To Europe on our knees? Yes

Watch, listen to, and read the Labour media today and you will inevitably come across a particular mantra. The Labour leader, some of his parliamentary colleagues and party officials, news editors, radio phone-in callers, journalists and editors will tell you that the Maltese government is prepared to go into Europe even if it has to do so "on its knees".

Originally, the story popped up as a news report on the Labour media. They attributed the words to the foreign minister, Joe Borg. Purportedly, he uttered them at a meeting with representatives of the agricultural sector. When I heard the news item the first time, I experienced a familiar confusion. It did not ring true, if for no other reason, because it is so completely out of political character for Joe Borg to say such a thing. At the same time, however, any news item, by its nature and context, gives an equally loud ring of legitimacy to whatever is covered.

What are the facts about this business of the government wanting Malta to get into Europe on its knees? The foreign minister immediately denied saying anything of the sort. The Labour media did not accept his denial and upped the stakes. They alleged that there was a tape recording of the meeting proving that he did. In no time, the minister challenged them to make the tape public.

Days and weeks passed and the Labour Party never produced the tape. Subsequently, I spoke to a reliable source who was at the meeting at which the minister spoke. The source confirmed that the minister never expressed such a thought or anything remotely akin to it. Malta`s foreign minister never said that the government is prepared to go into Europe on its knees. End of story.

What was Labour`s response to this unfolding of events? Did they retract the story and acknowledge that they had been misled? Did they apologise for the mistake, at least out of respect for their readers and supporters?

They did nothing of the sort. In fact, they did worse than nothing. A number of Labour politicians and all their media continued to repeat the original line as if nothing had transpired. Indeed, Alfred Sant himself continues to repeat it to this day, ignoring the facts staring him in the face.

The common public response to this state of affairs is a slow Mediterranean shrug and the line that this is Maltese politics. Most critically, the argument goes, in this respect, at least, politicians are all the same.

I beg to differ, and rather forcefully. Politicians from different parties should be expected to have different views on matters of policy, to criticise each other on performance and to play up their record. Indeed, that is what democracy is all about. Without this licence, there would not be much point in having different political parties vying for public approval.

But this licence does not extend to facts, to statements which can either be true or false, never both. Ten politicians can hold 10 different views on the economic and financial situation of the country, divorce and European Union membership. Yet they cannot hold more than one view on the established facts in any of these areas. Economic indicators, family breakdowns and EU directives are facts and are immune to opinion.

Minister Borg either said that Malta should go into Europe on its knees or he did not. There is no grey area, no Labour or Nationalist `view` on the matter. The truth is that he did not.

This is no small matter. Once public opinion fails to penalise a politician and his media for saying that something is a fact when it is not, democratic debate is not only dead, it becomes its antithesis. Escaping the confusion of fact with fiction is the essence of the European Enlightenment and its political reverberations over the last few centuries. It is the only Europe we should not mind crawling on our knees to.