Joseph Muscat’s ‘Letter from Valletta’

Not many people in Malta read Progress, the online magazine published by the ‘progressive wing’ of the British Labour Party. So you will have missed, in all likelihood, Muscat’s ‘letter from Valletta’, published just as he was leaving for a lengthy holiday in Italy with Michelle, Edward, Elena and ‘di kits’.

In it, he writes about how his government “joined forces with the private sector to modernise (Malta’s) energy sector”.

What private sector? By that I suppose he means the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan with Siemens and a couple of Maltese fixers thrown in, who are always there when there is a big state project no matter who is in government and no matter whether it is their field of expertise or not, and the Chinese government, through one of the limited liability companies of which it is the sole shareholder.

You also get an interesting insight into his attitude: that political parties are not pressure groups and that they exist not to pressure the government to make changes but to get into government and make those changes themselves.

All well and good, except that in our system, just as in Britain, the political party which is not voted in to government automatically becomes the Opposition – and the sole role of the Opposition is exactly that: to keep the government in check and to pressure it to make changes for the better, or not to make the changes it plans to make if those changes are not considered to be for the better.