COME ON GUYS, GET ON WITH IT

The Labour Party is being surprisingly circumspect and giving me little, if anything, to write about. Yes, sure, the usual suspects like Anglu Farrugia and Jason Micallef get up to their familiar antics from time to time, but there’s nothing really juicy into which I can get my teeth.

This, of course, is the usual excuse of the columnist or blogger who has no inspiration or inclination to write and who thinks he has to get off his back-side and meet a deadline. The beauty of blogging is that there isn’t the formal structure that the print media demands, so you can slack off and pretend that you needn’t write if you have nothing about which to write.

Which is true, but only up to a point. For my weekly column, Wednesday night rolls up and I have to sit down, poise the laptop where it should be and hammer out the requisite number of words, whether or not Joe Muscat or whoever had done or said something worthy of a few pointed barbs.

In fact, there is something to write about – there’s plenty. I could have another rant at the parliamentary economies with the truth resorted to by the FAA in their desperate defence of St John’s, valiantly preventing the wanton demolition of the nation’s place of worship for the erection of a tower-block in the manner of the early Seventies.

I could – yet again – demand the resignation of the Cinema and Theatre Classification Board, for their obtuse refusal to recognise that I have a brain and that they have no right to tell me how to use it.

Apparently, one of the reasons why the literary luddites lowered the boom on Stitching was that it contains blasphemy against the state religion. I am open to correction on this, as I am sourcing this from reports carried in the foreign press and we all know that “foreign” means godless dens of sin and iniquity: why else was the Church against Integration all those years ago?

So, it seems that Ms Friggieri has taken upon herself the role of crime prevention: the play is blasphemous, so it can’t be performed. The idea that criminal prosecution could have taken place after the event seems to have passed the lady by completely.

A new target for a good old rant has shown up in the form of the ADT’s deployment of speed-cameras all over the place, establishing a new, and ludicrous, speed limit of 60kph.

I have to ask: has anyone within the decision taking process actually tried to drive a car at this stupid speed? Quite apart from the fact that you’re risking being whacked in the rear by someone who – quite justifiably – assumes that an appropriate speed is a tad higher than an arthritic snail’s pace, you can’t actually maintain a decent cruising progress at 60.

But does that worry the ADT? Of course not, as Bill Hacker used to believe, we have to do something, in this case about bad driving, this is something so let’s do it.

One can only hope that someone, somewhere will see sense and get speeds up to normal levels. A bit of decent traffic policing would help, too: for instance, if I get cut up on the Mriehel Bypass again by some fool who thinks I’m sitting in the outer lane in slow traffic for my health, I might very well succumb to a spasm of road rage.

The Labour Party has done something I can comment about, of course. It has proposed, and the Government has agreed, that a debate be held about the problem of illegal immigration.

No sooner had this news broken than the filthy racists, both the indigenous and the extra-territorial ones, started bellowing their usual slogans, generally mis-spelled, often hardly coherent, but always venomous.

I don’t know if Joe Muscat and Lorry Gonzi read this blog. I imagine they have better things to do with their time. But you – yes, you, the one reading this – could do me a favour, especially if you’re one of the honourable ladies and gents who has speaking privileges in the House.

Could you pass the message on to your leaders, and to your honourable colleagues, that this is the time, the perfect time, for the country to see a show of unity and a clear, unequivocal and resounding condemnation of racism, overt and covert

Tell the racists that their contribution to solving this problem is not welcome, would you? That we have a problem, dwarfed as it is by the problems that drive these human-beings towards our shores, is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is the way some people, who think they’re superior to anyone with a darker skin, for some unfathomable reason, think the problem can be solved.

It’s Friday night and time for supper, so any errors are the result of my failure to proof-read.