Labour is currently adopting the policy that anyone who criticizes – read does not roll over and acquiesce – the doings and shakings of the Government is a traitorous swine who should be taken out and shot like the cur that he is.
OK, I’m exaggerating for effect, but that’s the gist of it.
The latest one to make this sort of crack was Dr Owen Bonnici, currently Parliamentary Secretary for Justice, tipped to become (deservedly, incidentally) Minister for same. He accused his shadow, Dr Beppe Fenech Adami, of undermining the Great Unwashed’s faith in the justice system with the comments being made.
Let me not hark back twenty-five years odd and scoff at the thought that a Labour spokesman has the nerve to say that someone is undermining the justice system, given the way Mintoff and KMB used to behave back then. After all, Dr Bonnici was still in shorts then, so it was hardly his fault. No, instead, let’s examine the context in which Labour are getting all uptight about people having the nerve to criticize their administration of justice.
Point the first: Joseph Muscat says that he will abide by the Commission for the Administration of Justice’s findings vis-à-vis Mr Justice Lino Farrugia Sacco. Joseph says, but Joseph doesn’t do, because the arguments about angels and heads of pins have trundled on with the net result that the way things are going, Farrugia Sacco will retire without having gone through the impeachment process that the Commission has recommended. The other net result is that the populace at large has got the impression that the law works one way for them and another way for the Great and Good.
Point the second: Labour get elected on the “we don’t stand for shenanigans” but then turn a blind eye and then when a thousand or so people grab the opportunity to line someone’s pocket for their pecuniary advantage, using the flimsy, and frankly ludicrous, excuse that it wouldn’t be right to take a thousand families to Court, as if Mommy Bear, Poppa Bear and all the little cubs were going to be prosecuted.
Sorry, folks, it’s not the people who are criticizing who are doing damage to the system, it’s the people who are damaging it by this sort of posturing. It’s the same, frankly, as saying that the people who were – and in many cases, remain – against the Passport for Cash Scheme (what price a passport now, incidentally, with Portugal and whoever racing us to the bottom?) The damage was done by the way the scheme was put out initially, making us look as if we are some tin-pot third world peoples’ republic bent on cashing in, not by the fact that it was opposed by those of us who can think outside our wallets.
And while on the subject of Passports for Cash, who has been approved thus far? I thought that the cloak of secrecy had been removed, but it seems not, all we’re going to be given is a list of names, without any indication as to the manner in which passports were granted being given. If this is the extent to which there’s going to be compliance with the principles touted after the scheme was proposed, I’d be surprised if the European Commission won’t be having something to say about the subject.
On the other hand, I won’t be holding my breath, because the mandarins of Brussels might not have the energy to pick hairs with our PM on what has turned out to be an insignificant issue, everyone else having jumped on the bandwagon.