perceived. The enemies they build up in their minds and in propaganda are, they end up believing, real witches and wizards, real enemies of the people, truly horrible individuals who must be scorned by everybody in Europe.

They are then puzzled to discover why they are not understood beyond Malta’s shores, why their reasoning is considered medieval and uneducated and their way of expressing themselves incomprehensible and primitive. Lots of them are upset because the journalists working for the international media contact me and quote me in articles about the Panama Papers and other subjects. Some of them, including one woman who featured in the Labour Party campaign and was put on the public payroll at a state council by her boyfriend the executive chairman, are writing to the editors of these non-Maltese media houses to say that they are negatively affecting their newspaper’s/radio station’s/news portal’s reputation by quoting (insert witch description of your choice). They sound nuts to the people at the receiving end, but they probably have no way of knowing why. They know nothing of normality outside the Toxic Bubble.

In this same bubble of ignorance, the Labour Party wishes to convey to its supporters the message that David Cameron and the Prime Minister of Iceland, David Gunnlaugson, have been put under pressure to resign because they had secret stashes of money but Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri did not. Well, they don’t actually mention Keith Schembri. They’ve allowed all the focus to stay on Mizzi so that Muscat gets to keep Schembri, who actually is the prime mover in all this and the most dangerous person of the three of them. It’s actually Cameron and Gunnlaugson who committed no crimes and had no intention of committing them. They were guilty of nothing more than failing to mention real or potential conflicts of interest to Parliament.

Cameron has been fighting against tax evasion and offshore tax avoidance, and so he stands accused of failing to tell Parliament that before becoming prime minister he held shares worth (just) GBP31,500 in an offshore fund called Blairmore Holdings, which had been set up by his father, and sold them five months before he took office. He never held them while in office. He had bought the shares in 1997, the sale was registered and recorded, and full tax was paid on the profit. He told ITV that he sold his shares in the fund precisely because he did not want anyone to accuse him of having “vested interests”. And yet he is still under heavy fire.

Iceland’s Sigmundur David Gunnlaugson’s wife walked out of a television interview when he was asked about an offshore company held by his wife, which owns millions of dollars’ worth of bonds in Icelandic banks. His interviewer asked why he sold his own interest in the company to his wife for just $1 some days before he would have been required to disclose it. He is not accused of tax evasion and nor is he accused of ill-gotten gains. The bank bonds – they are not ‘money’ – actually are his wife’s legitimate inheritance and were fully disclosed to the Icelandic authorities for tax purposes. Again, Gunnlaugson, like Cameron, is accused of ‘merely’ (by Maltese standards) an unethical failure to disclose to Parliament his vested interest, given Iceland’s bank crisis and the fact that he is one of those who was involved in negotiations for their survival.

Compare and contrast with the Prime Minister of Malta, his chief of staff, and his Health and Energy Minister. The chief of staff set up a secret company in the British Virgin Islands – in his personal name; he has another one for his Kasco business – in 2011 while he led the Opposition Labour Party’s energy committee and was engaged in campaigning for its election to government. Then after taking office, he set up another secret company in Panama held by a secret trust in New Zealand, and his boss’s top Cabinet minister did exactly the same. They both tried to open accounts in banks in Dubai and Panama. The bank in Panama turned them down as too big a risk. It is not yet conclusive that the bank in Dubai turned them down. The available documentation – emails published in the Panama Papers – is not conclusive in that regard. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, behaves as though all this is perfectly normal and the only thing which shocks him is the fact that they were discovered through the most massive and unprecedented leak of documentation in history.

Yes, the Labour Party lives in a toxic bubble of its own making. It might try to present a business-as-usual face to the Maltese public and make out as though there is absolutely nothing strange or wrong in a Cabinet minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff setting up companies in Panama, maintaining companies in the British Virgin Islands, setting up trusts in New Zealand and seeking to open bank accounts for all of that. But he knows as well as I do that this is not at all how it is perceived beyond these peculiar shores, where the Prime Minister of  Britain is asked to resign because of a few thousand worth of shares (not money) in a legal operation which he held and sold before he became prime minister. What people hunger for most right now is normality – except that we know what that is only by observing what happens in the more civilised parts of the Europe to which we belong only technically.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com