I. M. Beck used to have this problem and I’m no different. Sometimes stories start to break just as I’m sitting down to write the column on Wednesday and such is the nature of the beast that I know full well that by the time you get to read the fruit of my labours, the news cycle will have charged on, sometimes leaving the story high and dry, on other occasions changing it completely and on yet other occasions, making it totally irrelevant.

This is happening as I write. The European Parliament is settling down to discuss the prostitution of our, and Europe’s, citizenship and, on Thursday, the day before yesterday from your point of view but tomorrow from mine, a vote will (have) be(en) taken, either vindicating Joseph Muscat’s stance completely or – more likely – reddening our national face even more than it is already.

Whatever the result, frankly, Muscat’s scheme has made me embarrassed to be Maltese for the first time in many, many years. The controversy has raged for weeks – months, in fact – and Labour’s little weasels have struggled manfully to divert our attention from the primary issue, that of the sale of our passport and, hence, our identity, our European identity, for cash. They took their inspiration from their supreme leader, of course, as is their wont.

It was reported in one of the Sundays, or online on Sunday, that in his brief address (don’t remember where or to whom) Muscat said the major difference between Labour and the Nationalist Party lay in the Opposition’s insistence in tarnishing the country’s reputation over the controversial citizenship scheme. This contrasted with Labour’s belief in a united country, Muscat said, adding that, “whatever some may say”, Labour was honouring the Malta For All electoral slogan.

It is clear that Labour’s doers and shakers are stuck in the 1970s and 1980s

I’ll leave out, for the moment, the last, albeit enormous, red herring that Muscat has seen fit to chuck into the mix.

You’ll have noticed, astute reader that you are, that Muscat has run a billowing great flag up the flagpole and all his obedient foot soldiers are saluting it madly, trying to make us all forget that the real problem lies elsewhere.

Desmond Zammit Marmarà and Cyrus Engerer, to take but a couple, were zealous in marching to Muscat’s tune that it is the nasty Nats who are failing to wrap themselves in their flag and chant ‘my country, right or wrong’ and spit in the face of all those horrid foreigners who are so jealous of the billions that Malta will make from selling our shiny red passports.

According to Pied Piper Muscat and his lemming-like followers, it is the Nationalists, until lately depicted by Muscat and his followers as being broke, unable to organise a booze-up in a brewery and basically ineffectual, who have rallied behind them CNN, The New York Times, Reuters and virtually every other media organisation in the civilised world.

Not only that, the Nationalists have persuaded Hannes Swoboda, the leader of Labour’s own grouping in the European Parliament, and European Commissioner Viviane Reding, to name but two of the many who have condemned Muscat’s cunning passport pimping plan, to come out against it, because, don’t you see, said Nationalists are hell-bent on embarrassing the country and doing down Malta just to further their own warped agenda.

The leitmotif of Zammit Marmarà and Engerer and their fellow travellers’ apologiae for the Labour Party is a combination of the aforementioned ‘my country, right or wrong’ mantra and an equally repetitive chanting of ‘don’t wash our dirty laundry in public’.

They ignore, either because they are inherently incapable of discerning the higher values that should guide them or because it is expedient for them to do so, the plain and simple fact that it is Muscat and the people who dreamt up this cheap scheme who have embarrassed the country and not those of us who have stood up and attacked it for what it is: a tawdry, money-grubbing disgrace.

It is clear – from this and other events in our recent past – that Labour’s doers and shakers are stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was relatively easier to perpetrate all manner of boorishness and get away with it because communications weren’t what they are today. Even then, of course, anyone who tried to expose Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s machinations to the outside world was berated as a traitor and threatened with the consequences of breach of the Foreign Interference Act, as insular and fascist a piece of repressive legislation as any aspiring dictator could salivate after.

Today, communications know no borders and the idiocies and foibles of everyone, from the President of France and his pillion-riding escapades to the less amusing, but no less public, prattling of people like Muscat and his ministers, who think they can say one thing in the European Parliament (Edward Scicluna, are you watching?) and another here, are out on show for the whole world to see and cackle at.

Why else would someone like Scicluna think that he can tell the EP that his master’s scheme is not about the money, while Muscat and the Bunnymen (wasn’t there a band called Echo and the Bunnymen?) spread it around for internal use that they’re going to make billions out of this and that’s why the Nationalists are trying to stop it, because they’re jealous and they know that Labour will be unbeatable for years to come because of it?

But wait, the MHRA (the body that represents hotels and restaurants, for heaven’s sake) and the General Workers’ Union, surprise, surprise, have come out in favour of Muscat’s money-making little ruse, so that’s all right, then.

I mentioned that I’d leave the bit about Labour honouring the Malta For All electoral slogan, ‘whatever some might say’ for later. OK, it’s later, so let’s take a brief look at this, shall we?

Let’s make it clear that I was never a subscriber to the foolish notion that governments should choose people to occupy positions of importance and that require trust and confidence in their holders by public call for applications or such-like fripperies. You choose people because you trust them and because (not ‘or’ but ‘and’) they are competent for the position, and there’s an end to it.

But, as we all know, Labour chose to ride a specific warhorse into battle and they told us that they would be doing things differently. In fact, they even went so far as to float the idea, comical as it may have been, that there would be input from us, the great unwashed, when it comes to choosing people for certain positions, though they never told us which, of course.

It is no exaggeration to say that if ever there was an electoral promise that was honoured virtually completely in the breach rather than in the fulfillment, it was this one.

Almost completely, public positions have been handed out like sweeties to people who were deemed to deserve recognition for their efforts in getting Labour elected.

Calls for expressions of interest? No, sorry, that was a pre-electoral gimmick, things have changed now. Everyone can work with us? Buzz, wrong answer, you can work with us if you’re not Labour but only where we put you and don’t run away with the idea that it will be anywhere salubrious, those positions are reserved for ‘our’ boys and girls (and they’re not even old-guard Labourites either, necessarily).

I’m not asking you to believe me, just ask the many, many people who found themselves rostered out of their jobs, had their positions changed, were fired and generally messed around with. When the Nationalists got into government in 1987, not a single one of the more than 7,000 people that Mifsud Bonnici had employed ‘irregularly’ lost his/her ill-gotten job.

The situation over the last few months has been very different. I’m lucky, I’ve never been dependent on the largesse of our political masters but many others are not so fortunate and they’re now seeing what it means for the country to be managed by the workers’ party.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20