THE NERVE OF LABOUR

I don’t know who advises Joseph Muscat about what policy positions to take, but s/he ain’t doing him any favours and that’s no lie. I mean to say, taking to battle about education, of all things?

Where is Labour coming from on this, do they really think that by changing their name from Malta Labour Party (MLP) and changing (as eventually they might) their logo, they’re going to make anyone with half a brain forget the actual and moral violence they perpetrated on education in Malta?

Just calling yourself “Partit Laburista” or “Labour” (or Movement of Regressive Immoderates, either) isn’t going to do that, Sunny Jim, not while people my age and even younger (your age, in fact) are still around to tell the tale.

Let’s have a little shuffle down memory lane, then, shall we?

Before we set off, let’s acknowledge that the people chosen to present a motion of no confidence in Minister Cristina are not themselves guilty of anything heinous in the education sphere.

Evarist Bartolo might have been less than vociferous in standing up for University students when his less couth colleagues were doing their thing up at Tal-Qroqq, but he was a decent enough Education Minister during the blip. Owen Bonnici is too young to be guilty of anything.

Let’s also acknowledge that not everything the jolly old Nats have done in the education sphere has been of enormous benefit to the country, so that at least I won’t be accused of blinkered Nationalism. Well, I will be and I won’t give a toss, but let’s do it anyway.

Within days, I will be schlepping up to the University to pick up exam scripts and I will then descend into the darkest depths of depression, due to the awfulness of the language and logic skills a piteously large number of students will display.

Incidentally, if the Hon. Gino Cauchi wants to ask a PQ about my earnings there too, he’s welcome. He might be surprised.

My depression will be a direct result of certain educational policies that most will say can’t be laid at Labour’s door, for all that they are, in fact, on a direct line of descent from the lunacies of Labour’s illustrious past.

But let’s get back to why Labour have a real brass neck for choosing education as a battle-ground, and for trying, with significant lack of success, seeing that she’s come through valiantly, especially if the programmes get back on course quickly, to mess with one of the better Cabinet Ministers.

As soon as Labour got into power in 1971, they proceeded to tear down an educational structure that was pretty darn good. I was at the Lyceum almost up to when Labour got into power, but we moved to London just before. When I went back to visit my mates, who were then in Fifth Form, the place was, not to put too fine a point on it, a zoo.

Under the usual Mintoffian banner of egalitarianism, also known as “bring everything down to the lowest common denominator and then kick it to shit and back and bury it even deeper” what was a decent school was turned into a temple of mediocrity, with party hacks taking the upper hand and the good teachers being treated like pariahs.

Of course, anyone who lived in those days knows that this was par for the course, but let’s stick to education. Wind forward a few years and we get to my University days.

The story has been told before, and some day I’ll document it in detail, but what started as a partial, and innocuous, industrial action by doctors turned into Mintoff and his henchmen shutting down the Medical School, one of the best in Europe, and then turning the full force of their iron fist in a mailed glove onto the rest of us.

The Royal University of Malta transmogrified into the Old and New Universities and then into the University, with cock-eyed schemes to ensure that students were treated like children (an attitude that sadly prevails even today) and that any opposition to the crypto-communist persecution of intellectuals was put down in a tough and unrelenting fashion, if you’ll allow me a euphemism.

The attack on education, a thinly disguised effort to produce a Socialist Generation with the IQ of a particularly stupid stone (if you don’t know much, you can’t criticise the Leader) continued into the Eighties.

Dr K Mifsud Bonnici, first as Education Minister (almost, but not quite, a total oxymoron in MLP days) and then as Prime Minister oversaw an initiative that can be described fairly as aimed at throttling independent education, and hence, independent thought which, thankfully, resulted in Labour finally being kicked out, notwithstanding the institutionalised bribery of voters that almost swung it for them in 1987.

Examine the results for yourselves, folks. Look at the quality and content of the comments that will appear below this and at the ones that have appeared before. Give some quiet consideration to the way some people behave, to the way they think and the way they argue.

And then tell me that Labour using education as a forum isn’t anything but political suicide.