The worst scandal to ever hit the Maltese islands has left us all baffled at the extent to which greed has crept into the top echelons of the government and the Labour Party.

This is clearly a blow to the moderate Labour supporters and to honest workers who struggle on a daily basis to make ends meet. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat spoke a few days ago about the right for everyone to have aspirations, but he was so disconnected from his audience that it no longer sounded credible.

Ultimately aspiration and greed has become the Achilles heel of this government.

They aspired to run the country as if it was their own property forgetting that they are there to serve each and everyone of us. Today’s movement, as those who ‘aspire’ to move forward like to call it, no longer represents the Labour Party or at least the Labour Party we knew.

You could say a lot of things about the Labour Party but at least its ultimate mantra used to be that of protecting society’s most vulnerable. What we have seen, one scandal after the other, from Café Premier to the Gaffarena case, is how this Labour has left its core voter base behind.

Labour supporters are feeling betrayed and no longer ready to defend the morally bankrupt leadership
of the party

And Muscat can huff and puff till he’s as blue in the face as his tie, but the fact remains that a government minister and his own chief of staff have set up structures whose purpose, one can justifiably suspect, is to prevent the Maltese authorities from knowing two things - the first is the amount of money being squirrelled away and hence avoid any tax on it, and the second, even more serious, is to hide where that same money is coming from.

This is utterly unacceptable to anybody who has a modicum of sense and objectivity.

It is no wonder that more and more genuine Labour supporters are feeling betrayed and no longer ready to defend the morally bankrupt leadership of the party. They realise that the party leadership has removed core Labourites who were deeply socialist at heart and who we might have disagreed with but who were ultimately honest.

And it is these honest people, like many others, who are slowly starting to realise that Labour has tricked them. That Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri cannot see what is wrong with their actions beggars belief.

No politician, let alone those in top positions in government, should be involved in the setting up of shell companies or trusts in their name or their family’s name let alone when this happens to be in a shady jurisdiction like Panama. When you are there to serve the public you are judged on your actions.

While the Prime Minister’s chief of staff comes from business and should have stayed there if he preferred the allure of money to public service, Mizzi is a different kettle of fish.

He promised a new power station that has not yet materialised and he is responsible for selling many of Malta’s assets behind our backs and without having the decency to publish the contracts. What is becoming more and more evident is that this aspirational style of politics is such that what this government seems most interested in is to emulate the world’s one per cent (who have accumulated the wealth of the rest of the world’s population put together) forgetting all along about the social conscience that the Labour Party and socialists should be known for.

They used to accuse the Nationalist administration of high electricity bills, but let us not forget that the price of oil was at an all-time high and we were facing one of the world’s worst economic crisis since 1929.

But then again, while promising to reduce the electricity bills, we are now facing the highest prices for fuel every time we fill our cars with petrol or diesel, when the international price of oil is at an all-time low. Things will never be the same after the shocking revelations of the past few days.

Many are feeling a huge sense of betrayal but those mostly betrayed are the genuine Labour supporters who have been waiting for many years only to see their ‘aspirations’ fizzling into thin air.

Dom Mintoff had toppled Alfred Sant’s government after saying the latter’s government had lost its social conscience.

He would probably conclude today that under this Labour, social conscience, or any other form of conscience for that matter, was never there in the first place

Charlot Cassar is a Nationalist Party Marsascala local councillor and an election
candidate.