They want their money
The Labour Party claims that it was not consulted before the decision to increase the salary of members of parliament. But now the party’s leaders have taken a unilateral and summary decision that Labour MPs should accept the increase but direct it to a charity fund which the party has set up.
An important distinction has to be made between refusing the increase and accepting it and passing it on. Newspapers and commentators are making the mistake of describing the Labour stance as a refusal to accept the increase. But this is a salary and not a donation. In order to pass it on to somebody else, you must first accept it. Then you can donate it.
Labour’s decision, taken without consultation, has put a rift already between those MPs, including party leaders Anglu Farrugia and Joseph Muscat, who have decided to be magnanimous and donate the extra money to charity because they can afford to do so, and those who quite understandably wish to keep it for their families.
Faced with a fait accompli in which the Labour Party leaders have decided to set an example without prior discussion, their position is now very difficult and they resent having been painted into such a tight corner by a boss who seems to think in ‘I’m all right, Jack, so stuff the rest of you’ terms.
Those Labour MPs who are determined to keep the money – and they’re right because it’s theirs – now face a situation in which they are being put under pressure to give it up.
When the newspaper Malta Today asked some Labour sources for names of those who refuse to relinquish their pay increase, the response it got was, unbelievably, “Dak li jhawwad, dak li jaghmel ta’ rasu, u s-serp.”
That’s a lovely way to discuss your colleagues.
ROMANTICISING UGLINESS
A beautiful book has been published about Strait Street in Valletta during its lowest point, which some insist on seeing as its heyday. That’s right – a beautiful book, which is perfect if you wish to see that part of the city’s history through the rose-tinted glow of romanticism.
But in reality, it’s wrong.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about Strait Street’s past. It was hideous, sordid, violent and abusive, a place where girls as young as 12 (and even younger, if the price was right) were sold to men by the hour and small boys were made to be ‘nice’ to men who paid their prostitute mothers and violent, drunken fathers.
The whores were beaten by their pimps, who were usually their own male relatives, and had little or no chance of escape unless it was by tricking or treating a sailor into marrying them. The conditions in which they lived were beyond squalor.
Yet we persist in looking only at the painted bar signs, the old photographs showing gaily dressed girls of the night, whores with hearts of gold, and jolly transvestites at the piano.
Because these are all we now have, plus a few verbal accounts from survivors who prefer to put a gloss and a spin on things, if for no other reason than the obvious one that they are too ashamed to tell the truth, we take it as evidence that Strait Street was a sort of stage-set with dancing girls and chorus-line sailors in their little white hats.
But nobody would have gone behind the scenes to photograph women being beaten into submission, terrified boys made to offer their rear to strange men, the neglected and abused children of prostitutes who never had a father but who had plenty of ‘uncles’, the poor nutrition, the sordid living conditions, the ghastliness of the reality.
The appalling story of that poor child Twanny, killed and half decapitated by his mother and her husband around 50 years ago, did not come out of nowhere. Behind the smart townhouses and the upper-middle-class families tal-Belt that was what life was like in Valletta’s notorious slums, and it was those slums which supplied the human meat trafficked, for there is no other word for it, in Strait Street.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about prostitution, white slavery, sex with children, little girls raised to pleasure men, their births regarded as the felicitous arrival of yet another sex worker to bring in the sailors’ cash, boys violated for money, backstreet abortions, children whose idea of a family was 20 people packed into the same room and for whom incest was normal, drunken violence, beatings, murders and knives.
Any true history of Strait Street cannot be divorced from the reality of life in Valletta’s slums. It was a sub-culture unto itself. But no book for popular consumption will be written about any of that, because popular consumers just can’t face the truth that Giga and Twanny were not an aberration. Only his murder and the manner of it were.
This article was published in The Malta Independent on Thursday, 30 December.
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So true. Well said.
Dear Daphne – please do write a book – please.
Well done, Daphne! Facts are facts, and remain facts, even though some endeavour to hide realities!
It is certainly a question of accepting the money and income tax has to be paid on that amount. I hope Dr Muscat does not now come out with the idea that it’s tax free as it is being donated to charity.
Mela veru ghal certu nies xejn mhu xejn. Mhux kulhadd jaf li Strada Stretta kienet bejta tal-prostituzzjoni, tat-tahwid u tal-abbuzi. Imbaghad hawn min ipengiha bhala post romantiku u ta’ nostalgija.
Lili dan it-tip ta’ passat ihammarli wicci bhala Maltija.
Xi nghidu ghall-“penny joe”? Ghal penny tfajliet zghar joghllu d-dublett ghall-bahrin. Kultura moqzieza ghall-ahhar.
As you rightly say, one may only donate what is one’s own.
The MPs who donate the whole of their salary increase to charity must pay 35% income tax on the value so donated
CIR would do well to take note.
So now we are trying to romanticize sordid Strait Street, Strada Stretta or the Gut thanks to”Biografiji” and this new book. Way back in the Sixties I used to work at Scicluna’s Bank on Palace Square and our office had windows overlooking Strada Stretta.
The afternoon office monotony used to be broken by one of the harridans screeching “L-iswed ma hallas” and all hell used to break loose, with bottles, chairs and even tables used as weapons.
The British Military Police and the US Shore Patrol used to wade in with truncheons flailing. Malta’s finest used to stay on the side-lines and let the action die down before moving in.
The Maltese, English and American language used was quite an education in itself after my seven years at St Aloysius College.
Your piece on Strada Stretta is excellent. This romanticising of Strata Stretta has been going on for many years. I always had this nagging doubt that something was not quite right. In spite of my doubts, I was willing to accept what in effect was an attempt to re-write Malta’s social history.
The gist of your article is that people should question what they hear and read, even on subjects which at face value seem to be non-controversial and hence less susceptible to spin.
Agree .Never accept anything at face value and have an open enquiring mind.