A local councillor in Pieta has resigned from the Labour Party and will instead continue to serve as an independent councillor, citing his disillusionment with the direction that the government is taking the country into as the reason for his decision.

Ryan Douglas Tanti was elected to the Pieta local council on the Labour Party’s ticket last year on the last count, having picked up 99 first count votes.  He was one of Labour’s four councillors in a council made up of seven members – meaning that the PL has now lost its seat majority in the council.

Posting on Facebook to explain his reasoning, Tanti cited four issues which had pushed him into making this decision.

The first, he said, was the Labour Party’s stance on abortion. “When the Prime Minister said that he doesn’t want women charged in court because they went to a doctor after having an abortion, I felt that I couldn’t not continue to militate within this party,” he said.

“We couldn’t pass through the door, so we passed through the window,” he added.

He continued that had it been for the Labour Party, he would still be unemployed.  He said that he experience a huge level of stress because of an overload of work at his previous job within the procurement department of the Justice Ministry.

He said that he was going to receive a warning from the assistant director because he wanted him to carry out work without the necessary approvals, and added that his pleas for people to assist him in his work had fallen on deaf ears.

Tanti said that instead of receiving help, he was sidelined because he took sick leave due to symptoms of anxiety and depression – something he took personally, calling his superior a “clown” which ended up in him being removed from his place of work.

He brought the issue up to MPs and secretariats but remained with nothing.  “The PL did not care whatsoever about my work,” he said, adding that he has documentary evidence of this.

Thirdly, he said that members of the Labour Party had tried to “censor” what he wrote on his personal Facebook page. “I was asked to remove a post that I’d have just uploaded several time.  I don’t agree with this because I’m always in favour of free speech,” Tanti wrote.

He also cited the direction that the country is going in.

“I am not seeing that the direction that this government is taking us is the right road.  Youths like me have to spend their lives literally slaving away to try and own two rooms which they can call a home,” he said.

“The courts are in a shocking state, I don’t need to be the one to say it.  Deaths, fights, everyone being angry… we’re done for,” Tanti wrote.

He said that he feels that resigning from the Labour Party is the best step he can take, and hopes that with what he is doing he could open some eyes to seeing that “politics is not like football, where you side with a football team through good and bad.”

“A political party has to be there for the interest of the Maltese people, and not for its own interest and for that of its friends,” he said.