Who is responsible?

Robert Henry Bugeja continues to deceive readers by failing to tell us that he is a candidate for the Labour Party in the next election. I know this because he declared himself as a candidate in l-orizzont. So much for following Joseph Muscat’s transparency call!

His bias towards the Labour Party is obvious. Nothing wrong with that but then why doesn’t he declare an interest? I have never hidden my preference for the Nationalist Party as I consider that readers should be respected.

Let’s look at his latest contribution Who Will Be Held Responsible? (March 13).

He wrote that “a serious government would have never allowed that the country is run by individuals who have failed so many times over to deliver in their assignments and, yet, are still being let loose to run their ministries as if it were normal practice. In seriously-run countries heads would have rolled straightaway…”

Mr Bugeja should take a close look at a number of members of Parliament on the Labour side who are being promoted by Dr Muscat as part of his experienced team. And, yet, all of these politicians when in power, especially between 1981 and 1987, supported a government that was rejected by the people, so much so that recently Dr Muscat himself branded them as having acted in a politically immoral way.

They had failed the country then and they failed the country again between 1996 and 1998 when they allowed Alfred Sant to ruin Malta’s economy with his fantasy consumer tax called CET.

Heads certainly didn’t roll then. Who was held responsible? Then we had a politically corrupt system, a corrupt police force, a corrupt bulk buying system, political violence galore, frame-ups of innocent individuals, disappearance of individuals, one murder at the police headquarters and so much more.

Is Mr Bugeja comfortable supporting individuals who were part of that system? Will he be happy seeing our island represented by them? Isn’t this a case of two weights and two measures?

Whatever our present ministers haven’t delivered shades into insignificance when compared with the above record.

As to a Prime Minister voting against the clear will of the people in the matter of divorce, Mr Bugeja seems to have forgotten that the whole of the Labour parliamentary group voted against the Accession Treaty in 2003 after having a referendum result in favour of membership, confirmed also by a general election.

And this after Dr Sant, with the full support of Dr Muscat, declared that the question of Malta’s EU membership should be decided by a general election.

Mr Bugeja proclaimed that “this country cannot continue like this, as if one cannot be bothered to ever assume responsibility for one’s actions. Such a mess can never be tolerated in a truly democratic society”. These words would be taken seriously if only Dr Muscat had cleared from his party those in his shadow Cabinet who never assumed responsibility for their actions or inaction when they were in government.