Echoes of Prime Minister’s New Year message 2016: parents of boy who died making kitchen seek compensation from factory owners

June 2015: a 17-year-old boy, Matthew Bartolo, dies when he becomes entangled in the woodworking machinery which he is too young and untrained to operate, at the furniture factory where he has been working for just a few weeks.

The factory directors present the inquiring magistrate with ‘training papers’ bearing the boy’s signature. The inquiry concludes that the signature appears to be forged.

Seven months later, and ignoring all of this as unimportant, the Prime Minister delivered his New Year Message for 2016 from a show-kitchen produced that same factory, Construct Furniture, accompanied by Fernando Agius, who works there, whose parents are the majority shareholders, and whose father John – the inquiring magistrate said – should be prosecuted for manslaughter.

The Prime Minister colluded with these people to pretend that the Construct Furniture kitchen was a real kitchen in a real first home owned by a real struggling working-class couple who received government benefits to make it all possible. Meanwhile, a properly working-class lad had been dead for seven months, having died making kitchens for privileged people like Joseph Muscat and Fernando Agius to pose and fake about in, mangled by the machinery from which Fernando Agius’s father failed to protect him.

The cynicism of those false socialists is astounding.

The Prime Minister, delivering his New Year message last year from a showroom kitchen owned by Construct Furniture, accompanied by the majority shareholder’s son masquerading as a working-class man who could only buy his first home because of Labour government benefits.