GUEST POST/The Labour Party’s problem is that it has no integrity

Sent in by Matthew S:

I, for one, welcome the contrasting statements issued by the European People’s Party and the Party of European Socialists.

Statement by Party of European Socialists

Manfred Weber of the European People’s Party

At last, we can finally put to rest the wrong-headed idea that Malta has six European members of parliament who should always band together against the other 28 member states of the European Union.

Just like the Maltese Parliament, the European Parliament has different parties which take different stances. David Casa, Therese Comodini Cachia and Roberta Metsola are three out of 216 from 28 European Union member states, and not three out of six from Malta. Being from Malta in that context is as relevant as being from Naxxar is in the Maltese parliament. MEPs are not in the European Parliament to represent their nationality or their country, but their political principles and values. These differ mightily from those of their fellow-citizen MEPs but are shared instead with MEPs who are citizens of other member states but belong to similar political groupings.

The different stances taken by the European People’s Party and the Party of European Socialists, on the matter of Malta and threats to democracy, highlight how ridiculous it is to expect MEPs of the European People’s Party, who are elected on the Maltese Nationalist Party ticket, to vote for people like Karmenu Vella just because he is Maltese like them.

Or to support the nomination of Toni Abela for the European Court of Auditors, despite his unfitness for purpose and his cocaine and corruption baggage, just because he too is Maltese like they are. He is Maltese, yes, but he is most certainly not like they are.

Now the shameful statement issued by the Party of European Socialists has to be put into some context. Over the past couple of years, Blairism – supposedly working- and middle-class-friendly policies which do not try to pit employees against their employers and the poor against the rich – has taken a big hit.

In France, Francois Hollande’s party hangs on by the skin of its teeth. In Germany, the Socialists play second fiddle to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.In Britain itself, Blairites were unceremoniously booted out by the electorate before being rejected by their own party, to be replaced by an old Marxist in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn.

From Greece to Poland and from Spain to Hungary, electors have dumped Blairist parties to either replace them with hard-left parties, sensible Christian Democrat parties or xenophobic far-right parties.Through this haemorrhage, the Malta Labour Party has unexpectedly become a bit of a darling amongst European Socialists. It is seen as one of the few parties which can lead the way to the rise of a new centre-left: Blairism without the fallout of the Iraq war, if you will, except that nobody was expecting the Iraq war to be replaced by the Panama Papers.

At least Tony Blair can legitimately say that his party had an electoral mandate to go to war. Joseph Muscat can say no such thing about the Panamanian companies set up by his most trusted minister and his chief of staff, and their quite clear intentions to launder the money they planned to obtain through corruption and graft.

And the worst of it is that Muscat’s Labour should never have been viewed as a leading light. Muscat’s is a Potemkin form of Blairism. It is nominally pro-business, but in fact it’s just a cover for cronyism, corruption, sleaze, kickbacks and money-laundering.

It’s everything that a real fair and free market hates. It’s Blairism with all the good bits taken out; just a bunch of camel-traders and ex-Soviets riding in on a Chinese dragon brandishing freshly minted Maltese passports issued by Henley and Partners, sold on the back of Muscat’s snake-oil-merchandising in some of the shadiest jurisdictions of the world.

Everyone could have seen through it well before Muscat and his men swept to power, if only they cared to look. That, today, now that Malta has ended up in this situation, is the saddest, and dumbest, thing.

The Malta Labour Party’s biggest problem is that it is rotten to the core and has been ever since Dom Mintoff seized control of it from Paul Boffa who, unlike the corrupt and intellectually-challenged grand-daughter he never knew, who is currently engaged in sleeping and horse-trading her way into public office for which she is unfit, was by all accounts a dignified, decent and honourable man.

The reason why the Labour Party ruins every chance it gets to govern is because it is always led by wily people with bad intentions who are surrounded by wily people with bad intentions.

Bad leaders breed bad leaders. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was Dom Mintoff’s mentee and Joseph Muscat was Alfred Sant’s. Now Muscat’s mentee is Konrad Mizzi, and both of them are in collusion with the corrupt business operator, Keith Schembri, who was the Labour Party’s key adviser when it was in Opposition, and who has been the Prime Minister’s chief of staff since he became prime minister. How can Malta’s Labour Party be anything other than downright awful and dangerous with these terribly corrupt and incompetent people in charge?

And that’s before even looking at all the old Mintoffian hangers-on who, for the last three years, have been cashing in one last big pay-cheque before they retire or, as in Joe Grima’s case, die of old age. And the sad thing is that they won’t die out because they are busy breeding new Mintoffians like Silvio Parnis and Owen Bonnici.

Sometimes people look at a Labour politician like Louis Grech and think “Hey, he’s a good guy, isn’t he?”. But then there he is, shamelessly clapping Konrad Mizzi on and embracing him for all the world to see. From Toni Abela, who was involved in covering up a notorious cocaine-dealing case at a Labour Party club, to Ian Borg, whose driver’s brother is up on trial for cocaine-dealing, there really is no hope for Malta’s Labour Party.

In contrast to Labour, what has made the Nationalist Party a success is not a constant stream of great policies – although it has done pretty well in that regard – but the fact that it has been led by fundamentally good and decent people, with a couple of notorious exceptions, one of whom has been dead for the last six years and another who was kicked out of the European Commission in disgrace to be appointed Joseph Muscat’s adviser. He is now most often spotted on flights to and from Dubai.

Can you imagine Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi being involved in these corrupt messes? Can you imagine Richard Cachia Caruana, while he was Fenech Adami’s chief of staff, being revealed to have a secret company in the British Virgin Islands and to have set up another one in Panama, sheltered by a trust in New Zealand, along with the Minister for Energy in the one case and with the managing director of the Allied Newspaper Group in the other? It’s inconceivable.

Did Mary Fenech Adami or Kate Gonzi behave as though they had landed with their nose in the trough? Did they throw their weight around, behave like a combination of Elena Ceaucescu and Eva Peron? No. That, too, is inconceivable. Michelle Muscat does it not because she is younger than they were, or more fashionable, or keener to participate in public life and have a proper role. She does it because she is fundamentally unprincipled, greedy for money and material goods, and hungry for the kind of social acclaim and jet-setting life she must have spent the first 40 years of her life dreaming about.

The Nationalist Party could have gone Labour’s way, of course, when John Dalli ran for the leadership – but, thankfully, the party delegates – unlike those of the Labour Party – had their heads screwed on right. By means of a complicated detour and Lawrence Gonzi’s unwise decision to nominate him for the European Commission, John Dalli ended up in Joseph Muscat’s massive skip and is now probably handling his affairs in Dubai while building his illegal bunker in Siggiewi.

I trust Simon Busuttil for the primary reason that he is cut from the same cloth as Eddie Fenech Adami and Lawrence Gonzi. To be sure, he is his own man, but he is a man of good character just as they were. Both Fenech Adami and Gonzi are now living in their unassuming homes, the one in Birkirkara where he has lived all his married life, and the other in Marsascala. They have not retired in some shady but sunny place on the fruits of crime and corruption which they squirrelled away through companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands. But that is exactly what we would now expect Muscat to do, and his henchmen too, because clearly, it is exactly what they planned on doing before they were busted in the most massive leak of documents the world has ever seen.

Despite its trials and tribulations and the occasional corrupt and unstable person in its midst, the Nationalist Party unwaveringly stands for integrity, while the Labour Party unwaveringly stands for the lack of it.