Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind

Last week The Sunday Times reported that the “far-right leader Norman Lowell will instruct his supporters to vote for the Labour Party at the next general election if Joseph Muscat sticks to his promise to take concrete action against African immigrants”.

Mr Lowell said that “the Leader of the Opposition is showing recently that his heart is beating in the right place”.

Oh dear.

Malta’s far-right party is now endorsing the socialist party, thanks to its “moderate” and “progressive” leader Dr Muscat.

Something does not quite add up here, does it?

If I can see it, so can all those who thought that Dr Muscat was truly moderate and progressive.

The truth is that Dr Muscat’s criticism of the government on immigration is anything but socialist, moderate or progressive. And now we have it from the horse’s mouth.

If anything, as the leader of the socialist party, one would have expected him to criticise the government for entering into tiffs with Italy over who should rescue boatloads of people bobbing on the high seas.

And you would also have expected him to criticise the government for the poor conditions of our reception centres. One would have thought that the two-year respite in arrivals would have given us enough time to get our reception standards in order.

But saying any of that will not win Dr Muscat any votes, will it?

So off he went to criticise the government for being too weak on immigration while praising Italy for having safeguarded its national interest by not rescuing a boat of 171 migrants. Although he stopped short of saying it, Dr Muscat’s statement left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was strongly implying that the government was wrong to save those lives. In other words, we should have let them drown.

I had criticised Dr Muscat’s statement in this column and so had the PN and Alternattiva Demokratika and several opinion leaders.

Dr Muscat pooh-poohed all our criticism but never quite endorsed the government’s choice to save the migrants. When it came to saving lives he fudged and mumbled but never quite came clean.

And it is precisely this that earned him the dubious respect of Mr Lowell, who The Sunday Times reminds us, is a convicted racist and not known for his tolerance with migrants.

Mr Lowell promised to endorse Labour because Dr Muscat’s heart beats in the right place.

For any mainstream party, let alone a socialist one, such an endorsement should sound like a political death knell.

But it took the Labour Party a full two days to decide to come out with a statement “completely dissociating” itself from Mr Lowell.

Two full days.

And yet, in between, Dr Muscat had ample opportunity to do it himself when he addressed a mass meeting. But he did not. Being endorsed by Mr Lowell was not a serious enough an affront for Dr Muscat to dispel personally.

So when it eventually came, his party’s statement was not just late. It sounded weak and unconvincing.

And instead of clearing up the mess, it made it worse.

The Times reported the party’s spokesman saying that “Mr Lowell’s reaction was exactly why Labour chose to speak up on the issue of migration. We believe a mainstream political party should lead on immigration, and not leave the subject to far-right extremists”.

So what do they do?

They copy Mr Lowell. It’s the easiest thing on earth. If you can’t beat him, you join him. That’s the best way of siphoning off his voters. So they use his words and phrases and insinuations, albeit in a more subtle manner.

But make no mistake about it, they are pitching at all those of us who have a little Mr Lowell inside. And this is the irresponsibility of it all.

Someone should have told the spokesman that a mainstream political party should not confront a far-right party by adopting its policies and by using its same language. Because if you do so, then you should not be surprised if people start to think that you are xenophobic and racist as well.

What a mainstream party should do is to disprove far-right policies by offering policies that are more realistic and more humane.

True, this might cost votes in the short term, especially among those who really think that we should not have saved the migrants. But in the longer term, mainstream policies are better accepted because people prefer to rely on political parties that offer fair and balanced policies to those who offer intolerance and xenophobia.

This is exactly what the current government has done. It continues to resist Italy’s bullying tactics without foregoing its obligations to save lives wherever the boats may be.

By putting people’s lives before people’s votes, Lawrence Gonzi is giving Dr Muscat – and us all – a lesson in humanity.

On the contrary, by speaking the same language of Mr Lowell and by getting his endorsement, Dr Muscat is legitimising a message that has no place in a democratic society. At least not in one that wants to uphold the European value of tolerance.

www.simonbusuttil.eu

Dr Busuttil is a Nationalist member of the European Parliament.