Labour: the specialists in concealing matters of public interest from the public and the Opposition

Not to blow this website’s trumpet or anything like that, but I was the first to raise the alarm over how the prime minister must have OBVIOUSLY cut a deal with Renzi in Italy, because Malta went, overnight, from rescuing drowning immigrants every week to rescuing none at all, ever. It wasn’t because none were crossing from Libya, I wrote, because they OBVIOUSLY were. It was because the Italians were picking all of them up were previously it was regularly a fight to the death to get Malta to do it instead.

So it followed that Malta had OBVIOUSLY given up something in return, I argued, and that it was the duty of the press and the Opposition to pursue the government which was OBVIOUSLY deliberately concealing from the public and from the Opposition what it had given up to Italy in return – because this is a government which does not understand democracy and its duty of disclosure to the electorate and to the Opposition.

That was months ago. The Times of Malta asked a couple of questions to camera and then let the matter go (but that brief interview on camera revealed that Muscat was hiding something, because of his telltale involuntary furrow, which always gives the game away).

The Opposition did jack about it. Nothing. Why not – because they thought the public would see them as ‘negative’ in trying to find out what rights or property Muscat had given to Italy when cutting his OBVIOUS deal?

I mean, honestly.

Now the matter has hit the Maltese media at last – yes, at last – and the news value is that the Italian press is questioning the deal Italy struck with Malta.

Why are Maltese journalists reporting that Italian journalists are pursuing information on their prime minister’s deal with Malta’s prime minister, instead of pursuing our own prime minister themselves?

This is nuts.

Message to the Opposition: demanding, relentlessly, that the prime minister reveal what he has given to Italy in exchange for Italy picking up all immigrants from Maltese territorial waters is not ‘being in favour of collecting immigrants we don’t need’. It is a reminder to the government and to the damned stupid members of the public who take everything lying down and for whom democracy is nothing more than pearls before swine that the government of a democratic state simply may not cut deals of this nature behind parliament’s back and the back of the electorate.

Something I wrote on 22 April after Muscat was briefly interviewed to camera by the Times of Malta

The Malta Independent correctly reports on Italian coverage of the secret deal between Renzi and Muscat, but Malta’s newspapers should be pursuing – relentlessly – the information themselves.