It took some nerve for Transport Minister Joe Mizzi to deliver a speech to mark the anniversary of Operation Pedestal, better known as the Santa Marija Convoy. In the summer of 1942, 14 ships left Britain for Malta to bring much needed supplies to a starving nation on the verge of surrendering to the Axis. A few of those ships made it, and it was enough to save Malta.
Crowds turned up on the bastion walls around Grand Harbour to cheer the ships, most especially the US tanker Ohio, laden with vital fuel, on Santa Marija Day. It is an event worth remembering each year, but not with the likes of Minister Mizzi patronising it.
Mizzi is the kind of man who cannot get a simple bus from Sliema to Valletta, let alone organise a wartime convoy, without that bus being late, overcrowded and, it now turns out, using a lane of dubious legality.
Incredibly, Mizzi managed to link the Santa Marija Convoy to Malta’s seafaring history, like we had something to do with that convoy. They were mostly British ships.
But one cannot expect better from a minister whose party thinks that World War II wasn’t ours to fight anyway, that we died for someone else’s war, as epitomised in that intellectually offensive rock opera Ġensna. Dom Mintoff’s Labour patronised Ġensna because it fed into the mythology that March 31, 1979, carried some meaning for Malta.
March 31 was the end of the British base here. It threw us into the clutches of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who liked horse riding with Mintoff at Marsaxlokk, like they were feudal lords overseeing their serfs.
Mintoff’s reincarnation Joseph Muscat treats this country very much the same way, except that he is more cynical and lacks Mintoff’s twisted ideology.
Muscat’s policies are turning these islands into a pirate base once again. We’re selling passports that don’t belong to us and promoting high-rise buildings to provide five-year rentals to new Maltese nationals (flats that remain empty because it is just a legal requirement), or to host Libyans running fake companies.
Muscat thinks these short-sighted, irresponsible, fast-buck policies spell economic progress, but they just humiliate the country and assault this nation’s dignity.
Labour understands and applies that piracy mindset perfectly: it schemes secretly to make a fast buck, but it is never clear who gets the loot
Mizzi can boast all he likes about Malta’s maritime history, but the only thing his government understands from it is piracy. Labour applies that piracy mindset perfectly: it schemes secretly to make a fast buck, but it is never clear who gets the loot. If it’s not for money, then it’s for votes. Even for something as simple as issuing bird trapping permits for autumn, the government works underhand.
The only thing that has changed about Maltese piracy since its heydays, when the Knights of St John licensed it, is that piracy has generally left the seas and gone onshore.
• The US Securities and Exchange Commission has just accused a Malta-based company of being involved in a scheme which saw traders and hackers make as much as $100 million in illegal profits over five years. Meanwhile, Italian police accuse our online gaming industry of laundering money for the ’Ndrangheta.
That doesn’t mean that we’ve lost our touch at plain old traditional contraband. On bird-loving Gozo hundreds of illegally imported songbirds are on the market, complete with false rings. This month too, the Customs Department found almost 2,000 bottles of wine being sold on the market without any excise paid, following a blitz on supermarkets and residences. Oh, how we must make our forefathers proud.
Transport Minister Mizzi can wax lyrical about Operation Pedestal, but he has nothing to be proud of when he speaks of the maritime industry that is sadly at his mercy.
Another ship has escaped from Maltese waters under his watch, this time a Turkish freighter that owed €42,000 worth of fuel to a Maltese company.
“This incident is a civil case between two private entities and does not impinge on Malta’s maritime reputation,” said Mizzi’s ministry spokesman. He might as well have said that the Turkish ship had followed Labour’s example, swindled a buck and vanished.
Labour and its pirate cronies behave like there is no tomorrow. That is why we’ll soon be stuck with a Jordanian university in Marsascala.
Those Arab students at Żonqor Point will be able to spend the nights watching Mizzi’s ships sail by and, if they’re lucky, some boat may come along and drop a bagful of drugs close to shore. Someone did that recently. It’s called maritime trade, you know, it’s in our blood.
Back on shore, our transport infrastructure and the public transport service remains an absolute mess. One pities those tourists who have no option but to brave the sweltering heat to await a bus that never comes.
Maybe some of them are here now to honour those brave men who gave their lives for us in the summer of 1942. Operation Pedestal was pulled off by heroes, but there’s no pedestal today for Mizzi and his ilk.
• The Labour government chose the feast of Santa Marija to tell us it has given a €360 million guarantee for Electrogas to build a gas-powered power station at Marsaxlokk. It’s pure coincidence, of course, that the announcement took place as thousands of Maltese were off partying in VAT-free Gozo.
Nationalist Party leader Simon Busuttil said the guarantee was simply a way for the Prime Minister to avoid having to resign. There is more to it than that. Muscat would never resign, but that power station could cost him the next election.
Muscat must be getting restless. He’s half way through his legislature and, for all his many promises of Dubai-style pro-jects, has nothing to show. He needs that power station because it would be his only achievement.
The government has tried to downplay the matter, saying the guarantee is only temporary. The implication was that Electrogas couldn’t go it alone, so the consortium came out to say that it always had the financial clout and that this wasn’t a government project anyway. That’s not the impression Labour is giving.
The problem is that Muscat cannot wait until the European Commission gives its clearance for his government to commit Malta to purchase energy from Electrogas for 18 years: hence the need for a guarantee. With the two-year deadline missed, Electrogas has the government at its mercy.
There are reports that the consortium may not like some of the conditions the commission may impose, which could slow down the negotiation process further. But Labour is running out of time. Electrogas can afford to wait for the commission’s go-ahead but the government, which claimed to have done its homework before the election, cannot.
This gas-fuelled power station will be built before the election come what may. Finance Minister Edward Scicluna said the government is ready to take on the €450 million burden of building it itself if the EU did not give its green light to the security of supply agreement. The government must be that desperate. He also said something else.
The LNG tanker, which is to be permanently moored at Marsaxlokk Bay, is due to arrive in Malta next month for conversion works. That is Labour’s Santa Marija convoy for you, a tanker full of gas for a power station we probably don’t need.
“It’s a gas!” was Mick Jagger’s take on life. That superstar had every reason to celebrate but for the rest of us mortals, life is not a gas at all. It’s an LNG tanker permanently anchored in Marsaxlokk Bay just to save a man’s skin. And we’re lumped with it.
There will be no cheering crowds when that tanker sails in. Just resignation.