Photo: Jason Borg

On September 11, of all dates, and in New York, of all places, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat was selling European passports in the US.

He told his audience at a Global Citizenship seminar that the government’s aim behind its ‘Citizen by Investment’ programme was not investment after all, but talent. He said: “Malta wants your talent, not your money. Your networks, not your accounts.” Oh yes, our Prime Minister knows a thing or two about networks, all right.

But clichés apart (he really needs to get a proper speech writer), what’s the point of a bill of around €1 million in fees to buy a European passport in Malta when all you are after is talent? There must be talent crossing the Mediterranean for free on rickety boats, but they’re the wrong colour, they don’t come with wads of money, so we tell them to collect our garbage instead. In any case, that avenue of talent is now closed. The Italians are picking up most of the migrants now, although exactly why they are doing that and what Malta has promised in return, we are never told. That’s Muscat’s networking for you.

If it is talent that Malta is seeking, then that should be a main condition for a passport, not the processing fees and a rental agreement for an apartment in Malta. Obviously, to try to make any logical sense out of Muscat’s waffle is a waste of time. We are selling European passports; that is the beginning and the end of it. Anyone with the kind of talent the Prime Minister is speaking of can easily land himself a job in the EU. He does not need a passport from us.

It is probable that this talk of talent is a marketing tactic by our Prime Minister to sell passports. A bit of flattery always helps a sale. He’s certainly good at that, and it looks like he’s going to need to sell quite a lot of passports to placate the many flattered voters who are getting restless because he’s promised them heaven on earth, or better, he’s promised them what they can’t get or don’t deserve.

That incredibly pathetic speech in New York reads like a tourist brochure; a bit more like a ‘retirement in the sun’ scheme than an invitation to people with ‘talent’ and a million euros to spare.

Malta, Muscat said, has 7,000 years of history and 300 days of sunshine every year. It is also a melting pot of civilisations (for heaven’s sake, the whole world is!) and obviously, home to megalithic temples, which are the oldest freestanding monuments in the world. Actually they are not; France beats us at that, and probably Turkey too. Muscat never cared much for details anyway.

There was also the other all-important point that our temples are older than the Egyptian pyramids. Yes, so is probably my back garden wall.

He then told them that Malta would soon be home to the “latest creation of global architecture [sic] superstar Renzo Piano”. He left out the bit about how his party thinks the Piano City Gate project is a waste of money and that according to another superstar, Transport Minster Joe Mizzi, the garden that was to be part of this masterpiece shall instead be turned into a car park. Such elegance, such sensitivity and style: you’d have thought Labour never had it in them.

Well, we can excuse Muscat for telling half of the Piano story because he was selling Malta and that we shouldn’t be washing our dirty linen in the international public eye, especially if it is Labour linen.

Then came the bombshell. As Muscat made his pitch for cash and yes, talent too if you happen to have it, he looked majestically into the future and said: “We believe these are the new borders of a brave new world.”

In the last century, there were two visionary books that looked pessimistically into the future. There was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and we received a twisted version of that in the golden years of Labour. The system failed miserably and kept Labour on the opposition benches for a quarter century.

Muscat now opts for the other book, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which proposes a softer form of totalitarianism, one based on a drug called soma that ensures that no one is ever unhappy in a pleasure-seeking society, free of religion, permanently entertained, and of course, suppressed.

In Muscat’s Brave New World, nothing is intrinsically wrong, so long as it foments a feel-good factor

In Muscat’s Brave New World people are kept doped with VAT rebates, two-cent fuel cuts, free concerts, promises of mega projects, decriminalised marijuana and yes, a three-legged horse statue at City Gate to flatter that growing stream of pseudo-artists.

That horse is a brilliant piece, and that’s not just because it has exposed the immense ignorance in this country. Like all art, it is useless, and that is what it should be. What it should not be is State-financed, because then it is no longer art, it is an indulgence – dope.

In the Brave New World that will be Malta, Muscat told his New York audience, there would be “legislative agility” and a “short legislative distance between investors and policymakers”. In Malta, those who take decisions are “accessible and ready to listen”. In other words, it’s a free for all. Just take a look at the countryside and you see what you get. Look at the anarchy in Armier and now San Blas. That’s what happens when decision-makers are accessible.

In Muscat’s Brave New World, it is a wild world, where everything is negotiable, principles and values especially. This kind of world does not attract investment or talent. It just attracts pirates, adventurers and corruption.

It is not backroom arrangements that true investors with talent want. They want a free market economy, with proper stringent laws, just like we have for the financial sector, thanks to the Nationalist Party. They don’t want a flexible government. They don’t want a pirate country with a banana government to whom you can readily turn to at whim. They want to be free to operate, and the smaller and more distant government is, the better.

Why is it so impossible for Labour to understand that the root of Malta’s success story lies with freedom and rule of law and not with backroom deals with the likes of Gaddafi and Kim il Sung and now possibly China?

With this kind of thinking, Muscat is the worst prime minister to have at the helm as Malta’s independence turns 50.

With its ups and downs, independence has been a success story, thanks mainly to the Nationalist Party and certainly no thanks to infantile pipe dreams like the ‘neutrality’ the great Dom Mintoff shoved down our throats, like he shoved down much of everything else he did.

Now our Foreign Affairs Minister George Vella, conscious of another brewing conflict down south in the country Mintoff so much loved to visit – Libya – is admitting that neutrality is no guarantee that the country shall remain untouched.

So finally, the cracks are beginning to show in that constitutional provision that insists we are to keep equidistant between two superpowers, one of which no longer exists.

“The time has come to revise our military defence provisions,” Vella said, because what applied in the 1980s does not apply to today’s circumstances. He doesn’t explain what the new provisions would be. The truth is, neutrality has never served for anything. Working for peace in the region is fine, ineffective as Malta may be. But insisting on staying neutral when there is a clear choice between what is right and wrong, that is an amoral foreign policy and intrinsically wrong.

In Muscat’s Brave New World, nothing is intrinsically wrong, so long as it foments a feel-good factor as our environment pays a horrible price, as will our children. Selling passports is not a Brave New World. It is degenerate, like much of what Labour has stood for over the years.

With nothing to offer from its history but rot, no wonder the government has hijacked the 50th anniversary independence celebrations, under the excuse of unity, another Labour piece of dope. “It was destiny that Labour has the opportunity to organise the celebrations,” Muscat said on Sunday. It’s bad karma for the country, more likely.

The sad thing about all this is that people are still falling for this rhetoric, because they still have hope for a perfect society under our visionary Muscat.

Thomas More’s Utopia would make good reading for them. It’s satirical, by the way.