Well, so much for that

If the combined forces of the Labour Party and Malta Today were capable to embarrassment, they would have been crippled by it over the last few days.

David Gatt, the disgraced policeman turned lawyer, was a Labour delegate until he was struck off the list a couple of days ago. And Malta Today has gone out of its way to publicise the man’s quest for ‘justice’ as he sought to have himself returned to the police force after a controversial and purely technical court ruling. With Saviour Balzan, any stick will do to beat the big, bad gONEziPn, even if it’s riddled with termites.

As for the Labour Party, what can I say? Malta Today’s critical faculties might be terribly damaged by its owners’ pressing need to grind their not-so-private axes, but with Labour, the issues at play are different.

We’re not speaking here of political hatred blinding them to the wisdom of not sticking up for people who might well be criminals, but of something else altogether.

Labour is the government in waiting, and yet it thought nothing of taking on as a delegate a disgraced police officer, a man who had been dismissed from the force because he had been overheard, in tapped telephone conversations, liaising with bank robbers.

The court ruled in his favour not because there were any doubts that it was he speaking to those criminals, but because the police did not demonstrate that they had a warrant to tap those telephones.

Is the Labour Party crazy or is it just completely amoral? That’s a question to which I haven’t yet found the answer in a good 30 years of wondering.

I can’t see why Labour is prepared to expose itself to risks of this nature. Surely the party’s big cheeses must have understood that if the police commissioner was prepared to stand his ground in his summary dismissal of one of his police inspectors, then the likelihood is that he had cast-iron reasons for doing so?

Or perhaps they did understand this and didn’t give a damn because he was their friend?

It appears that this David Gatt, when he was dismissed from the police force and joined the law course at the university (and even there, I have to react in exclamation marks at the fact that it is possible for a dismissed police inspector to obtain a warrant) carried out his practical experience – a necessary part of the course – with Labour’s deputy leader Anglu Farrugia.

When David Gatt sued for unfair dismissal and then for reinstatement in the police force, Edward Gatt, Anglu Farrugia’s legal partner, was his lawyer. Edward Gatt is still defending him now as he faces charges of complicity in major heists.

That apart, I can’t even begin to understand what made this David Gatt push that envelope so far – suing for unfair dismissal from the police with all that going on in his life, and then suing for reinstatement. Shouldn’t he have kept his head down? Or did somebody in the Labour Party leave him with the mistaken impression that he had the party’s backing and that he was somehow protected from justice?

No doubt, there will be those who trot out the usual chestnuts about the lawyer of your choice, and the rest of that self-serving tripe. The fact remains that Edward Gatt is a professional partner of one of Labour’s two deputy leaders and it just doesn’t do to have him defending somebody who has just been struck off the list of Labour delegates, a list he shouldn’t have been on in the first place.

LOOSE CHANGE

It was inevitable that Joseph Muscat’s decision to refuse his €27,000 pay increase would come across completely the wrong way except to his most obsessive devotees.

Alfred Sant could have done it and got away with it because the man famously has no interest in material things or ‘lajfstajl’. But Muscat is just the opposite of that. He loves material things and ‘lajfstajl’. He lives in a house with a swimming-pool, drives a big car, wears (badly at that) expensive clothes and a ghastly flashy watch, has a financially dependent wife who also spends on her wardrobe, has two children at one of the most expensive independent schools in the country, travels, eats regularly in restaurants, and the rest of it.

So the message the thinking public picks up when he brushes away with contempt the offer of another €27,000 is not that he is prepared to go without but that he doesn’t need to, because that extra €27,000 on top of what he has already will make little or no difference to him. He is comfortable enough, thank you very much.

He didn’t have the foresight to see that this is how his decision would be received by those who are struggling: that it’s all right for some; that while they’re working out how to pay their bills, Some Pigs Who Are More Equal Than Others can afford to turn down €27,000 a year because they just don’t need it as they have enough as it is.

This follows on from the debacle last summer, when Muscat tried to hoodwink us, in an interview, into thinking that his father was just a humble salesman who lugged his goods from door to door on behalf of an evil merchant swine.

Then it turned out that his father was the merchant (though not a swine) and that our man Joseph is the sole heir to a thriving and buoyant business which trades in chemicals for the manufacture of fireworks, that he never had to worry about money because he is the only child of besotted parents, and that even his house and pool were provided by those fond parents on their own land when he was still in his 20s.

So yes, it really is all right for some and that’s why they can afford to turn down €27,000 a year so cavalierly. In fact, I see from the newspapers that the only MPs who are turning down their salary increase, on both sides of the house, are those who are comfortably off anyway.

I think they are putting unfair and ungentlemanly pressure on those who are not so financially comfortable that they can afford to play the big-shot and refuse the money. I also think the refusal is unseemly and yes, even vulgar. Instead of coming across as dignified and honourable, the MPs doing the refusing strike me as boastful and crass:

“Take it. I don’t need it.”

This is because they are, to a man, fond of money – as are most people – and not a bunch of Francis of Assisis. So the gesture strikes me as false.

They should all just take the money and shut up, because their posturing is ridiculous. This is not a matter of taking something to which they are not strictly entitled, like a free gift, or which they should be above taking, like Jesmond Mugliett and his STEPS scholarship last year.

It’s a salary, for heaven’s sake.

Those who pay peanuts get monkeys, and we’ve had a parliament full of them for long enough. It’s a wonder the bar doesn’t stock up on bananas. Perhaps with decent pay we’ll start to get better parliamentarians, though it’s a long shot.

There’s another reason why they should take the pay increase: it’s about time we cracked this socialist mentality that everyone’s income has to be measured against that of a shop clerk. The sight of these chattering idiots behaving as though they’re hedge-fund managers turning down a five-million-dollar bonus just sets my teeth on edge.

They should take it, and if they really don’t need it, then they should find some family who does and pass it on, in silence and without issuing a press release about it. But by refusing it outright, no needy person is going to benefit, so the gesture is just an empty one.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday on 12 December.