Sharon needs a lifebuoy
Deportment classes required: SIT UP STRAIGHT. Thwack!
Joseph Miuscat is panting and gagging to convince us that Labour is the new Europhile party. He reckoned without Mrs Ellul Bonici, who took out a full-page advertisement in Malta Today yesterday, telling us that we need to be saved from the wreckage of the European Union, and that she’s the girl to do it.
There’s an ocean-going liner, modelled on the Titanic, with a disproportionately large EU flag, of the sort commonly used for buildings not ships, photoshopped onto the prow. And then there’s the copy:
Qabel ir-Referendum tambrulna li ‘se nitilfu l-vapur’.
Il-vapur mhux talli ma tlifniehx, talli salpa, qeghdin f’nos ta’ bahar u ma nistghux naqbzu minn fuqu.
Ajma, jahasra. X’biki ta’ partit: trying to be all things to all men – the Europhiles, the Eurosceptics, the anti-EU campaigners, the people who voted Yes and then voted for Sant, the ones who claimed partnership won the referendum and who are now saying they were never against EU membership, the Super One reporters who scared us with the prospect of Sicilian hairdressers in Made in Brussel and who are now gagging to sit at the table with all the other EU prime ministers. If the Nationalist Party is a multi-coloured rainbow – not a metaphor I would have chosen – then the Labour Party is one of the less appealing stalls at a car-boot sale.
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“u ma nistghux naqbzu minn fuqu. ”
So presumably she will work to withdraw our membership once she gets to the European parliament, right?
I pity the ones that see the world from one eye… They miss the beauty of 3D Vision. When are you going to open the other eye to see more clearly, dear Daphne?
[Daphne – Here’s another one, pitying me and calling me dear. It’s precisely because I see very clearly that I don’t support the Labour Party, and when I voted Yes in the referendum I followed it up with a vote for the pro-EU party, not for the anti-EU party. I think it’s called sanity.]
And with regards to the advert… You missed the Plot :) How can one campaign to leave the ship if its in the middle of the ocean? thats the message! So the Best way to make sure our citizens are safeguarded is to be critical of the laws. And fight for our rights!!!! meta hemm Bzonn nighdu LE!!!!!!!!!!! Do you truly love your country? are you a self centred I’m always right person?… Know thyself!
[Daphne – I stand to be corrected, but I imagine the main reason most of us voted Yes was so that we WOULDN’T be left stranded on a sinking ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. You should choose your metaphors more carefully.]
its the perfect metaphor! the EU is in the middle of the sea its still developing and forming. And we are in a position to choose its DESTINATION. We cannot tell people to get of it, because at this point not only it would be undemocratic, but it would be unwise. So if currently the EU ship is heading to a Federal Destination. We ought to be informed!
Good grief, you sound like Captain Ahab fighting against the whale.
Let me guess. kev was Aldous Huxley’s mentor. Some achievement, that.
Ironically, the Labour party is like royalty in Malta. The minute they screw up everybody comes out to defend them.
So much for equality, or are the Labour MPs pigs that are more equal than others? Oink.
To John A. G. Huxley:
I think the message is for those who wish Malta to leave the European Union and you got it all wrong. It means that now we are European Union members and there is no turning back and we cannot jump ship, meaning we cannot leave the European Union.
Sandro Vella
[email protected]
Ah, but Sandro, there’s a world of difference between “cannot” and “should not”.
[Daphne – Don’t forget ‘may not’ and ‘must not’….]
Andrea,
Would that whale be ‘Moby Dick’ or ‘Moby Joe’?
From whom is the single white rose on the floor? Sibling love or what? Some people are all for show, are they not?
Dik tal-plastic. Forsi ta min hi ried juri kemm hu pur u kast!
Il-pinna ta’ Huxley hi bhal ta’ Kevin.
The same hysterical, ‘wannabe deep and intellectual’ but actually shallow and non sequitur barker tone.
Is our Joseph trying to pull a 21st-century version of Mintoff’s wearing ‘clothes of the worker’? Very trendy in jeans, open shirt and jacket, eh? What happened to Alfred Sant’s New Labour in new suits?
[Daphne – They can’t find any with sleeves short enough to fit.]
Is it me, or has anybody else noticed that the PL (Partit tal-LE) is steadily sliding into its real position of being primarily anti-EU? The cheek of the PL candidates, who are working so hard to get elected so to represent this country (or is it their party?) in the European Parliament, is unbelievable. The mask which the PL has put on and which is meant to say that the PL has accepted EU membership, is slowly wearing off, and their true colours are coming out. The PL’s leaders know that their partisans, having been force-fed anti-EU gibberish for so many years before the referendum, have not accepted the party line, and will gladly pick up the anti-EU baton at every given opportunity. You meet them in shops, in work-places and see them on television. The result is that we get all kinds of mixed messages from Labour whenever the EU is mentioned, and the party leaders will not (make it, can not) impose their u-turn on their faithful. Pathetic.
Indeed, eros. And once they get to the European parliament, will they still be part of the rabidly pro-EU European Socialist Party? Or perhaps they’ve been feeding a bunch of lies to the ESP these last five years?
MLP, I salute your effrontery.
And you don’t realise, eros, that once Malta joined the EU we all became EU citizens, including those who voted No?
Don’t you realise that this is our parliament at a federal level and those who voted ‘No’ have a right to be represented if their numbers suffice, and that they also have a right to participate in the shaping of the future EU?
Don’t you realise that Malta pays 5 million euro monthly to the EU budget and that roughly half of that money comes from those who are not as starry eyed as you.
Have you any idea of how democracy works at a federal level? Do you know why the EU is not yet a federal state and which EU insitutions operate in a federal way?
One thing I realised from this campaign is how horribly uninformed this population is. Totally oblivious! And that includes people like you and others on this blog who hold pretentions of ‘knowing it all”.
Now that, eros, is what is truly pathetic, and what you wrote is indeed gibberish to the informed.
@Kev. But don’t you realise that you’re not singing the same tune as Labour, which has now seen the light on the EU?
In Malta the voters make up the party, because voters vote for the candidate. In other countries they have lists. Top of the list is assured to become MEP if the party gets one seat, and so it goes down the line, district by district. This has ensured that more party cronies get to the top of the list. The Maltese and Irish systems are much more democratic.
I don’t know what you mean by Labour having “seen the light on the EU”. Is this another way of saying “pro-EU”? For starters, it was ‘pro’ or ‘anti-membership’. The pro and anti mindset should be dead by now, and yet it lives within us in the form of a zombie. So what light is it? That the majority said Yes to membership? You need to update the PC inside your skulls, people. It’s version 0.9 today – that’s at least six upgrades behind time.
Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick’: From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale
Whatever PC version you use, it always downloads the same information: there were a whole load of Kants who did their damnest to keep us out. That will remain, forever, an indelible blot on their record of poor judgement, no matter how much they now try to squirm out of it. You can delude yourself, if you wish, that it’s a dead issue. I can assure you, mate, it ain’t.
And as for “the voters make up the party”, that’s not quite right either. Don’t forget that our electoral system allows for non-party voters to vote as well, down the line, for candidates of a party they have little sympathy for. Non-party voters can influence which candidates of that party are elected. They can vote for the least obnoxious amongst them.