Why not?

Prior to the elections, The Times hyped up trivialities to make Gonzi’s government look bad.

More recently, it was an accomplice in Muscat’s bad and costly decision to push out Arriva. It downplayed the implications of the sale of passports and the way it was grossly mismanaged by government.

It downplayed the vote in the European Parliament and the massive negative international publicity Malta got because of PL governments’ shortsightedness. Had it been a PN government which amended a law three times AFTER it was debated and voted upon in Parliament, The Times would have made mincemeat of it.

The P.N. is a political party operating in what it thinks, quite wrongly, is a mature western democracy. As its principal aim, it has a vague mission to improve the country’s lot, but like all political parties it is flawed to the same extent its leadership and upper echelons are flawed. Its intentions are good, but the quality of its outcomes may wax and wane according to the skills and good or bad intentions or beliefs of the common mortals upon whom it depends for success. History will show that these outcomes have been mainly positive successes.

Labour, on the other hand, is not a political party. It is a criminal organisation; it operates like one, and has been so since the ascent of Mintoff and his criminally libellous coup d’état against and disposal of Paul Boffa.

That the intimidation is (so far) no longer physically violent but only mediatically so is simply an update for the times.

The Labour Party’s vote buying – not Anglu Farrugia’s pathetic claims of the PN purchasing junkie votes, but the wholesale purchase of every lobby with illegitimate aspirations – is further testament to this criminal behaviour.

Its principal aim is the advancement of its leadership and a restricted set of hangers-on. Malta Taghhom Biss. The country’s advancement is only incidental to these aims at best, and is often times contra-posed to them.

The Labour ‘movement’ corrupts all that it touches, including those who join it with the best intentions, and the corrupt and the amoral flock to it as they know they will find a home there. One need only look at the prominent (and flawed) former members of the P.N. who are now operating within Labour to see how true this is.

The result of this is inevitably economic failure, because the amoral and corrupt tend to be blinded by their greed. If they were not terribly bright to begin with, just cunning, they can and will destroy an economy in short order. That is when they will become seriously undemocratic, the inevitable fate of every Labour government post-Boffa. (Sant’s excluded, mostly).

So a run of successive Labour governments is unavoidably a descent into economic failure and deterioration of freedoms, followed by a struggle for the return to full democracy with further compounding of the economic issues.

Eddie Fenech Adami’s only big mistake was national reconciliation, although one might say it was simply an attempt on putting a brave face on an unwinnable situation: an armed and violent Labour Opposition in the early post-1987 period, with a corrupt and unwilling police force still firmly in Labour’s grip.

But even if it was really a genuine attempt at reconciliation, it’s useless. National reconciliation is ultimately meaningless. There is still a poisonous streak running through Maltese politics because of this. There needs to be atonement, not reconciliation. It is too late for those responsible for the last excesses, but it has to be made clear to the current lot that it will not be tolerated again.

This time round, there has to be jail time. (Henley & Partners are also prime candidates for this). Then there can finally be national reconciliation. But really, on principle there should be no reconciliation with the Mafia.

Why not? It doesn’t cost very much.

Just a tiny error in the text though: it’s a “moot” point, not mute.

Absolutely. I make it a point of reading his column.