Labour Party’s Youth Forum: Muscat is the best in Europe and now the envy of the world

Published: June 20, 2017 at 3:36pm

Sometimes I think we may as well be in the thick of a Hugo Chavez rally in Venezuela, or the equivalent in Ecuador. I don’t think there are European parallels any longer, quite frankly. Perhaps there never were.

The extent of isolation, of disconnection, of a world within a world, in the perspective of people who generate and propagate these sentiments, and who actually believe them, is the isolation of social, geographical and cultural remoteness.

It is actually quite frightening that lots of people in Malta are as educationally and culturally disadvantaged as Ecuadorean farm-labourers (who cannot be blamed for their situation, unlike the Maltese who have all the advantages) and that they are so detached from reality that they really do think Joseph Muscat is “the best in Europe and the envy of the world”.

This is a state of affairs I remember from my childhood and teenage years. We thought there was a cultural shift over the intervening 30 years, but the main shift was in material well-being which only served to mask the fact that beneath, nothing has changed.