He is standing on a pool table that was a gift to the Labour Party by China in the Golden Years ™.

That’s why vicious characters such as Leo Brincat and Karmenu Vella are still around.

I think the truth is rather more bleak. Eddie Fenech Adami and the Nationalist Party were wrong to practise reconciliation at the expense of justice.

Many of today’s Labour leaders would have been total nobodies were it not for their spectacular rise through the ranks in a system which co-opted and turned a blind eye to thugs, henchmen, criminals and corrupt officials from the Labour era.

It is so damned Southern Mediterranean to confuse justice with retribution or revenge. And so the canker grew and spread. Twenty years later, there is nothing that can be done.

That is what I had said for the PN in the 2008 election as well.

I must concur that I was (pleasantly) shocked and greatly surprised at the leadership of EFA immediately after 1987. I had grown up “knowing” that a Labour govt meant good things to Laburisti – at the top of the tree anway, and repression to Nazzjonalisti top to bottom, lack of freedom of expression even, that I simply thought this was normality, that now it was the Nats turn to simply get even.

Hence the “shock”.

[Daphne – A man wrote it.]

I am not talking about exacting revenge. I am talking about acknowledging what people went through which is a different thing altogether. By handling it the way he did, the pain still exists for so many. We should have done what South Africa did with the Truth and Reconciliation. People were forgiven their actions but only once they admitted them.

As it is, not only have they not admitted fault (at Muscat’s attempt at this was nothign but a feeble election ploy) but have strategically and systematically rewritten what happened,seeking to eradicate all evidence of the wrongs committed. We now have the very real risk that the very same people who caused the injustices in the ’80s are going to be running the country again.

Muscat is ensuring that they keep a relatively low profile lest they upset his carefully managed marketing campaign. However, they are there, back in the fold. Unfortunately the one good thing Sant did by getting rid of them has been undone by Muscat’s manouvering. By his attempt to embrace all and sundry so that he can gather every single vote possible regardless of the expense.

There is no doubt that it is the Nationalists who have tried to make Malta Taghna Ilkoll – first EFA with his policy of reconciliation – then Gonzi who even awarded the highest post in the country to a Labourite. By nominating George Abela to the post of President of the country, when he had done very little to deserve this in the first place, Gonzi made a very clear statement that he was reaching out to the whole of the country.

The way this was repaid? the President’s own son and his daughter-in-law have been at the forefront of the Labour Party’s campaign instead of keeping a dignified silence as members of the President’s family. But then ‘ dignified’ is not something Labour understand.

Is everybody on Facebook?

As you pointed out, Labour is seeing politics as a zero-sum game where one Clique is taking everything for itself and its friends, so all Malta is theirs.

They want to be the new Clique for whom Malta is all theirs, “tagħna (il-Klikka) lkoll”.