A new test for Labour

After whole decades of trying to eradicate the Labour Party from the Maltese political scene, The Times, in its editorial (May 26), now purports to advise the MLP as to what it should do to give it a better chance of winning the 2008 general election. So The Times urges the Labour parliamentary group to pass its first test by voting in favor of the EU ratification treaty when it comes before the House of Representatives. How very considerate! How generous of those who run The Times to show this belated love for Labour.

True, the majority of the people voted to join Europe in the last general election... However, this does not mean that more than 47 per cent of the Maltese people, who voted against full EU membership, should blindly follow what the majority decided. Should the Labour parliamentary group ignore the fact that 134,000 Maltese voted for Labour's alternative? Definitely not.

What is The Times suggesting, that from now on the Labour parliamentary group should vote for all the laws the Nationalist government decides to move in parliament just because it enjoys a majority of votes?

Indeed, the EU ratification treaty is the new test for the Labour parliamentary group. A test that gives the Labour MPs the opportunity to point out to the prime minister that before rushing to Athens to sign the treaty he should have first consulted the opposition. Nowhere in the EU applicant countries was the vote against full membership as pronounced and as big as it was in Malta. This, in my view, should have prompted the prime minister to inform Brussels that because Malta was so divided on this issue he needs more time to consult the opposition before signing the accession treaty. Such a gesture would have raised the status of the prime minister to that of a national leader and not a leader of a political party. How could one expect consensus when the opposition is brushed aside in this manner?

The test of the Labour parliamentary group lies in its allegiance to the Maltese Constitution which protects Malta's neutrality and non-alignment.

The responsibility of the Labour parliamentary group and the new MLP leadership is not to acquiesce to anything the majority decided in the last general election but to convince those who voted against it that its policies are better than those of the Nationalist Party. They could indeed start by being more militant against the presence of warships in our ports, a fact that is flagrantly flaunting the entrenched clauses of our Constitution.

The Labour parliamentary group has many tasks ahead. One of these is not to cooperate with a prime minister that systematically ignores court decisions to correct the injustices suffered by Labour sympathisers. Unless the government comes clean on the presence of warships in our ports, unless it shows its laudable call for national unity is supported by facts, the Labour parliamentary group has no business in cooperating with the government.

In my view, the prime minister missed a unique opportunity to support his call for national unity by failing to publicly take to task the secretary general of the Nationalist Party when, at his party's general congress, he vowed to get rid of the Labour "webs" within the civil service.

It is a mistaken notion that when Labour is in power all the civil servants and, indeed, all those who are Nationalists do their utmost to sabotage the government of the day and that Labour supporters do the same when the Nationalists are in power. There are exceptions definitely but the majority does not fall in this category.

I, for one, have never dedicated so much of my time to convince the Chinese to help Malta as much as I did during the 10 years of Nationalist government. To their credit various ministers in the Nationalist administration recognised this and always gave me the assistance I requested.

Finally, if, as The Times seems to imply in its editorial, given a free vote, there are some Labour MPs that would vote for ratification, this would be going against what was decided in January by the MLP general conference when it unanimously approved a motion in favor of partnership and against full membership.

Unless an extraordinary general conference is convened to change that decision, no Labour MP should and could vote in favor of ratification of the EU accessing treaty.