When ‘liberal and progressive’ is only skin deep

The trouble is that Muscat was allowed – by the Opposition’s silence and the electorate’s short-term memory and/or ignorance of the facts – to rewrite the history of the Labour Party in total fakery.

This photograph was not taken in the Dark Ages, but just 14 years ago – in the run-up to the referendum on EU membership, when ‘liberal and progressive’ Muscat led this particular atavistic army which told us to vote No, because if Malta joined the EU then – horrors – Maltese men would be able to marry each other and Maltese women would be able to have abortions (which they did already, by the hundreds, in Rome, Catania and London).

Now I hear people my age, who should remember these posters but don’t, say: “But these are liberal, so we might as well get what we can from them, and then vote against them afterwards.”

To which my reply is always: “They don’t give two hoots whether two men can marry each other or not, and 15 years ago they were virulently against the idea and trying to scare us off EU membership with the spectre of lesbian weddings. So when they ‘give’ you this kind of thing it’s for one reason only and not because of their policy beliefs: so that you don’t notice the more important things they’re stealing from you with the other hand. And so that if you notice, you fail to care because you think it’s a good trade-off, when it shouldn’t be a trade-off at all. You should get same-sex marriage, and they shouldn’t do the bad things they’re doing.”

Anything else is Third World thinking.