It gets curiouser and curiouser. The man we elected as prime minister appears to have just one talent to show and that’s to sell what is not his. The signs were there when he came up with that dreadful idea of selling European passports in a scam scheme he peddled around as foreign investment. The initial public reaction was of repulsion, but Joseph Muscat managed to break the ranks of the opposition by applying his next best talent – flattery laced with money.

In no time at all there came forward many converts to the scheme, selling passports and renting out sea-view flats in Sliema, in one unending tea party.

When Muscat sold part of bankrupt Enemalta to Shanghai Electric, many thought that it was a grand slam until it emerged that he had not just given the communist Chinese government control of our energy supply but also vast tracts of real estate in industrial Marsa.

He is indeed a great salesman, this Prime Minister, of land that, however, does not belong to him.

And now we are confronted with a pseudo-American university in Marsascala, a foreign land-grab of prime real estate. Three of Muscat’s minister-status stooges, Evarist Bartolo, Leo Brincat and Chris Cardona, ridiculed themselves last week when they stood up for the project saying building on virgin land was fine because it was educational.

Their shameful statement didn’t go down well because practically everyone, including a stunning number of university student organisations, in whose interest Labour pretends to speak, has rubbished the idea.

Labour and education do not sit well together because, much as they may hate to be reminded in surveys, Labour and the university-educated middle class just don’t mix. The latter are far more intelligent than the average Labour voter.

Back in the golden years of Labour, Bartolo, Brincat and Cardona were happily cheering away at Labour meetings while their illustrious leader, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, waged war against Church schools under the slogan Jew b’xejn, jew xejn (for free, or nothing at all).

Feeding on working class jealousies for those better off, Mifsud Bonnici argued that the Church should open its school doors to anyone and not just to those willing to pay. In the end, the Church agreed and the government has since been footing the bill.

Yet, something happened in those terrible Labour years that hit a nerve in a people that said there is a point which they would not go beyond. The Church schools crisis saw many anonymous heroes standing up for what is right, whatever the cost. That crisis spelt the end of Labour. They had met their match – the conscientious objector.

The sham university project in Marsascala is not the last of Joseph Muscat’s delusions of progress

The events of the last days indicate that Labour may have again hit a raw nerve. This time round people are standing up for the environment, late in the day as it may be. Something happened at that spring hunting referendum that has loosened people’s tongues, making it easier for them to stand up for their rights, for the common good and for their children who deserve a future in the same way that, 30 years ago, their own parents stood up for their right to a proper Catholic education.

The ideological catastrophe that Muscat has wreaked upon his party since he took the helm is now being exposed. This weekend it emerged that Labour was officially de-listed from the Socialist International, for not paying its fees.

Membership of the Socialist International had led Dom Mintoff to lock horns with his nemesis, Archbishop Michael Gonzi, with the subsequent religio-political crisis that crippled Labour for a decade.

Having flushed away all ideology and political principle, Muscat’s first clash with new Archbishop Charles Scicluna is ironically over land speculation, capitalist style, by his own ‘socialist’ government. Talk about a party in deep rot.

Ministers Bartolo, Brincat and Cardona, once considered as moderates, must now explain how their party has moved from a position that education should be free for all to a position where education is for foreign students only, on prime virgin Maltese land and at a price that only children from the oil-rich Middle East will be able to afford.

Ideologically, Labour has reverted to the same colonial mindset that Mintoff fought so hard to destroy but failed.

Labour is today promoting exactly the opposite of what Mintoff stood for. It is selling off tracts of land to foreign interests, be they Chinese communists or a Jordanian land speculator, and then marketing it locally as some foreign investment or, more shamefully, as a foreign investment in our children’s education.

It is anything but investment in education. It is the regeneration of Malta’s oldest profession after piracy, prostitution.

The Prime Minister may have pushed his luck, and charm, a little too far with the Marsascala project. Of course, there are those in favour, like the business community in that former fishing village and the local football club, which has been promised a playing field. How far-sighted and intelligent they must be. But, then, Marascala is a Labour stronghold.

Also in favour was the self-proclaimed king of the south, Labour MP Silvio Parnis, whose colonial servitude to the foreigner would have earned him automatic party expulsion had Mintoff still been around.

Instead, there is Muscat and, to this country’s shame, he thinks exactly like Parnis. He thinks we must be grateful for the morsels the foreigner gives us, whatever the price. No wonder he campaigned against European Union membership. He does not think Malta is up to it.

Muscat speaks only in superlatives and thinks he can still impress the country with grandiose projects that do not get off the ground. In Qatar, last week, he announced yet another mega project, a helicopter base in Malta by a company called Gulf Helicopters.

It is “premature to give more details,” Muscat said, to the relief of anyone remembering him announcing a similar project, a drone factory in Gozo that would even require a runway.

And, on Sunday in Marsascala, he gave warning of a big project by a major private investor in the ‘north’.

“It will not be in an ODZ,” Muscat quipped, thinking he was being funny. That joke was actually immensely offensive because it showed exactly how frivolously he treats natural heritage.

We really cannot expect better because we do not know what Labour promised before the election and to whom. Evidently, that irate Labour backbencher, Marlene Farrugia, does not know either. She is only now finding out about these promises, revealed in slow, painful phases and sold off as a foreign investment to a credulous electorate.

Ask the Jesuits who run a retreat house on the outskirts of Mosta what price they will soon have to pay for some electoral promise that will see a Russian company opening a shooting range right next door.

The problem with the sham university project in Marsascala is that it is not the last of Muscat’s delusions of progress. Land reclamation will probably be next, Dubai style, with so-called iconic buildings on artificial islands off Malta’s shores. This may have been the true reason why he was in Qatar but we can never know. In this aspect only, Muscat is exactly like his predecessor Mintoff. He treats his country like a fiefdom and his electorate with disdain.

With Labour in government, one must always expect the unexpected. Those who took the risk two years ago with Labour have only themselves to blame. As Lewis Carroll puts it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”

Some people who should know better were too quick to reach for that bottle marked “Drink me”. Now there’s a man in Castille with the grin of a Cheshire cat.

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