Is Labour Party against the euro?

Make no mistake about it. Labour lost the last election due to floating voters not trusting its real intentions on the EU and the euro.

We are not monkeys, and before we vote we want clarity from Muscat and the entire Labour movement- Austin Bencini

Alfred Sant’s speech in Parliament on the European treaty on stability, coordination and governance seems, however, to increase instead of reduce fears that Labour still has to show its true colours on the EU and the euro. Its position is still dominated by tactical electoral considerations in which fudge is the name of the game.

Sant’s position does not seem an isolated one within Labour. Only last weekend two articles, both anti-EU and the euro, were carried prominently in the Labour-leaning weekly It-Torċa.

The first was a two-page article signed by Mark Camilleri who openly confessed:

“The problem with the Labour Party is that the Maltese decided to enter the EU through a referendum and the general election of 2003. It seems to feel uncomfortable to harshly criticise the EU. Obviously, if it does so the Nationalist Party would turn it into an opportunity to throw bad light on the Labour Party, that it wants to go against the will of the people,” Camilleri says.

The same correspondent then mentions, in sustenance to his thesis that the most outspoken enemy of the euro, former Prime Minister Alfred Sant, will none­theless have to vote in favour together with all of the other Labour MPs to ratify the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in Parliament.

Camilleri then goes on to quote approvingly the visceral opposition offered by the Greek far-left movement led by Alexis Tsipras as if the economic situation of Malta were identical to that of Greece.

As if all this were not enough to make me lose my sleep, in the very same issue of It-Torċa there was another full two-page article by none other than Sant himself, lambasting all things EU and euro. We are given more than our fair share of anti-EU Sant-speak.

Sant denounces the use of legal instruments to plan economic policy whether it be national or international policy.

The Prime Minister who froze Malta’s application to join the EU without any mandate from the electorate, feels comfortable comparing the EU’s methods to “the Soviet five-year economic plans”. He states: “Now, wonder of wonders, this is being seen happening afresh within the liberal European Union”.

Nothing seems to have changed from when Sant was Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. He is given free rein to crusade against the EU and the euro without any protestation from the Labour Party, or more worryingly, from Joseph Muscat.

One genuinely wonders why no one attracts Sant’s attention that none of the Soviet satellite states which on the collapse of communism rushed to join the EU are thinking of restoring the Soviet Union so that they can leave the ‘liberal’ EU and return to its militarily imposed five-year plans.

Two articles in the same edition of It-Torċa cannot be ignored. There is evidently a clear case of Orwellian doublespeak whereby the Labour parliamentary group plays the game so cleverly exposed by Camilleri of tactical electoral opportunism while allowing free rein to its press to throw disrepute on the EU and the euro.

Camilleri once more spelt it out: “Therefore, we need to think of political solutions, we do not want to be restricted ideologically and we need to think outside the box of the EU. We need to go back in time to see where we went wrong.”

This can only mean to the times of Dom Mintoff’s ‘Europe of Cain’ and Sant’s ‘deep-freeze’; only that this time they want to succeed in their anti-EU campaigns where their predecessors failed.

Whatever is said of the sorry state of the Nationalist Party’s parliamentary group in its varying levels of association or dissociation, there is no dissent on the challenges of the EU and the euro.

It was Lawrence Gonzi who took us into the euro and it is his Government which with the excellent results in the economic, tourism and financial sectors won the praise of the rest of the EU partners, as the 5+5 meeting held in Malta demonstrated.

The economy and our rightful place in the EU and the euro is to be our sole voting criterion.

Muscat must explain fully without any fudging what is his true position on the EU and the euro, and the extent to which he agrees with Sant, or for that matter, with It-Torċa, plainly and realistically. He must not think that if the poster on Gonzi is ‘see not’, and that on Muscat is ‘speak not’, that the electorate’s should be ‘hear not’.

We are not monkeys, and before we vote we want clarity from Muscat and the entire Labour movement.