Guest post (this means I didn’t write it, though I certainly agree with it)

POSTED BY ‘NEVER AGAIN’

Yesterday I watched a current affairs program on Net TV about the vote. The participants were David Aguis, Francis Zammit Zimech, Owen Bonnici, and last but not least, Leo Brincat.

As usual, there were references to ‘blogs’ and requests that they be shut down, this time from Leo, of course further enhancing his democratic credentials.

Wait a minute, what democratic credentials?

Leo Brincat was part of the 1981-1987 government. Like the rest of them, he had an opportunity to show his democratic credentials in December 1981 and turn to his leader and tell him that he should re-draw the electoral boundaries and call another election.

But he did not do that, so he failed his democratic test, one for which there is no re-sit. To add insult to injury, when his government continued to degenerate into an endorsement of police torture, crowd violence, intimidation etcetera, he did not get up and leave. He stayed which means he endorsed it fully.

Not only did he stay until the end, he stayed in the party after democracy returned, as if nothing had happened, which again means he endorsed the behaviour of his government. He should have at least had the good grace to bow out of politics forever. But what am I talking about – the MLP and good grace, that’s a contradiction in terms.

And here’s another thought about Leo, more about spine and the national interest rather than about democratic credentials.

Compare with Lino Spiteri. Lino Spiteri also did not have the good grace to bow out of politics after 1987, but at least on another level, that of the nation’s economic interest, i.e. the replacement of VAT with the suicidal CET tax, he did have the good grace to resign as soon as CET was promulgated.

Of course, he could have threatened to resign or bring down the government, quite frankly for a much more valid reason than the right of transit through a yacht marina, (or not being made a minister, if it comes to that). But that’s asking too much of a labour politician. Back to Leo, he JUMPED at the opportunity to replace Lino and continued to preside over the implementation of the CET farce.

Whilst on the subject of national interest, again, what cheek. Leo and most of his colleagues have been consistently on the wrong side of the national interest, such as CET, the EU and the Euro. How dare they say what they say about Richard Cachia Caruana, (or anyone else) when it is clear that he has demonstrated more competence than the lot of them put together?

How dare they even dream of suggesting he would work against the national interest when most of his adult life has been spent working in its favour (and getting stabbed and almost dying in the process)? How do people like this have the gall to challenge other people’s integrity?

Labour have sent a very clear message here. I have always contended that competent and intelligent people are very reluctant to work for Labour administrations, irrespective of their political leanings, because it is clear that they will be left in the lurch and dumped if it suits Labour to score a political point.

That is another reason why a Labour government is a priori doomed to be a failure. Good people won’t work for it.

You can say what you like about Austin Gatt and the Arriva saga, but you must not forget that he spent the last five minutes of his speech in the no-confidence motion against him, defending his staff.

If you listened to the speech, as I did, rather than read it in the newspapers, that is what you came away with, a demonstration of leadership qualities the Labour Party can only dream of. That’s how you get people to work for you.

Not only do Labour send the message that competent people shouldn’t work for them, they also send the message that it is all right for MPs to attack civil servants carrying out the government’s policies, further eroding the base of competent people willing to take on the role of senior civil servants, to the detriment of the nation, and might I say it, against the national interest.

Later on in the programme, when taken to task for the atrocities of the 80s, Brincat had the gall to attempt to create a moral equivalence between that and Eddie Fenech Adami’s statements about Alfred Sant and his son not getting into university. And he was serious.

He says that Joseph Muscat ‘apologised’ for the 80s, but in reality he did not. He said a few meaningless and generic words and even those words can’t be taken seriously when (a) Leo and others like him are still in the Labour Party and (b) he and others make statements of a similar nature.

Owen Bonnici also had the temerity to bring up the MLP/Church dispute of the sixties. How does Mintoff picking a battle with his former colleague Archbishop Gonzi in any way justify the violence and oppression perpetrated by the Labour government for 16 years?

Why should the Nationalist Party be held responsible for a battle between the Labour Party and the Catholic Church, which weakened one (or both) of them? And let us also not forget that this battle was actually partisan.

Archbishop Gonzi was an elected senator for the Labour Party in an earlier life, part of the Boffa faction, a man of integrity who, you may recall, was deposed by Mintoff in a dirty campaign where he insinuated that Boffa had slept with his own daughter. So Owen, check the facts, won’t you?

Finally, Leo also made some reference to the anonymity of those like myself who comment on this blog and elsewhere. There’s a reason for that anonymity. We are writing about the Labour Party. We remember its methods.

We see that it still contains people like Leo Brincat who by their continued presence in the 1981-1987 government endorsed those methods, and we see the glorification of that period by Joseph Muscat and others as a further endorsement of it.

That’s why we comment anonymously, and that is not a reflection on us, Leo, but a reflection on you.