I remember those days only too well.

How anybody could even consider voting for these tossers is mind-boggling.

Progressivi, my arse.

http://archive.maltatoday.com.mt/2002/11/10/sav.html

The wikipedia entry on Toni Abela is extremely chaotic. (No surprise there.)

In that incredible chaos there is a beacon of even more intractable chaos:

“He currently holds the greatest political comeback within a party in Maltese political history, being expelled from a party and later becoming deputy leader of the same party within 20 years.”

(There is also written he was President of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1989. How can that be when Sant was President from ’84 to ’88? Were there two Presidents?!)

Are you sure Toni Abela was party president in 1983? I think he was party president after Alfred Sant, that is 1987 or 88, and then resigned (alongside Wenzu Mintoff) in the early 90s.

In 1983 somebody else was President of the Labour Party. Dennis Sammut perhaps?

[Daphne – No, Alfred Sant was president of the Labour Party back then. I know because he was married to my husband’s first cousin at the time, and when we married in 1985 we had to, against our wishes given the horror of the times, invite the president of the Labour Party by default. Fortunately, he wife came alone.]

La Redoute, Rover’s was only a rhetorical answer.

@snoopy

It’s not as unbelievable as it sounds. Joseph Muscat promised a ‘new’ party implying that the future will not necessarily reflect the past.

Given the performance of the present administration, I felt that he deserved a chance – he couldn’t have done much worse than this lot.

It’s only lately that the likes of Joe Grima and the old guard reared up their head and appear to at least want to be dictating PL policy henceforth. This is a new development and will need to be considered in the light of their past.

Let’s see where the two parties are heading in the next couple of years.

We have their confirmation — they call those black years, “the glorious past”

@Reluctant Voter

The past is a mirror of the future.

You have lost hope but then are ready to take the biggest gamble of your (and your children’s) life by “hoping” that “despite its appearance, the PL might still be able to deliver this time”

This is akin to that woman who has been beaten up by her partner but accepts to get married to the same person, hoping that he will change!

Unbelievable!

It was only after the intermission and the phone calls that Toni changed his stance and even then, you could easily see his discomfort since I’m sure he knows that there’s more to the story than a simple court case about the violation of mooring restrictions (time – 58mins).

Remember that Toni Abela, apart from being a lawyer, was also the party president in 1983, when this case came to light.

As an aside, Karmenu Vella seems to be in the habit of making disparaging comments when it comes to the privatisation of public /parastatal entities by the current incumbent. Wasn’t this also the strategy of the Alfred Sant government, of which Karmenu Vella was a cabinet minister? In case his memory does not serve him well, here’s an excerpt from an interview with Alfred Sant (http://www.alfredsant.org/pages/dassingle.asp?id=239) –

“When Labour came to government in 1996, there were no plans at all by the previous administration, to privatise the then Telemalta corporation. We initiated that from scratch, in the same way that we liberalized, if that is the word, the gaming industry where there had been a monopoly.”