Last Sunday MaltaToday published an open letter to the Prime Minister by a group of people the newspaper des-cribed as “26 left-leaning individuals including academics, former dockyard workers, pensioners and Labour activists”. I will refer to them as the Group of 26.

The signatories include Dominican missionary Fr Ġwann Xerri, a personal friend of former president Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva and an advisor to the incumbent President Dilma Roussef – both of Brazil; Prof. Peter Mayo, a scholar and prolific writer of internationally published academic papers; former prime minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and former chairman of the Drydocks Council, Sammy Meilaq.

The letter was hardly given any importance by any of the other media but its content and the fact that it had been written is very significant.

Several can be the reasons for the lack of coverage.

Some media outlets are still taken up by the alleged abuse of one Dominican friar and consequently other subjects receive less attention.

In spite of the extensive coverage of the alleged abuse, most audiences have not been informed that the person pushing the story had been condemned to prison because he defrauded an old, vulnerable woman. One can say that it takes an abuser to recognise an abuser!

But this is not the main reason for the lack of coverage. There are other more important reasons. Firstly, several of the positions of the Muscat government that were heavily criticised by the Group of 26 are in line with the neo-liberal thinking which today is mainstream in many sectors of Maltese society. The media is not well-known for criticising mainstream positions.

The second reason is that some of the signatories are considered to be passé by the majority of the Maltese. Muscat managed to win the election so convincingly because he also distanced himself from some of these persons. It is a pity that because of the presence among the signatories of some of the political dinosaurs of the 1980s, the importance of the contents of the letter has been gravely undermined.

The third reason is that the ideas of the Group of 26 have been described as ‘left wing’, something which is not very popular with the current mood of the electorate, so much so that in 2013 the same voters elected an eminently right-wing government deceptively garbed in the pseudo-progressive hobbyhorse of sexual orientation.

The ideas of the Group of 26 can be described as left wing but really and truly they are Christian positions to the bone. The letter could (perhaps should) have easily been penned by Caritas or the Peace and Justice Commission of the Church in Malta.

The present writers have one important advantage over the rest: their writings cannot be credibly described as an attempt to undermine the government, a common accusation hurled at those who criticise it.

The message of these Labour Party voters to Muscat is similar to Dom Mintoff’s message to Alfred Sant: you lost (or at best, are losing) your social conscience. They just used slightly different words.

They urged the party “to change its course, amend its ways and return to its fundamental values and aims, the most important being social justice and the elimination of poverty and want” and “the party has embarked on a path that steers it away from its fundamental principles”.

While “recognising the positive achievement of the present administration”, the Group of 26 showed their disapproval for several things with which the government is blotting its copybook.

According to the report in MaltaToday (I do not have the original letter), the group said the government appeared to be “unable and unwilling” to consider a decent increase in the minimum wage or take measures whereby wealth is redistributed in a just and rightful manner.

It said the economy seemed to be favouring the rich and penalising the interests of the working people, of pensioners and of those in the lowest echelons of society.

The group said wages and pensions are falling when compared to the cost of living and poverty is on the increase, that a number of ministers are unjustly targeting people on welfare, hinting that people belonging to this category are the only ones that abuse the state’s coffers.

It said the government seems to be going out of its way to please the construction lobby, not merely by relaxing the rules that protect our environment, but also by refraining from enacting measures aimed at curbing the exorbitant prices of houses and dwellings to realistic and decent levels.

Public auto-criticism of institutions one belongs to is shunned by many as a form of disloyalty or as naïve pandering to the opponents

They criticised the government for having no intention of tackling the problems that exist in the health sector which “is riddled by abuse and ill-function that frequently lead to a situation whereby if one cannot pay for private consultancies and medicines, one will be seriously affected in their wellbeing”.

The main items missing from this long list but which are added to the list of others are the stench of corruption and the total disregard of the pre-electoral promise of ‘Malta Tagħna Lkoll’. This is the real Achilles heel of the Muscat government. A person who actively contributed to the electoral campaign of the Labour Party told me: “I cannot believe within few months of its election there is so much corruption”.

The initiative of the Group of 26 is important in itself and independently of its content. Intelligent public discussion about political issues is by and large lacking. We cannot allow popular political public discourse to be relegated just to the tit-for-tat banter and ad hominem attacks that suffocate cyberspace.

Public auto-criticism of institutions one belongs to is shunned by many as a form of disloyalty or as naïve pandering to the opponents. This reaction towards criticism is the norm in the political arena and very common in the ecclesial sphere.

The open letter challenges these popular attitudes which are generally fomented by the leaders of organisations who are more bent on keeping their hegemony on ‘their’ organisations than in its mature development.

It is high time more people in various institutions follow the example of the Group of 26. The sooner we realise that the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality benefits neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’, the more we can move forward as a nation.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt