GUEST POST. Labour – So the party’s over
The Leader of the Opposition with Super One cameraman Byon Jo Zammit
This post was written by somebody other than Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Has anyone seen the Partit Laburista lately? I haven’t. Why has it gone missing?
Since the electoral campaign kicked off, Joseph Muscat has driven the party out of existence and has installed instead, well, himself.
Over the last four and a half years, since he was made Labour leader, he has given us glimpses of what he had in mind for the political party he leads. But it was only during this electoral run-up that the penny dropped.
Let’s put the clues together, shall we?
A few years back, without batting an eyelid, Joseph Muscat abolished the second most crucial party post after the leader’s – that of secretary-general. Party officials and party delegates did not bat an eyelid, let alone ring an alarm bell.
Even the press seemed to detect nothing untoward.
A few weeks ago he sacked his deputy leader without so much as a nod to the party delegates who elected that man, and who should have been consulted and asked for their vote.
The new party logo, launched with so much fanfare, has gone missing from the forest of Labour propaganda around us. Labour candidates do not even use the party name.
At Labour mass meetings, the party’s two deputy leaders are not allowed to speak – no, not even the much-lauded Louis Grech. Their role has been limited to being ushered on stage to clap at the end of the Great Leader’s speech, like two show-girls on something produced for one of Silvio Berlusconi’s TV stations.
More embarrassingly, the leader’s wife, who has absolutely no official role within the party, is given precedence over them.
All Labour candidates have been banned from appearing on stage at mass meetings. They are herded into the pit at the foot of the stage to clap their hearts out and rub shoulders with the Antonella tal-iSnobbys of this island.
Who is launching all of Labour’s electoral proposals (such as they are) from health to Gozo to justice? Joseph Muscat is.
All his spokespersons have been either excluded completely or reduced to playing fourth fiddle.
Do a little surfing of discussion programmes on television, and you’ll discover a simple truth. Eight out of the 10 men and women “representing” Labour are not the ones who will be governing the country if their party wins. They are only the faces of convenience required to sustain the JosephMuscat.com fiction until election day.
Finally, tomorrow we will have the ultimate piece of evidence that marks the death of the Partit Laburista. Joseph Muscat will be submitting the electoral programme for approval by the party’s general conference delegates. Given that he has already launched most of it, tomorrow’s exercise will be a political sham straight out of a dictator’s play book.
And the Labour Party’s electoral programme will not be launched at the party’s headquarters after approval by the party’s delegates, as it should be – as, indeed, the Nationalist Party’s was. No. It will be launched during an evening session at….the Bay Arena in Paceville.
The ultimate irony is this. Here is a man who four years ago spoke about broadening the party to the extent of rebranding it as a movement. At the time, it sounded like harmless political puffery. Now we know what he had in mind. The movement turned out to be a fiction and in the process turned his party into one as well.
What’s left out there now is only JosephMuscat.com, the ultimate fiction towering over both, a manufactured cult.
How did Joseph Muscat, an ex Super One reporter, get away with this political heist? Why wasn’t there anyone in the Labour Party who felt able to speak out about the emperor and his missing clothes? Sadly, this country does not have a long and deep-rooted democratic tradition.
Even more sadly, Labour always represented, and still does, the plants with the shortest roots. Mintoff’s uncouth authoritarianism is just a short step away from Joseph’s faux tal-pepe version.
Let’s face it. Joseph Muscat’s campaign is not about electing a party to government on 9th March. It is only about making him prime minister.
Beyond this goal, there is a gaping dark abyss. It stretches from Labour’s mad promise to lower water and electricity rates, on day one of the campaign, to today’s equally mad promise to build a “small” cruise liner terminal in Gozo’s harbour. A small cruise liner terminal for what – small cruise liners?
Not enough people see all this now. Those who should and who can make a difference prefer to turn their eyes away from the empty darkness between these two promises and lull themselves into the belief that ‘Malta Taghna Lkoll’ is what they really need to make their lives better.
The sad bit is that if JosephMuscat.com is elected on 9th March, everyone will be caught in the downward spiral, whether they wanted it or not.
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Yes, smaller cruise liners, Club Med style. Problem is those things tend to be extremely fickle about their destinations. They get to decide, which they do, off Xlendi.
He also said it could also be the ones which stop in Valletta, making Malta and Gozo a double destination.
Would that be the big ones then?
Things got interesting when he mentioned, in passing, some incentive package consisting of an undisclosed discount on fuel if these oblige to stop in Gozo.
A proposal to sell fuel to cruise liners if they stop in Gozo, unbelievable. The gall.
They’re looking at Mgarr harbour. Now then, why try fitting a full sized quay when Hondoq’s so close?
Imagine the view from the blue lagoon, those poor posidonia meadows and the bathers from Nadur, left in the shade of some 10 storey behemoth.
Another one of his personal responsibility or else perhaps?
Who came up with this one, Schettino? Plenty of uncharted reefs there.
“He also said it could also be the ones which stop in Valletta, making Malta and Gozo a double destination”.
That actually destroys his idea completely. If he is serious about this he should realize that in a six or seven day cruise, very rarely would a cruise liner stay in port for two days. This means that the ‘double destination’ he talks about is probably two hours in Valletta and two hours at Mgarr/Xlendi or wherever.
Not enough time for tourists to shop Valletta or Gozo. Who wins, in all this? Absolutely no one. It sounds like a lose-lose situation and yet another harebrained proposal by Joseph and his gang.
Yogi Berra made an amazing comment: ‘Deja vu all over again’.
Hitler also played little Joey’s game. Super result.
Expect the same from little Joey. Disaster on the people, a ruined economy and country, little Joey strutting around the ruins, blaming all others, retiring to his bunker, and sucking his pudgy thumb.
It looks like nobody’s thinking this through. If we elect Joseph Muscat and he becomes PM, we’ll wake up on 10th March and that’s when the party will be over.
I wish we’d realise we’re handing him OUR country, OUR money and OUR future for his personal pleasure.
It’s all a game to him. Trouble is, we’re the toys.
Saw a beautiful super-yacht once: name was “Just another toy.”
Yes, Baxxter. Toys are toys no matter the size. Isn’t Joseph good at keeping some for a while? Pity about the discarded headless ones. What do you think he does: sends them out for recycling or patches them up with a good amount of tape to fix up a new, dolls-house-functional albeit not prime-action material model? Remove the bits he didn’t like for an instantaneous remodelling. Door always open type?
Lego-type? a thought a minute, refashioning according to whim and current lobby group, but no trace of any of this come end of day? no longevity of plan.
The first debris of a person who operates in this way is psychological. What is going to happen when after having given their vote, they all approach with open hand? What he’s forgotten to factor in is that a person who operates in this way usually hops from country to country, venue to venue, group to group, hoping the two don’t meet.
Even now, look at the ride he’s getting: he is counting on the fact that no one within that camp will stop to think and question… at least until election time. And of course little hope that any one in his camp understand that someone can take you for a ride so badly: they haven’t experienced it yet. We have, but Mintoff wasn’t on our side-then. In terms of negative experience, in terms of mass, he mainly has a horde of virgins. The rest, the ones who do know better, are in for gang-rape.
What they are chanting at the moment, the empty mantra, is just incidental disappointment of so many years in the Opposition exploited by the Joseph and Co to suit their ‘movement’.
At some point however, things will start not tallying. And that is where my fear sets in. There will have to be either admission, which I doubt, or a forced tally, which to me is the likelier scenario. I have absolutely no faith in any plan they put together for the simple reason that to me the basic reasoning of that group is flawed. AST? Karmenu Vella? Evarist Bartolo? Cyrus Engerer?? Joe Debono Grech? Helena Dalli? even the sidelines advisor (cum future …?).
Daphne has again had to explain to KZT just how flawed the reasoning is. Of course he got it the first time round. But what other ticket could he surf comfortably in on? But there again, reasoning with the objective of policy planning benefitting Malta was never the point.
Let me ask: does each new member to the club need to recommend others? Who has been recommended by whom? Is this normally a private meeting? Or does Joseph somehow always manage to have a one-to-one to ascertain the clinch aspect: Nuance. Implication. Smile seal it. Deal.
No record.
Is it important, at all, to the whole picture right now? Things have again moved a step further. Joseph’s confidence will increase as he realises that no one has as yet come out with the full detail of lies and his side don’t seem to care anyway.
I’ll insist on the no record to that private deal. Easy to have misunderstood some vital aspect of the deal… in retrospect. Let’s renegotiate shall we? This time round I’ll promise you “x.” Next time round – and to accommodate one level of promises unkept with another (private comment ‘you idiot’) – we’ll go for “x/2.” And you’ll still come back for more because once the wheels are set in that negative spiral the person is indebted to you at some level or other.
Another tactic of the great liar, con-man and snake-oil artist.
We’ll still be toys, but by then he’d have found the remote controls.
Bursting JosephMuscat.com bubbles can easily become a national hobby at this rate.
After being told a hundred times that the permits for the gas fired power station will be fast-tracked just as the ones for Smart City and the power station extension were, it now turns out that none of them were fast-tracked at all. One took two and a half years to get all the permits and the other took even more.
And the time wasn’t wasted. In the print edition of The Times there’s a breakdown of each stage which was taken to acquire all the permits.
I wonder whether JosephMuscat.com lie deliberately or whether they simply have no clue what they’re talking about, and I don’t know which is worse.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20130205/local/no-fast-track-for-smartcity.456252
It just shows that Joseph is a gullible idiot who is being fed garbage by his cronies and he does not even notice, such is his incompetence .
“How did Joseph Muscat, an ex Super One reporter, get away with this political heist? Why wasn’t there anyone in the Labour Party who felt able to speak out about the emperor and his missing clothes?”
I would put that down to:
1, Joseph Muscat is extremely ambitious. He has one goal and that is to be the youngest PM of Malta.
2. The rest of the party members that had some balls are too old and I think they know that if they are the face of the LP, the team will get no where. And they don’t really want the job of leader really.
3. What’s left of the party members lack ambition and are intimidated by Joseph’s.
4, With the exception of Jason Azzopardi. He will surely be the thorn in Joseph’s side.
Melissa, I think you meant to say Jason Micallef not Azzopardi.
Muscat did not give a hoot about disposing of the MLP statute (supposedly set in stone) and removed the post of General Secretary – a key position mind you. (Can anyone imagine the indignation if the PN leader ever dared to do the same?).
Given his attitude towards an institution like a political party, is there any doubt whether the future prime minister will think twice before changing the national rules of the game, disposing of national safeguards and institutions, and anything that comes in his way as a prime minister. He already hinted that the new power station will not go through the normal process. That commission is hanging like a carrot, and the faster one cashes it, the better is for Malta’s new royal family.
One needs to remember that we are referring to a spoiled single kid that did not have a normal upbringing like the other kids, and has already proven that has no respect for rules, institutions, protocol, and any kind of behavior that one expects from an upcoming prime minister.
We are witnessing the casting of a dictator in front of our eyes. It’s a pity that so many people are in denial about all this.
Perfect.
Labour derided the idea of equating Gonzi with PN, as in GonziPN, and have been shooting at it more than the French have aimed and fired at the Sphinx. Now Joseph is equating his name with his political party … only that he’s doing this in operatic diva style, getting all the limelight in case the nasty shadow of old Labour creeps out from under the layered skirt. If he’s already treating his people and the Party machinery like a boy with toys and hasn’t made it to prime minister yet, how could life be in a few weeks’ time with him running the country’s resources? If Labour has branded ‘GonziPN’ as the country’s downfall, what kind of abyss would ‘josephmuscat.com’ be like?
Clueless, breathless, brainless–no, not Joseph Muscat. No, rather, that is how JM regards the rest of us–those who are not the one and only JosephMuscat.com, when the country disappears after March 9th.
If one has no freedom to hold the man in check from his next whim or brainchild, game over: that’s what happens, if people vote emotively, and discard rationality. Malta loses extremely big time.
This will be far worse than Jim Jones with the Kool-aide, or L. Ron Hubbard with his science fiction. The FICTION is now, and the danger is IMMINENT: Muscat has long ago discarded truth, honesty, and integrity–and most of all, he has embraced irrationality, and calls it a “movement.”
Am I alone in noticing that MLP chose a short narrow street in Zabbar last Sunday to hold a mass meeting?
Do they always do that to make it look like there are thousands attending?
The stretch of road is the one leading from Zabbar to Cottonera, with fields on one side.
From the ONE footage, the crowd occupied about 200 metres of the road. Considering that it is within walking distance of the Three Cities, the crowd wasn’t that impressive.
However, most the voters in the second district will vote Red, irrespective of the hogwash program and inept leader (they are used to the latter species anyway).
A big eye opener this article. Can`t be more true…..
His focus is on the wedding reception. Marriage comes afterwards and he will face the real truth, for which he has prepared almost nothing.
This guest post has hit the nail on its head. josephmuscat.com, simply has one agenda, to promote his ‘moviment’. He says that he’s attracting new faces, to a new political party (such as star candidate Joanne Vella Cuschieri, who said on One, that she was lured by Joseph’s smile to form part of the Moviment ta’ Joseph’), which underlies the fact that he wants to do away with the ‘Partit Laburista’. This begs the question, how has he registered the party with the Electoral Commission, under ‘Moviment Malta Taghna Lkoll’ or under ‘Partit Laburista’, and under which logo?
What amazes me is that for the past 5 years the labour party have been making fun of the GONZIPN logo used in last election as though it was something wrong or to be ashamed of. And now we have josephmuscat.com – not a mention of the PL or Labour Party. Why do you make fun of something for 5 years and then do the same if not worse? Beats me.