Here’s a letter that shows how the Labour Party thinks corruption is normal. It calls it commission or donations.

Dom Mintoff – the most corrupt politician in Maltese history – institutionalised corruption in the Malta Labour Party.

His predecessor, Paul Boffa, was a correct man who would have been horrified at the corruption and abuse, and whose widow, who actually lived to see it, published a message in the 1981 general election telling people to vote for Eddie Fenech Adami.

Corruption permeated the Labour Party/government so thoroughly that it was normalised. Much of that way of thinking survives to this day. Labour politicians, their sidekicks and the Labour Party itself took cuts on everything, baksheesh, bribes, bags of silver.

Their thinking was completely perverted: the way they saw it, they were in a position to make things possible for people, and for that, they should receive a small (large) consideration.

Mela naghmlu xi haga ghal xejn?

They simply did not understand government in a democracy: that it is a not a third-world power structure in which you use your position to your advantage and take a cut on everything, or give business to those who scratch your back or ‘donate money to’ (read bribe outright) the party.

I have been given this letter from 1977, which you will find interesting, if only as a reflection on how nothing has changed in the way the Malta Labour Party thinks and operates. The only thing different now is that a Taghna Lkoll ambassador would never think a corrupt deal favouring the Labour Party as so normal that he would put it down in a type-written letter on a High Commission letterhead.

No, he would send an email from his Gmail address to the prime minister’s Gmail address, understanding that some difficult people would see this as brazen corruption and it might end up in the press.