Looking back on 2011

It’s that time of the year when writers whose intellectual capacities have been diminished by a surfeit of food and drink, all in the name of celebrating the birth of Christ, resort to looking back and regurgitating the stuff that happened over the previous 12 months.

Never let it be said that I am one to stay away from surfeit.

… we have a situation where a Nationalist MP is doing Labour’s job for it…- I.M. Beck

This was quite a year, really. It is characterised in my mind by the fact that the opposition abdicated its responsibility and passed it on, for better or for worse, to the Nationalist backbench.

For all his bluster about getting divorce on the agenda on the part of Joseph Muscat, Leader of aforesaid Opposition, it was down to a Nationalist MP to kick this country into the 20th century (yes, I know we’re in the 21st, but, hey, this is the Nationalist Party we’re talking about, these things take time) and get divorce introduced officially into the corpus of our legal system.

As has become, and will continue to be, its wont, the Labour Party hopped with such alacrity onto that bandwagon that they almost managed to combine vertigo with whiplash, though the extent to which it had to twist and turn in order to appease everyone and his brother was almost breathtaking to behold.

So bitter was the pill that Labour had to swallow when it found itself behind the curve on the divorce issue that they had to resort to sniping at the Prime Minister when he declared his personal dislike of having divorce on the statute books, for all that they conveniently ignored his undertaking, given (unlike Alfred Sant’s behaviour in different circumstances) immediately the referendum result was known, that once the people had expressed their will, it would be done.

As it was and you can now get yourself a divorce, though the extent to which this has led to society being rent asunder is debatable to the point that the doomsayers should hang their heads in shame and not be seen in polite society any further.

Fat chance of that happening.

And then it came to pass that the buses didn’t. Pass by on time, that is, and this became a national scandal to the point of the government teetering on the edge and hanging on by the skin of Franco Debono’s teeth.

Again, Labour tagged onto the coat-tails of a Nationalist MP to raise a bit of a storm about, of all things, whether buses were running smoothly or not, this while the world was going to hell in a financial handbasket.

Truth be told, if having buses not run on time and having a few students turn up late for lectures (why turn up at all, actually, since, apparently, most lecturers don’t bother, at least if you take students’ whining at face value) are the issues that so raise the hackles of well-brought up young ladies that they resort to gutter language, then we’re a very lucky country and no mistake.

The government didn’t fall (and it wasn’t ever going to, given that this was not a money Bill, a small fact that eluded those who were – and still are – gagging for it) but that was not the end of Nationalist MPs doing the opposition’s work for them.

Dr Debono let Austin Gatt slip from his teeth and promptly sank his fangs into another minister’s, this time Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, an equally tasty morsel, when you think about it.

As I pointed out in my blog a couple of days ago, Dr Debono made a couple of good points about justice, home affairs and related phenomena and if it weren’t for the fact that his way of going about things has become a bit (more than a bit, frankly) irritating, the discussion would have become interesting.

In the circumstances, though, we have a situation where a Nationalist MP is doing Labour’s job for it and coming across as doing that in a way that is favouring Labour’s partisan interests, rather than the interests of the country as a whole.

In its role as the country’s opposition, this is what, in fact, Labour should be doing itself: working for the national interest by criticising and proposing options. What it is doing instead, however, is sitting on the sidelines, hoping that Dr Debono will push things a bit too far and give them a stab at winning the keys to Castille.

What it is certainly not doing, to boot, is proposing options. We’ve had the Labour Chorus Line talking up Joseph Muscat’s 51 answers to Lawrence Gonzi’s 10 questions but the stark fact is that those 51 pious hopes didn’t answer a single one of those questions and we’re actually a bit worse off because we know what Labour intends to do but how it’s going to do it remains a total mystery.

That being as it may be, a couple of recommendations for you to end the year on, though I don’t know if you’ll manage to adopt them: go to St James and catch Dingle Bells, Malcolm Smells and then go to Trabuxu in South Street (the bistro, though the wine bar in Strait Street is of the same standard) and grab a good meal.

Have a good 2012 and may the Lil’Elves carry on giving me such sweet contentment that I manage to annoy them to the point of their being unable, in their spluttering haste to get at me, to put together a sentence in coherent English.

imbocca@gmail.com

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