Lydia Abela wants my feedback. Well, she got it.
Lydia Abela, national executive secretary of the Labour Party, with Magistrate Consuelo Herrera at her 45th birthday party, discussing the finer points of the living wage.
Lydia Abela, daughterin-law of the president of the republic and national executive secretary of the Labour Party (whatever that means, though I suspect she has replaced Jason Micallef in all but name) is busy sending out round-robin emails.
These emails seek to encourage people who are not members of the Labour Party to send an expensive text message, vote for the party emblem, and automatically, without signing up to any terms and conditions, become a card-carrying Laburista.
This is the email Dr Abela sent round in Maltese and English. This is the English version.
THE LABOUR PARTY IS GOING THROUGH AN EXCITING PERIOD OF CHANGE
Under Joseph Muscat’s leadership, we offer a vision that unites together a Movement of Progressives and Moderates in our country.
It is a dream which together I believe that we can achieve.
I urge you to join our growing team of those who believe and are ready to work to see this dream become a reality.
Today I would like to invite you to take part in the choice of our new emblem, which will include the torch being our main symbol.
In former Prime Minister Paul Boffa’s own words, the torch ‘represents progress, a guiding light, education and love’. The new design shall represent an evolution to reflect the way the party is renewing itself so that the message it relays remains relevant in today’s age.
I am sending you the three emblems that have been shortlisted by an expert group following an open call for proposals.
If you are already a member of the Labour Party, you can send your preferred choice by SMS on 50616119*.
If you are not a member, you can enrol and at the same time send your preferred choice by SMS on 50618913**.
The voting is now on and will close on 10th October 2010.
If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact me on [email protected]
I look forward for you to join me and the rest of us in this historic change.
Feel free to circulate this email to your friends and contacts. The more, the merrier!
Lydia Abela
PL National Executive Secretary
*In order to ascertain a democratic one member, one vote system you are asked to indicate your ID Card number together with the letter of the emblem of your choice in your SMS. Each SMS costs Eur 1.16c
** To become a member send your ID Card number together with the letter of the emblem of your choice. Each SMS costs Eur7 and includes a one year membership fee and participation in this process.
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Given that the Important Persons among the Labour hierarchy don’t read my blog – or so they say, though I know Kurt Farrugia does because each time I call him a dwarf jester I get a stream of anonymous and hysterical slander – I thought it best to send my feedback direct to Dr Abela on the [email protected] address she gave me.
I know that you would want to read it, too, so here it is.
Dear Dr Abela,
In an unsolicited round-robin email to people who are NOT members of the Labour Party, encouraging us to vote for your new emblem – and this when your party had said that voting would be open only to members – you asked for feedback.
Here is mine.
If the Labour Party is able to receive feedback via email, then it is also able to receive votes via email.
It is ridiculous, insulting and money-grubbing to ask people who, you tell us, are buried under the weight of their water and electricity bills and who can’t afford to eat steak on Saturday night and have to eat a pizza instead, to send feedback via free-of-charge email while overcharging them on a text message for their vote.
You’re the ones who want their vote, so you shouldn’t be charging them to give you what you want from them. The way it works is this: you pay them for their vote by way of offering an incentive: vote and win a cruise on the MSC Splendida, courtesy of Hamilton Travel, for example.
But then I had almost forgotten that the Labour Party doesn’t understand how the market works. In the Labour Party’s world, you make people pay for giving you their things.
Though I have definite views on the three shortlisted emblems, I have no wish to be made a member of the Labour Party against my will and charged €7 for the dubious privilege. So I will not be voting.
After getting several thousand people to queue up and pay a contribution to the Labour Party’s mass law suit on car VAT (or so they were told) and now this, I await with interest any future initiatives the Labour Party might devise to wrest money off the starving populace so as to pay for the policies it is not developing.
Yours sincerely,
Daphne Caruana Galizia
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But this is the best bit: my email bounced back within seconds, with the message ‘This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:
Labour – they can’t even organise a piss-up in a brewery.
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Effing unbelievable! Imagine what they’d do should they win the next election. Il-vera “amateurs”.
What a fake. If she wants feedback, can’t she give out her own email address? Or is she afraid that it might actually work?
I think that “This is a permanent error” describes the Labour Party to a T.
550 error. Unknown user.
I don’t blame them. It’s not as if they actually expected feedback from their members.
Unless, that is, said member left a post on Facebook before asking “x’inpogi f’ta labour fejn em subject, aa?”
I can’t help noticing the glaring grammatical mistakes in the email. However please allow me to point out Dr. Abela is the president’s daughter-in-law not his daughter.
Now for such an insignificant slip of the mind you will be charged with perjury. It’s all the rage now for non-consequential memory slips. Forgive me, I digress but I’m still incredulous.
[Daphne – Yes, I know. It’s late, I’m exhausted, a friend has pointed it out already and I’ve amended it. And my mind has been sapped dry by today’s unbelievable folly.]
If I send an SMS to Lydia Abela, will it make a difference if I send it in the afternoon or in the evening?
I also received the letter last night and am trying to find the sender’s ISP so that I can report it. Sending hundreds (thousands?) of emails haphazardly amounts to spamming, especially when they are trying to sell a product or service.
They also tell me to “feel free to circulate this email to your friends and contacts” which, in my opinion makes it a form of chain letter.
The email finally asks me if I want to unsubscribe from a “josephmuscat newsletter” to which I’ve never subscribed.
I received mine on my university email address. These addresses are hidden accept from university employees and one has to log in to access them.
So I believe that as usual with the PL, they have found some good friend within the university (and I might know who this person is) who has downloaded all the university’s list and given it to the PL.
The good thing is that one can blacklist the MLP email addresses and all goes down straight to spam and from there directly to trash.
I believe that as long as they include an unsubscribe link – even if the mail was unsolicited and your email address was clearly harvested – they can’t be accused of spamming.
I’m not familiar with/ aware of any equivalent Maltese legislation to this effect, but that’s the way things are in the US: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm Not saying it’s ethically right, but the law is the law, for good or for bad.
It would also be interesting to look into birthday greetings and other letters sent out of the blue by MPs in brown envelopes carrying the House of Parliament stamp and presumably paid from our taxes.
I have received such correspondence from both sides of the House in the past. How is that different? And I never saw any unsubscribe mechanism explained in those letters, either.
Today I received one too. Funny how the unsubscribe link points to josephmuscat.net, not the PL site.
QUOTE “the torch ‘represents progress, a guiding light, education and love’.”
The torch represents first degree burns which will ruin you forever. Even when not in government, that’s what the PL is good at, let alone, God forbid if they were to win the next elections.
U hallina Lydia Abela especially when I see that photo and remember what happened in the Courts of Justice yesterday. It’s one of those days when I wish I wasn’t born on this rock!
Maybe they are still using Alfred Sant’s computer with all its errors and misprints?
What a laugh – this is the first time I saw this pathetic Dr Abela doing something.
The more sophisticated and professional they try to be, the more ridiculous they look. They embarrass their nation from the Opposition benches.
I cannot understand why the SMS vote rip-off isn’t given more prominence on the PN media.
Ghax raqdu raqda fit-tul.
First of all the SMS thing is truly ridiculous. As Daphne suggested we would expect the PL to actually give an incentive and not ask for payment. So I came to the conclusion that the PL is truly cash strapped and that it has already decided what logo it wants so the vote is just a cash cow.
Is the PL so lacking in leadership that they can’t even decide what emblem it wants?
As for the claim that the torch ‘represents progress, a guiding light, education and love’ I couldn’t disagree more and I think iIm not alone in thinking so. that might have been a good question to ask the public for feedback about.
“Prime Minister Paul Boffa’s own words, the torch ‘represents progress, a guiding light, education and love’.
Yes, Lydia, inspiring words indeed – but then Paul Boffa was a man who inspired the people and whose good leadership qualities stood out during the difficulties and sufferings of WWII and, when Paul Boffa uttered those words the ‘torch’ was in HIS hands.
Lydia, you ignore what then happened when Mintoff grabbed the torch and ran off with it; using its guiding light to lead his followers back into the depths of medieval darkness and ignorance from which, three generations on, they are still unable to break out.
Thanks to Mintoff and to the entire circus act in the red glass house that succeeded him, the MLP/PL torch emblem now symbolises nothing other than fear, injustice, abuse of power, inept government, and maladministration. It is a badge of shame.
And, Lydia, when all is said and done, a torch is useless when its bearer has no clue as to where he should be going – Joseph Muscat’s stewardship as torch bearer amply demonstrates that truth.
These are the people who will govern us, only because some PN big guns are quite a bit too much.
‘The more, the merrier!’ she says.
Reading that immediately brought to mind Matthew 8:28-34 – the bit about the pigs.
“What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”
Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”
He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw Him, they pleaded with Him to leave their region.
This passage always makes me smile and think of the Labour Party.