I sometimes wonder whether the world we are living in has not turned itself upside down. What was right is considered wrong and what was left is now right. It reminds me of the answer that a former well-known and humorous person is said to have once given to the question of how does one drive in Malta.

His answer was: “If you drive on the right you are wrong and if you drive on the left you are right.”

Actually, his answer, even though it makes for a good anecdote and introduction to my essay this week, was not quite right since Maltese drivers do not follow this rule or any other rule for that matter. They tend to drive on neither side of the road but in the middle or preferably in the shade which changes from morning to afternoon.

Back to the theme of the topsy turvy world we live in and in particular this little Island State of ours.

I am inspired by a famous speech given in the House of Commons, by the then MP, Glenda Jackson. Jackson was a famous Oscar winning actress who had been born into a working class family and who left her acting career to be elected to Parliament for the Labour Party which came to power after the long period of Tory-led governments and Thatcherism.

The speech was held on the occasion of the death of Margaret Thatcher. Many speakers had praised her and then Jackson Jackson stood up and harshly criticised the former prime minister for having seriously damaged the fabric of society in Britain.

I will quote relevant parts of that speech since, in an absurd and topsy turvy fashion, they would apply to the present pseudo Labour Party of Malta that is now in power. What Jackson criticised the Tories under Thatcher for, is the same criticism that could and should be levelled by any Socialist or working class person, worth their salt, of Joseph Muscat’s government of today.

What did Glenda Jackson say in that famous speech?

The party ruling Malta today has been hijacked by a set of oligarchic developers, financiers and investors and by a set of unscrupulous politicians

It (Thatcherism) “was still wreaking and had wrought for the previous decade (in our case in Malta read Muscat’s government and half decade), the most heinous social, economical and spiritual damage upon this country….  Our local hospitals running on empty, patients were staying on trolleys in corridors. Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials such as paper and pencils. The plaster on our classroom walls was kept in place by pupils’ artwork and miles and miles of sello­tape; the books that were there were held together by the ubiquitous sellotape”.

“In coming to the basis of Thatcherism, I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperately wrong track down which Thatcherism took this country. (Sounds familiar when applied to the present Labour Party policies in Malta?)  We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice – and I still regard them as vices – was, in fact, a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees, all these were the way forward.”

If I were a young Maltese voter, whether a member of the Labour party or not, or  a citizen who has been brought up to learn the value of work,  of compassion, of care for the environment, of the rights of workers, of fairness, of moral and social values, of care for the weaker in society, of respect for pensioners and their needs, I would read in that speech by Jackson, as applied to Malta, a damning and pointed condemnation on the same party that she belonged to, that now rules Malta. The party ruling Malta today has been hijacked by a set of oligarchic developers, financiers and investors and by a set of unscrupulous politicians who started their rule by immediately entering into tax avoidance schemes with secret accounts in offshore tax havens.

So topsy turvy is Malta that the former Labour Party is super ‘business-friendly’ and laissez-faire in its policies and the Nationalist Party is now moving to place social affairs and the needs of the weakest in society as the basic pillars of their policies. Maybe they should trade names. After all, everything has a price and nothing has value.  No wonder people feel lost!

That the voters and party activists from within the Labour Party do not feel the same way towards their party, as Glenda Jackson did about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher so many years ago, astonishes me. When some commentators, who have had long experience, continue to praise and support the amoral and unsocial regime of our country, they damage their own reputation more than anything else.

To conclude, with one last phrase from that famous speech, I wonder whether everything is right or wrong, when an “aspirational society” was defined as a society which knew “the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador of Malta to the European Union.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.