It becomes ever more obvious that the Labour Party in Malta is transforming itself into the Champagne Socialist Party. This week, Joseph Muscat’s statement that Maltese workers should aspire to be managers and doctors, lording it over an underclass of foreign workers, is a perfect example of the crony capitalist Dubai into which this country is being fast transformed. Leaving all other considerations other than wealth and prestige out of the equation, the success of Malta and Gozo has been measured by nothing other than money in recent years. Using that metric, all considerations for quality of life, community and social justice are left by the wayside.

How is it that Malta’s most capitalist Prime Minister in history justifies leading our Labour Party? He says that the money made from the private sector is used to boost our public services, including healthcare. While that is true, it is hardly a Labour invention. That is standard centre-left political discourse, and no different to what the other political parties in Malta, including Partit Demokratiku, offer as a baseline.

There is nothing wrong with a balance. The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, there is no balance at all. Profit is prioritised consistently over the wellbeing of society. Money is God, and Money is King. Our natural environment is the most obvious victim of this approach, because short-term profit can be made by opening the floodgates to rampant over-development.

However, the fallacy that Malta can have an eternally growing economy, especially dependent on migration to Malta, has led us to having a worsening infrastructure situation, with endless traffic, congestion, dirty air and worsening public health. It is not only the physical health of the people who live here that is affected, but their mental health as well. What is it like to retire into a construction site, where one can hardly get onto the bus in some places? What is it like watching a familiar and beloved landscape utterly destroyed to enrich a select few? I suppose none of these things matter to Muscat’s New Rich, who can build villas in ODZ land to escape to, and travel whenever they want to escape the noise and pollution, sometimes at the taxpayer’s expense.

One must also consider that the current government depends on patronage to forcefully redistribute wealth. It justifies itself as leftist but hands out jobs and favours, in a system of clientelism and patronage. However, this violation of meritocratic principles is not only damaging because it undermines those workers who seek to get ahead under their own steam, but it means that politicians have total unchecked power, which they often use to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public.

By violating the rules of the state to maintain power and reward those who are loyal to them, the Labour Party is not acting as a socialist party, but as a crony capitalist party, whose chairmen and members are above the law. This is nothing more than begging-bowl politics, where workers must remain unquestioningly loyal, asking for favours and for little mercies, when in reality, politicians should be of service to the people. The government is therefore neither leftist nor capitalist. It is a tyranny of the majority, twisting all systems within its reach to protect its own interests. Corruption costs taxpayers in Malta €725 million every year. Imagine that money at the service of the general public.

This week, the façade crumbled further, as we discovered that the Labour Party is the new party for managers and doctors, as well as businessmen. There seems to be little place left for the pensioner who wants peace and quiet or the farmer who is finding his livelihood disappearing, and there is little regard for the person whose cost of living means that he cannot afford to buy a property or even rent a flat.

Many of our increasing problems arise from the fact that success is only being measured by statistics and economic theory, and not by wellbeing and quality of life. The Maltese worker is no longer sure that his children will enjoy the same quality of life as he did in his youth, and there is not much of what was left to him by his parents and grandparents that he can now hand over to future generations.

Then we must also ask, how much can a party claiming to represent the interests of the worker discriminate between its workers according to their language and culture? The old leftist battle-cry: “Workers of the world, unite!” falls on deaf ears when it comes to this government’s champagne socialism. In many ways, the world has moved past the old rhetoric of left vs right, and I am no advocate of ideological discourse. I prefer science. Yet, there is nothing scientific in politics of endless growth, mixed with fervent nationalism, pitching Malta against the world.

There is a dire need today for the Maltese government and civil service to return to the values and principles that guided them when Sir Pawlu Boffa was Prime Minister. Malta once had the Partit tal-Ħaddiema, which served in two coalition governments with Sir Pawlu Boffa as its leader. It was a party that understood how corruption and crony capitalism stood fundamentally against the interests of the Maltese worker. Just like the Malta Workers’ Party before it, Partit Demokratiku is determined to represent the interests of the Maltese worker, rather than the interests of a compromised elite. Malta’s trickledown economics today is nothing more than a drop of liquor on the side of an overly full glass – champagne socialism at its worst.