Laptop. One word in massive font splashed on Labour’s billboards in key areas frequented by Malta’s youth. Labour dangles the carrot.  A laptop, Labour calculated, must be the price of Malta’s young people. 

No more meritocracy or transparency.  Now it’s just ‘laptop’. Labour stopped pretending.  It’s now targeting the basest of human instincts - egoism and self-centredness. Gone are the days of what you know not who you know.  In its cynicism Labour doesn’t appeal to youth’s noble values or their aspirational ideals. It’s now just what you can get out of it. Ask not what you can do for your country but what’s in it for you.  It’s a race to the bottom.

Labour holds Malta’s youth in frightfully low esteem. It believes that egocentricity drives Malta’s young people.  It cannot fathom the notion that idealism and a deep sense of justice guides their choices.  Labour’s degraded perception of Malta’s younger generations drives their election strategy - buy the young with petty gifts - a laptop, €1000, free WiFi, a Rosianne Cutajar mug.  Or a VR headset to perpetuate Labour’s virtual reality.

Labour doesn’t promise a country our youth can be proud of.  It doesn’t promise a nation that pursues justice. It doesn’t promise a state that always makes the right decisions even on the international stage. It doesn’t promise a country that values human life, whether Eritrean, Somali or Ukrainian. Instead its finance minister cynically counts the war’s financial cost for Malta, €200 million, even as Ukrainian children perish under a bombed out maternity hospital. As lives are brutally extinguished in unprovoked Russian hostilities, Labour insists on selling golden passports.

As desperate Ukrainians flee indiscriminate fire power, Labour charges them €100 euro daily for quarantine accommodation. As over 2.5 million Ukrainians flee the burning hell their cities have become, Labour offers cancer treatment to five of them. As protesters demonstrate their outrage against Russia’s savageness, Malta’s police clear the symbols of protest, kicking candles and dismantling banners. As all Europe is aghast at the sheer barbarity, Labour’s MEPs vote to continue to sell passports. As the world seizes assets of Putin’s oligarchs, Malta provides safe haven for their super yachts.

That’s hardly surprising. Labour doesn’t even respect its own citizens’ lives. As Luxembourg names one of its streets for a fearless Maltese martyr, Daphne Caruana Galizia, our prime minister defies the recommendations of a public inquiry he threatened to shut down early. As halls in foreign parliaments are named in her honour, the grovelling speaker Anglu Farrugia refuses to consider any mention of her name. Having put her face on their billboards, they repeat their intimidatory threats to another journalist. Jason Micallef, denounced by countless MEPs and European writers for offensively mocking the journalist’s last words, still runs Labour’s ONE media organisation.

When an innocent citizen lost her life through rapacious uncontrolled development next door, for months Robert Abela concealed the report into the collapse of her property. His long forgotten promises of action remained empty promises. Malta’s citizens are dispensable in Labour’s mad rush to protect its generous donors.

As one slave worker after another fall to their deaths on construction sites, Labour defends the developers who fund the party’s lavish campaign, the millions Labour is spending on its blanket advertising?

Another food delivery slave labourer is killed on our roads as he dashed around to make ends meet. In May 2021, Recruitgiant, a Maltese agency, was accused of charging foreign workers a €3,500 fee to work in Malta as couriers.  Reports of agencies retaining 50% of workers’ wages for securing jobs are rife. Labour doesn’t promise a crackdown on the abuse. 

And what’s happened to Bin Han, the Leisure clothing managing director accused in 2014 of human trafficking for labour exploitation? Bin Han, photographed with Konrad and Sai Mizzi, got visas issued by the Labour government for 90 North Korean workers for his Chinese state-owned company. His workers were kept in squalid inhuman conditions at Hal Far barracks, their passports confiscated and paid paltry salaries. Labour doesn’t promise a country where workers’ dignity is protected and where abusers are prosecuted.

Quite the contrary.  Robert Abela invited businesses being pursued by the institutions for non-conformity and infringements to “come directly to me if you feel terrorized by the institutions”. Instead of empowering those institutions to fulfil their duty of protecting law-abiding citizens, Abela defends those breaking the rules. “To those businesses who are not in conformity with their obligations, I will be your shield” Abela declared.

This is what Labour promises Malta’s youth - a warped country where criminals and rule breakers receive personal protection by the prime minister, where shady characters who pledge allegiance to the ruling party are awarded exorbitantly expensive direct orders without competition, where loyal sycophants are given phantom state jobs, where pollster Vince Marmara is awarded millions of euro for opaque ‘consultancy’, where Saviour Balzan is secretly awarded millions of euro to toe the party line, where a canvasser’s daughter is promised 60,000 euro before she’s even graduated.

Malta’s youth don’t want a laptop. They want honesty, integrity, fairness and equal opportunity.  They yearn for transparency.  They hope for a country where politicians are accountable. They want their intelligence respected and not treated as votes to be bought. They dream of being proud of their nation not embarassed and shamed.

The sad thing is that despite Labour’s depraved vote-buying, 31.4% of youths will still vote Labour. The bright side is that almost 70% won’t. The dazzling ray of hope is that Malta’s youth condemn the despicable consorting of its prime minister with alleged criminals, the ruthless drive to retain power at all costs, the hostile harassment of journalists, the obscene rapaciousness and brazen abuse of public finances. 

In their defiant stand against Labour’s contempt , Malta’s youths send one clear message to Labour - you won’s fool us, you won’t buy us with a laptop.

Malta’s youth won’t let Labour darken its bright future.