I left the previous edition of these wise words (if I don’t praise myself, no-one will) up to see if I’d get any reaction from the rabid revolting racists but a week has gone by and got no takers, which is encouraging. It seems that the fervour of these louts is diminishing, as they realise that as soon as they open the cess-pit that is their mouths, right thinking people from all over the place demonstrate the distaste for racism.

All I got instead was a particularly strange, and absolutely out of context, comment about Elves and Smurfs. I don’t recall who the wit was who bandied the “Smurf” crack around (Smurfs are blue, you see – geddit?) and I’m afraid I don’t have the energy to surf across to the portal. Was it someone using the surname “Magri”, don’t quite remember? Schoolyard-style taunting is only fun if it’s done with aplomb, and peculiar grammar and syntax don’t help at all.

I reiterate my plea for someone with a psycho-linguistic bent to research the phenomenon that links bad grammar with apparently lefty tendencies. Is it something to do with the side of the brain that functions when trying to create apologia for the jolly old Labour Party or what? Answers by comment or in columnar form please, though without racist overtones or total incomprehensibility.

Another reason I didn’t add to the sum of human knowledge was, well, I was on holiday in windswept Gozo and nothing moved me to put fingers to keyboards. Sheer laziness if you ask me, and in my own defence I did go for a couple of walks, trying to assuage my conscience after taking too many carbs on board and indulging in too much fermented grape.

I’m not about to comment on the current dispute between the General Workers ’Union, the Malta Dockers Union, the MMA and the Freeport, for various reasons which do not interest you out there in the blogosphere. Is “blogosphere” the right word, incidentally, or is its use in the context of a real journalistic portal offensive to the amateurishness of the bloggers’ world?

The reason I’m not commenting, as I say, is not of interest to anyone but my reticence will not prevent me from making a couple of observations on ancillary issues that are unconnected with the dispute itself.

One such pearl of wisdom takes the form of a question.

All the social partners, worthy members of society that they are, have commented on the harm that this sort of thing does to all concerned, which is an indisputable truth. Many of these worthies have also said, drawing themselves up to the full height of their pomposity, that the law should be changed to cater for this sort of controversy and give a means to resolve it without all concerned having to resort to the equivalent of violence and mayhem (OK, I use those words with wild exaggeration, for dramatic effect, if you like)

Well, might I humbly ask where the social partners were when the main body of employment law, the Employment and Industrial Relations Act of 2002, was being drawn up?

I can tell you: sitting around the table gassing about it, that’s where. They had every opportunity to regulate the matter of union recognition and to establish a method to determine which union, if any, had the support of the workers in a work-place.

Did they do that? Did they buggery. Recognition disputes had played merry hell with the industrial relations scene for quite a significant time before the law was changed and the people responsible for amending it and consolidating passed up a perfect opportunity to salve that particular wound.

Why? Don’t ask me, I wasn’t consulted (no reason why I should have been, except that there were those of us who could have been useful in debating the real problems in this area)

All I know is that the unions were involved in the process, the employers were involved in the process and the Government was involved in the process and no-one thought it would be useful to regulate the process of determining union recognition claims. What were their reasons? Frankly, I don’t have any direct evidence, but somehow I have this nagging feeling that deep down, many of the players rather enjoy a good old-fashioned “my club is bigger than your club” barney.

Another issue connected peripherally with the dispute is a crack made by my old friend Dr Toni Abela, speaking with his politician’s hat on during some Sunday jolly or other (I think it was Sunday, though perhaps it wasn’t, since last Sunday was Easter Sunday and politicians have family lives too)

Toni A. saw fit to invite the President to intervene in a controversy that had already taken on pretty significant political overtones, as things tend to around here.

What, I have to ask, was Dr Abela thinking?

Firstly, the Presidency, in our manifestation of the office, does not involve itself in such things, they being the province of people who get down and dirty and take sides. Secondly, the request was potentially personally embarrassing to the President himself, who at different times in his former life was legal advisor to both the unions involved in the dispute.

What did Abela expect, that the President would stick up for the GWU and turn his back on the MDU? Or that he would back the MDU and spurn the GWU? What? This was, in my humble (!) opinion a faux pas of epic proportions and it is worrying.

It is worrying because it shows either that a leading exponent of an important political bloc has absolutely no idea how the Presidency works or should work or that said leading exponent is so enamoured of the pithy sound-bite and the catchy idea that he is oblivious of the embarrassment he might be causing, to himself, to his party and to other, significantly more important, institutions.

I don’t know which is the more worrying of the two: let’s call it a draw, shall we?