Someone should remind the Italians that we Maltese really don’t like being bullied by larger countries. It’s true we did not make it to the World Cup but hey, neither did they. And if anyone thinks that football references are too flippant for the latest unfolding drama of the Aquarius migrants crossing the Mediterranean, that is exactly my point.
The reaction of the populist and inexperienced Italian government to its first migrant emergency is as predictable as allowing three rebellious 13-year-olds with little knowledge and less respect for road safety regulations to drink and drive their first car. They fought over the wheel, smashed into the first available wall, then looked around to blame someone else. Part of the problem is that Italy’s new prime-ministership is in reality a three-headed Cerberus, each head vying to out-bark the other in protecting their voting base from the migrant hordes.
But another part of the problem is Europe’s near-paralysis when it comes to Mediterranean migrant policy. The European Commission has confirmed that Malta stuck to the letter of the law with the handling of Aquarius, and France declared its disgust at Italy’s cavalier attitude to its legal and humanitarian obligation. The Italians then retorted angrily that France should be the last to talk about fulfilling migrant policy obligations. But it had to be the new Spanish premier who actually showed some compassion.
The Yes Minister-like internal inquiry brilliantly succeeded in not asking the questions that really mattered
This policy, or lack of it, is now not only allowing the drowning of hundreds of migrants. By exposing the manifest mismatch between Europe’s substantial capacity and weak will to take coherent and effective action, it is defining Europe’s identity to itself and other peoples around it. MSF may call forlornly on Europe to put “people’s safety before politics”. But Europe’s migrant policy is like Gulliver, held down and helpless by the parochial agendas of countless little people.
Because this is not just a Mediterranean issue. Italy’s is but the latest in a wave of populist governments and resurgent parties – see Brexit, Hungary, Austria and now even Germany – that mirror the prevailing rejection of the European values of welcome, asylum and integration. Europe is the greatest net exporting continent of migrants in history, and most of it is ageing rapidly. Yet it persists in its non-policy of death that presages its own.
Of course, we Maltese have been there, done that. Joseph Muscat famously launched his illustrious premiership with trying to push back migrants and calling on Europe to “smell the coffee”. He has now polished his act, as evinced by his recent declaration in Parliament. But not only is he a populist at heart: he has transformed the PN into his own, brasher, image.
Adrian Delia tweeted that on migrants Malta should come first and foremost. Dom Mintoff would have been proud.
Carmelo’s Box
A week is a long time in politics, said UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s. In today’s 24-hour news cycle manipulated by fake news, it could seem like a light year. Minister Carmelo Abela’s flat-footed response to claims that public sector workers did private work at his residence using public resources seems to have already receded into the mists of political amnesia.
But it would be a mistake to succumb to political fatigue and let it drift away. Let’s go along with the story that the decision to contact the particular worker was not Abela’s personal initiative but his wife’s. That the works on the minister’s residence were not done during office hours and the raw materials were paid for by him (but they were bought during office hours). That the worker did not want to be paid for his work but that the minister insisted and topped up the costs on his own initiative.
Doesn’t he get it that the worker was obviously trying to put the minister in his debt for possible future pay-back? Did he not tell his closest family members, as all new ministers with a shred of dignity and ethical sense have done before him, to avoid like the plague anyone trying to curry favour, to not even be perceived to be exploiting their privileged position?
Even if Abela did not open this particular Pandora’s Box, he is guilty of not slamming it shut and throwing it away when he realised what was happening (what did he know and when did he know it?).
Furthermore, by insisting that an independent inquiry was not needed because the Yes Minister-like internal inquiry brilliantly succeeded in not asking the questions that really mattered, he has opened himself to charges of lack of transparency and abuse of power.
When even a personally decent man like Abela can be seduced or hoodwinked into thinking that his ethical sloppiness can sink unnoticed in his government’s general quagmire of nepotism, mis-governance and political cronyism, that really shows the state this country is in.
sandrospiteri1965@gmail.com