Clearly, the Labour Party is being run by a combination of those too young to remember the past and those who choose not to recall it.

The Labour Party was asked by the media for its position on the magazine-burning escapade perpetrated by the (Labour) Mayor of Mosta after he took umbrage at the fact that a (Labour) Councillor had, according to him, penned an article that gave unfair political advantage to her (Labour) constituency MP husband, presumably such advantage being calculated vis-a-vis other (Labour) candidates in the district, amongst whom the Labour Deputy-Leader Dr Anglu Farrugia.

The Party's response was that it does not concern itself with such petty matters, preferring to concentrate on matters of importance, such as the cost of living and the fact that so many people were finding it difficult to pay their electricity bills.

Of course, on one level, they are right. The fact that the Mayor of a locality had decided to imitate the Sun King and decide that he has the final say on what is and should be is as nothing compared to the more fundamental issues of the day, such as putting food on the table and power in the plugs. It's not as if what Dr Chetcuti Caruana does or does not do will have any sort of impact on the national scale, it being well known that Mayors, while having a function of sorts, are not the be-all and end-all of policy making and implementation.

But by wiggling away from the question, by failing to condemn outrightly and unequivocally the manner in which this particular specimen of the genus mayoralis had brought to bear the heavy hand of censorship and evoked the spectre of book-burning and all its attendant associations, the Labour Party has exposed something of its collective past that - were it not for the considerations raised in my first paragraph - it should probably prefer to remain unventilated.

It seems that for the Labour Party unilateral and repressive actions are not in and of themselves reprehensible, taking it upon one's self to decide what facts or opinions should see the light of day is not misguided arrogance and avoiding questions on this is not craven cowardice in the face of evidence of seismic rifts in the Party's structure.

This idea of mine that the Labour Party is run by someone who is too young to remember the past and its implications was strengthened by the position taken by Joseph Muscat during a service to recall the memory of Karin Grech.

This time of the year always brings to mind the vicious murder of the young girl, killed by a letter-bomb addressed to her father. This year, the memory was rendered more vivid and painful for the family by the fact that a related court case came to an interim climax, an event that was seized on by Muscat to criticise the Government for appealing a part of the decision.

In the course of his criticism, Muscat castigated the Government for sullying the memory of the "martyr" (his word) Karin Grech, and presumably in order to avoid being accused of political opportunism, he brought in another "martyr" (again, his word) Raymond Caruana, who had been shot in a drive-by while he was in a Nationalist Party club back when Labour was running the country.

These two events were tragedies of the highest order of magnitude and their impact first on the families and then on the country is immeasurable, but to call the two victims "martyrs" betrays a failure on the part of Muscat to grasp, even at the most fundamental level, what martyrdom means. He uses the word in a glib attempt to transform the consequences of two heinous crimes into a events that allow him to spew political sound-bites, ignoring the fact that neither Caruana nor Grech were "martyrs" because neither of them were killed while fighting for a cause.

Without diminishing by one iota the horror of their deaths, they both died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time - they were victims of criminal acts that had a political context but that's the extent of it.

This tendency to take a view of history that is conveniently tailored to fit the needs of the day is one that has prevailed for many years (to be fair, on both sides of the spectrum) and it's high time that it was reversed. Facts, unlike opinions, are sacred and are the only basis for aforesaid opinions to have any value whatsoever.