For all its talk of transparency and openness, this is no government that wears a negligee. Labour’s seductive appeal to a gullible electorate runs diametrically opposite to the luring methods applied by the oldest profession in history.

Labour doesn’t ask for money, it offers it by the bagful from the country’s coffers in the form of VAT refunds on cars and reduced energy rates from a power station still to be built. But that is not the most worrying difference between Labour and your friendly neighbourhood prostitute. With Labour, what you see is not what you get.

When Labour came up with the ingenious idea of peddling EU passports, the buzzword was national interest.

It was in the national interest to provide security to strange characters arriving on private jets ostensibly to buy EU passports, although we really do not know what they were doing here. Henley and Partners appears more forthcoming with information than our government.

Henley, an international company that skims the cream off the sale of passports that don’t belong to us, has told us that more than 100 foreigners have made financial commitments to Malta of around €100 million. These include cash deposits, bonds, medical insurances and real estate.

More than 50 have already received a residence permit. Henley’s chairman described them as “the right kind of individuals” and we must take his word for it because our government won’t say a word and won’t publish its contract with Henley, even though the latter said it had no problem with that.

The €100 million mentioned is not investment but costs associated with the conditions in the passport sale programme. But that’s just a detail for Prime Minister Joseph Muscat who claims he came upon this money-spinner after he won the premiership. He treats his people like idiots; they love him for it and even pay him back handsomely, with votes.

With the country’s Budget about to become dependent on a foreign company, the new buzzword now is national security and, like the passport sale scheme, it comes complete with security personnel guarding strange characters.

Whether the man who was hiding on Xemxija Hill was Libya’s former premier or his deputy is actually irrelevant.

The point is that someone whose identity the government has described as an issue of national security (which can be translated into ‘a terror target’) was being kept hidden in a residential block. Anyone passing that way in the morning knows the place is also a meeting point for school kids awaiting transport.

Who in his right mind would put him there? How could people’s safety be treated which such disregard? That’s what happens when you have a government that excels in secrecy and a subdued electorate to boot. Successive Nationalist governments have not managed to change this terrible submissive mindset of this little island’s inhabitants. That’s their biggest failure.

There is a more worrying aspect to the Xemxija episode, however. Local media is reporting the presence of not just Libya’s deputy prime minister in Malta (the government has not denied this) but of even other people receiving the protection of our secret services. If these reports are true, then there is more than just the Xemxija man whose identity can pose a threat to our national security.

It is not surprising that this is how Labour handles its diplomatic relations, through backroom deals with unknown foreign powers. It reached many backroom deals with local interest groups before the election. Providing asylum and security to people whose identity must remain secret follows very much on the same pattern. Labour hasn’t changed. Dom Mintoff behaved much the same way and with equal secrecy.

Back in the golden years of Labour, thanks to a secret agreement, Mintoff’s North Korean buddy dictator had trained for him a special police squad that later became the notorious Special Mobile Unit. That squad made its first public appearance at a PN meeting in Żebbuġ in 1982, armed and masked. It was intimidation par excellence, and they proved their mettle, to their Labour master, on many occasions.

Today, riot gear is being replaced by smart suits

Today, riot gear is being replaced by smart suits. The presence of the secret service in our streets is increasingly prominent and the man responsible for them is the affable National Security Minister Manuel Mallia. He took such a keen interest in the selection of these officers that he even sat at the interviews by the selection board.

There is nothing to suggest that our security services are anything like that former terror squad in uniform, the SMU. It is Mallia who is worrying.

This former criminal lawyer turned Labour minister insulted the country when, soon after Labour’s electoral victory, he went to the prisons to announce an amnesty, as criminals in the prison yard shouted Tagħna lkoll.

This is the man who wants to imprison former PN general secretary Paul Borg Olivier over defamation. This is the man responsible for telephone tapping and who was caught eavesdropping on the Opposition in Parliament.

This is the man responsible for the passport sale scheme, the man who stood behind the pushback policy on immigrants, the man responsible for public broadcasting and for the Norman Vella debacle and the man under whose watch an oil tanker slips out of Maltese waters despite a warrant of seizure.

Mallia is the man who pushed the Ombudsman to take the unprecedented step of going to court to be allowed to investigate promotions in the army.

Mallia doesn’t think the Ombudsman should meddle with his army and plans a counter protest. Gosh, and we were led to believe the Nationalists were arrogant.

Despite his long list of blunders and arrogance – that perfect combination that only Labour incompetence can provide – Mallia is today still waited upon by a police force all so ready to please its master.

No one rubs Mallia the wrong way more beautifully than that pesky Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi. It is a pleasure listening to them exchanging amiable words during question time in Parliament.

Two weeks ago, they had a lovely exchange over the sale of passports. It is not clear what the question actually was, because they don’t really ask questions in Parliament, they just give reference numbers. But, in a supplementary question, Azzopardi asked the thorny question of how many passports had been sold. Mallia asked for the question in writing.

Did the minister think, Azzopardi went on, that it was time for the monitoring committee responsible for the citizenship scheme to finally meet?

This is not a matter of opinion, Mallia said. If the Opposition leader, who sat on that board, wanted the committee to meet, he knew what to do.

But the Opposition leader has been publicly calling for the committee to meet, protested Azzopardi. I received no formal request, replied Mallia. Does that mean that if he writes to you the committee would meet, asked Azzopardi.

We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, came the curt reply.

In the end, no one was any wiser on the matter of passport sales. And the Speaker of the House wants to have this transmitted on live TV.

If Mallia treats question time in this manner, no wonder he doesn’t like the Ombudsman snooping around his army.

The judicial protest by the Ombudsman should truly be the last straw for the Prime Minister to finally move. This is not a case of waiting for the court to decide on the matter and let’s hope Muscat won’t take the same shameless, offensive position he took over the case of Mr Justice Lino Farrugia Sacco. That move by the Ombudsman requires a political response, not a judicial one.

Christmas came early this year in the form of government freebees on the eve of the EP election. It should not be too much to ask for another pre-Christmas bonus from our benevolent Prime Minister, that he would finally tell his National Security Minister: O go, Emmanuel, just go.

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