Opposition and Labour Party leader Joseph Muscat will rue the day when he compared the present impasse in Parliament with the perverse result of the 1981 election, which resulted in the PL running the country for more than five years against the people’s expressed wishes.

…it was (Joseph) Muscat himself who made Labour’s haunting past relevant again- Salvu Felice Pace

This paper has allocated a significant amount of column inches to carry the opinions of several Labour politicians who were members of Parliament between 1981-1987 or had positions in the party during that period. The comments themselves in Labour Party Stalwarts Rue Perverse Election Result But… (January 31) are of particular interest.

Former Labour leader and ex-Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici gave a very severe put down to Dr Muscat. “Whoever says what happened in 1981 was immoral is absolutely wrong and does not know what he is saying…”

But his view was contradicted by Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, the PL’s general secretary at the time, categorically stating that “we knew that morally we were wrong”.

A veteran former minister who served in the 1981 Administration, Karmenu Vella, as usual prevaricated, presumably due to his unfailing loyalty to Dom Mintoff, and Leo Brincat, a parliamentary secretary at the time, spoke about a “feeling of unease”.

It would have been interesting to get the views of former Prime Minister and Labour leader Alfred Sant who was president of the party during some of the years in question.

The two situations are not comparable, as Austin Sammut cleverly put it in his contribution (February 7 the 1981 Labour regime “was not a government of the people but a government against the people”.

While this is a very important historical fact, my emphasis is on the ramifications of Dr Muscat’s judgement on a number of his present colleagues that they were politically and morally incorrect to serve in that Administration. His statement as party leader should carry weight but does it?

We are talking here about the most prominent members of Labour’s front bench who, in the event of a victory in the next election, will be appointed to run important portfolios of government. Apart from Ms Coleiro Preca, Mr Vella and Mr Brincat, there is also George Vella, Joe Debono Grech in the parliamentary group and Alex Sceberras Trigona as a party official. I wonder how each of these politicians feel now that they have been labelled politically immoral by their own leader? Did any of them consider resigning their post since? How could a future Labour government present itself on the international stage with a significant number of ministers tarnished by such a serious accusation?

Of course, many of us columnists had mentioned ad nauseam what Dr Muscat came up with 30 years too late. In fact, not a few times we were told that what happened such a long time ago was irrelevant now and that we were living in the past. But, suddenly, of all people, it was Dr Muscat himself who made Labour’s haunting past relevant again.

Hence, Mr Spiteri’s Placing 1981 In Proper Context (February 6), where he argues that the past “remains there to learn from, especially not to repeat mistakes”, becomes even more poignant.

But then he goes all defensive about that perverse result, almost denying what the whole of Malta knew then: that the gerrymandering that took place before the 1981 election was totally unique, aimed precisely at wasting in a big way votes cast for Nationalist Party candidates.

Surely, Mr Spiteri knows that four members of the Electoral Commission never signed the document under which rules the 1981 election was fought while a unanimous vote approved the rules governing the 1996 election. And that the 1976 election was marred with acts of intimidation resulting in a number of people failing to cast their votes. And that Labour made use of property requisition orders and housing allocations to increase its vote in certain districts prior to the 1976 election.

The worse aspect of the 1981 premeditated perverse electoral result ushered in almost six years of political and social upheaval, a more corrupt police force, political arrests, torture and at least one murder at the police depot, the disappearance of several people and eventually culminated into Tal-Barrani incidents and the murder of Raymond Caruana.

Those events acted as catalysts for the corrective mechanism to ensure majority rule to be agreed upon but Mr Mintoff had to spoil it by blackmailing the Nationalist opposition into accepting neutrality.

None of this would have happened if, after the 1981 result, Mr Mintoff had called on the leader of the majority either to form a coalition government with the sole purpose of reforming the electoral laws or promised a short legislature with the main purpose of rectifying what went wrong in the previous election, followed by fresh elections. But “the politically immoral” were determined to govern till the last day possible.

Now out comes Labour MP Noel Farrugia, scandalised by the accusations of an MP against his Prime Minister, and suggests (February 8) that the allegations by Franco Debono, if proven, “should be considered as ‘crimes against the country’”.

He only needs to look around him in the Labour parliamentary group and he will find those that his own leader dubbed as the “politically immoral”. Once he identifies them, he can compare the real damage they had done to this country by either having actively supported all the excesses of the 1981-87 regime or by simply having adopted a deafening silence for almost six years.

One thing is certain. Dr Muscat’s effort to demean Lawrence Gonzi by alleging that 2012 is politically comparable to 1981 has opened a Pandora’s Box with a very deep bottom.