Many years ago during the Golden Years of Labour in the 1980s, I had a complex – I was losing my hair. It didn’t help that I was unemployed and feeling utterly useless for years as the Socialist government battled Church schools instead of doing the job of governing.
Now I am told by our prime minister that our national inferiority complex is no more because he’s thrown a tantrum over migration at the last EU council meeting, or so we are led to believe.
He tells me that I, today, bald and all, should now feel fine. Actually, I’ve long got over the hair complex, dear prime minister, but I never got over Labour.
Dr Muscat’s statement on our national inferiority complex could not have been more crass. Labour, as an ideology, is built on people’s sense of inferiority – on the fear of being unable to achieve anything on their own, on the need for patronage, on the need for a centralised state to turn to in time of need, justly or unjustly.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Labour in government refined this art by spreading its tentacles everywhere to the point that nothing could be separated from Labour, not even the simple purchase of a colour television. Some people found such dependence comfortable, some even prospered under it to the point that Labour lost the 1987 election only by a whisker.
The antidote to this horror of Labour is conservatism, with its emphasis on small government, on human rights and civil liberties, and on creating the right opportunities for people to reach their full potential unencumbered by a tax-guzzling state.
The Nationalist Party didn’t exactly implement that but, had it done so gradually over the near quarter century it was in office, then maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for Labour to turn the clock back, as it is very successfully doing.
In just over six months, our foreign policy is once again a matter of “us and them”, feeding on the island’s xenophobia.
Now what would you call that if not inferiority?
Muscat’s make-believe performance in Brussels, described as sheepish by PN leader Simon Busuttil, is a cause for concern because it reflects in our government the very inferiority Dr Muscat claims to have suddenly eradicated.
No one expected him to walk away from the meeting with a ready deal in his hand. If he did, he would have ended up waving a useless piece of paper, reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in our time’ speech. So why all this grandstanding? Who is he trying to impress? His supporters, the EU, or is it maybe just himself?
It appears that the string of interviews to foreign media has impressed people locally, but anyone in the business knows they mean nothing around the discussion table. No one who matters would have watched him. It is just airtime, a fanfare for the common man.
Labour, as an ideology, is built on people’s sense of inferiority – on the fear of being unable to achieve anything on their own
Muscat appears to want to keep up the hype, possibly thinking, maybe rightfully, that he is riding a (gullible) wave of popularity locally because he appeared on CNN International. Talk about a sense of inferiority. Has anyone watched CNN International to see the sort of rubbish they sometimes bring on to fill up the airtime?
By his own shocking admission, Muscat says he uses the term “irregular migrants” abroad but “illegal immigrants” in Malta, meaning that the words he chooses to use locally are actually harsher and more provocative than the ones he uses abroad.
Should it not be the other way round, like putting people’s mind at rest first instead of working them up, then making your points strongly at the EU?
Now after threatening the EU with a veto on issues unrelated to migration, our prime minister is threatening to try to get the EU to cut aid to African countries that do not accept failed asylum seekers.
That should go down well with our local brown shirts with their own inferiority complexes. But irregular migration and development aid are unrelated, except for the fact that development aid may actually help cut down on economic migrants.
Dr Muscat also says that Malta is ready to enter into a repatriation agreement with Libya but it cannot do so because the EU has as yet not accepted that the situation in Libya is stable. Well, maybe the EU (to which we are supposed to belong) is more responsible than our government. Libya is not safe, even its own prime minister is not safe. How can we enter into a repatriation agreement with a country that cannot even control its own borders?
The reporting in foreign media is strangely different from Muscat’s version of events. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who calls the shots at the EU, has refused to modify the EU asylum law. FAZ says that EU interior ministers recently set up a working group to examine ways of making better use of European border control bodies such as Frontex.
The group is to submit a final report by December, in time for the next summit. If this is the case, what exactly is our prime minister claiming to have single-handedly achieved?
As Dr Muscat remains in election mode, pandering to a local audience and bragging of shedding a national inferiority complex that helped bring his party to office for all the wrong reasons, the reality of the real position of the European Union on migration begins to emerge: there are migration problems everywhere and Malta is not unique.
Come December, Dr Muscat will have to put all his grandstanding to the test at the EU council meeting. We can only shudder in expectation.