Labour out of context in today's reality

Since taking over the leadership of the Labour Party, Joseph Muscat has been advocating what he calls a movement for moderate and progressive citizens. It is understandable that following years of uninterrupted defective Labour leaders, Dr Muscat wants to let everyone know that he is of a different breed, but does he really believe that attracting floaters, pale blue or even red sceptics, is where he should have started from?

What Dr Muscat is suggesting to moderate and progressive voters is that they should join his fold just because he's new on the block. His "new" movement is predominantly made up of the MLP which until a year and a half ago gave a good run to the Nationalist Party and nearly toppled it from power. So it only stands to reason that his "new" movement aims at adding numbers to what the PL already is.

This implies that Dr Muscat believes that nothing is wrong with the PL today or before for that matter. Nothing to change but for a few names, posts and stationary. So all those considering forming part of Dr Muscat's movement must do so by accepting that they (the moderates) have been wrong all along these years and now it's time to join the PL lock, stock and barrel.

Basically Dr Muscat is asking those who did not vote Labour in the past two decades to embrace his party for one reason: Himself.

In his claims to sell the "new" movement for moderate and progressive citizens, Dr Muscat tries to bring about urgency for its existence.

He uses phrases and battle cries stolen from the days when President Emeritus Eddie Fenech Adami, fondly known to all as Eddie, created such a movement. However, what Dr Muscat ignores is the fact that it wasn't only Eddie's great charisma to attract thousands of leftist minded voters to march with him, but the climate in which he created that movement.

The reason why conservatives and Labourites felt comfortable forming part of the same chain of resistance back in the 1970s and 1980s was to reject Mintoffianism; and Eddie was seen by all as the antithesis of that "ideology". Today, Dr Muscat wants the moderates to join his PL while embracing Dom Mintoff back in the party. In doing so he is telling us: Alfred Sant was wrong on Mr Mintoff, you were wrong on the PL but now I'm giving you the chance to join us and for my sake I will rename us all - A Movement for Moderate and Progressive Citizens!

In his first days at the helm of the PL, most of us believed that Dr Muscat would be a new page in our political history.

A new page which should have started off by setting the record straight. Clear apologies for what the humble worker's party of Pawlu Boffa became in the 1980s. True recognition that the MLP was wrong in trying to keep Malta out of the EU and not merely accepting membership out of default. Following that, one would have expected the new Labour leader to start rebuilding Labour policies on today's realities and not just advocating nostalgic slogans in an attempt to take advantage of those who at the moment might feel politically stranded.

Eddie's movement was built to restore freedom of expression, justice and the economy from a malice that was suffocating us all. What is Dr Muscat aiming to achieve with his movement? A simple change in power, which is OK as long as democracy dictates it but the substance behind its motive is evidently lacking. In this scenario, Dr Muscat's movement is out of context in today's reality.