I.M. Beck might have wished you Happy Christmas or something on those lines, so consider yourself thus wished, so there. You have to admit that the current Labour Prime Minister has proved himself to be something of a chip off the old block, said old block being Mintoff, Dom of that ilk, whose regard for the extent to which he bothered about what anyone thought of him was severely limited, to put it very mildly.
He (the current one) also seems to keep the bad news for Christmas-tide - those of a certain vintage remember how we used to foregather for festivities but keep a weather eye on the goggle-box, whereon Mintoff would appear to deliver himself of an annual message.
Good news was never a primary constituent element of these epistles.
I have no idea what was in Joseph Muscat’s seasonal message to us mere mortals (just as I never had any idea what was in his illustrious immediate predecessor’s) but of bad news we had more than sufficient just before Christmas.
Muscat doesn’t seem to have heard the hoary old chestnut, generally trotted out by ageing blokes trying to get a leg over, about whether a young lady would sleep with said ageing bloke for 10 million dollars.
On hearing the affirmative answer, bloke downsizes his proposal to 100 dollars (I know you’ve heard this one before) and gets a resounding slap around the chops and the pointed question as to whether he thinks she’s a lady of easy virtue.
“Madam, that we’ve established, what we’re doing now is negotiating your price,” is the punchline, as you well know, this being one of those oldies but a goody.
From what we got out of the party leaders when the talks about the citizenship-for-sale wheeze thought up by Muscat and his merry men started, the parties were so far from each other when they sat down at the table that they needn’t have bothered really.
Clearly, Muscat’s position was that of your average barrow boy: “OK, never mind the quality, feel the width, if a couple of quid don’t do you, make it an even four and Bob’s your mum’s brother”.
On the other hand, Simon Busuttil’s position seems to have been more on the lines of: no, we don’t sell our citizenship, whatever the price.
With diametrically opposed positions like that, it was hardly ever likely that there would be any agreement reached, so perhaps it’s reasonable to posit the thesis that what Muscat was actually doing was what he does best, constructing a pretty facade upon which the Great Unwashed could gaze in awe.
Before the talks started, there was a groundswell of opinion gaining traction that Muscat had gone too far on this one, springing it on us without the benefit of letting us have an inkling about it in his electoral manifesto.
The international reaction, obviously coordinated by the Nasty Nats (just for the benefit of Labour’s Little Weasels, that was sarcasm) had broken over the Prime Minister’s shiny pate like a Christmas Eve tsunami. His own Minister of Finance had it pretty darn clear that the scheme was a misbegotten hunk of illegitimacy conceived so far on the wrong side of the blanket that it was not even in the same bedroom as its parents at the material time.
The European Parliament is still going to discuss the vulgar sale of European citizenship come mid January
All in all, Muscat quite obviously needed his money-grubbing scheme to be rehabilitated and that sharpish, like.
Insofar as the harm done to our international reputation, that ship has sailed, foghorn blaring and it’s bearing down on the iceberg inexorably.
No amount of tweaking now is going to help, we’re four-square within the ranks of the purveyors of convenient identities and numbered accounts and no longer a jurisdiction to be respected. If Muscat thinks that his re-jigging of the numbers is going to make a blind bit of difference, then he has another think coming.
So the only rehabilitation that was going to be of any use to him was that which affects the perception of his cheap and grubby little scheme from the local perspective. The mere fact that he entered into discussions with the Opposition, a move anathema to any Labour politician since Mintoff, will have gone quite a way down the road to letting the Little Weasels feel all nice and fuzzy about how this is a feeling, inclusive the government.
Never mind that these discussions were, it would appear now, nothing but a sop. If it used to cost €600,000 and will now cost €1 million with no material investment other than a few shares and a mid-range piece of property, with no residence qualification and no tangible links being forged, what’s changed?
The sum total of not a heck of a lot, is the answer, but in the meantime, Muscat’s quick shimmy and shake quickly got the Malta Developers’ Association on his side, though the extent to which they weren’t on his side to start with is debatable in the extreme.
I have to ask, incidentally, why anyone would think that the developers’ association ranking among those who have nodded their approbation of Muscat’s tweaking is beyond me. I mean to say, these are the people who want Mepa to become a permit factory in their favour, so perhaps one should take their approval with a cellar or two.
The bottom line is that, without so much as a by-your-leave, Muscat’s government has put our citizenship onto a market stall, weathered (when one says ‘weathered’ one means ‘totally ignored’) the storm of criticism from far and wide and made enough of a pretend gesture towards discussing changes to convince the terminally bewildered that he’s made changes while having made absolutely none to the principles involved.
You have to ask: did Muscat time it this way deliberately or did he just stick his finger in the duff and pull out a plum?
This time of the year, people don’t give much of a toss about much and hang them if they’re going to be fagged to compare what Muscat had on the table before the discussions started to what was left on the table after he’d finished.
Just for those who need a hint, there is no difference in principle, just in the price.
The thing is, of course, that simply appeasing the Weasels isn’t going to help Muscat get out of the corner he’s painted himself into: the European Parliament is still going to discuss the vulgar sale of European citizenship come mid January and Muscat is still going to have to rely on Joseph Cuschieri and Marlene Mizzi and his other MEPs to talk his walk for him.
If I were he, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a decent outcome. After all, look what Edward Scicluna, Honourable Professor and Minister of Finance, did to him when he tried to explain that this wasn’t all that important a scheme from a fiscal perspective (giving the lie to Muscat’s spin about taxes).
Inimitably, Scicluna managed to make us even more of a laughing stock than we were already and there’s nothing to indicate that anything is going to be different when Cuschieri & Co. perform their turns.
imbocca@gmail.com
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20