Mrs Patrick Dalli’s definition of progressiveness: cabinet ministers who have all their family put on the state payroll through nepotism

I have really had enough of cabinet minister Helena Dalli’s constant whining about progressiveness. She seems to think progressiveness and liberalism are just about sex and gender relations.

Her definition of progressive liberalism? A cabinet minister who champions same-sex marriage but then has both her sons and the fiancé of one of them put on the state payroll through nepotistic appointments. She hasn’t had her husband put on the state payroll yet, but that’s because he’s too busy opening boutique hotels in Valletta – in the grand old Maltese tradition of copying the business ideas that are a success until there’s a glut of whatever it is, everybody begins undercutting each other, quality falls and the whole thing slowly – or suddenly – fails.

The next time Mrs Patrick Dalli calls a press conference to tell the world how liberal and progressive she is, and how liberal and progressive The Others are not, one of the reporters should stick his or her hand up and ask, “Mrs Dalli, would you define nepotism and putting your sons and their girlfriends on the state payroll as progressive liberalism?”

The weakness of the press is the strength of bull-s&*%ing politicians. And nobody knows how to bull-s%&* like Helena Dalli does. She’s been at it for decades. The very fact that she clung to Mintoffianism, to Dom Mintoff himself (I used to collect his rubbish newspaper columns from her on his behalf when I was associate editor of The Malta Independent in 1992) and to the Malta Labour Party right through the worst excesses, abuses and grave violations of human rights of the 1970s and 1980s tells you just how liberal and progressive that woman is.

She’s so liberal and progressive that she voted for, rooted for and worked for a political party that suffocated freedom of expression, encouraged its thugs to set fire to a newspaper building, ransack the Opposition leader’s home, beat up anti-government demonstrators and murder ‘enemies of the state’ at the Police Headquarters.

How lucky she is that most of the newspaper reporters who turn up to her press performances were born after 1987 and have their perspective truncated by lack of interest in and knowledge of anything that happened before they were born, even if it is directly relevant to the story they are supposed to be researching and writing for the benefit of their readers.

The fact of the matter is this: nobody liberal and progressive voted Labour before 1992 (and even after that, quite frankly, but let’s draw the line at where that weirdo Alfred Sant took over). But Mrs Patrick Dalli most certainly did. And that’s exactly where you can see how really liberal and progressive she is not.

I have no time or patience for these frauds. Somebody please tell this woman that if the Nationalist Party really wanted to “take the country backwards”, it would have started by setting fire to a few newspapers buildings, banning imports of consumer goods just like in the good old USSR, and savagely beating up a few anti-government demonstrators while chucking a couple of bodies under a bridge and into a well. It could also have started a campaign to take Malta out of the European Union, bringing it in line with Labour Party policy of the years 1971 to whenever it was that Joseph Muscat worked out that he could make money from selling European Union passports.

And that is exactly the kind of thing the self-serving Mrs Patrick Dalli needs to be told by the Opposition – those very words, in that very tone. That’s why the Opposition is so hopeless, because the tone it needs to take with the government is completely alien to its various exponents and front-runners. Qishom qabda pastizzi – and I mean the food item – who were brought up by their mummies and daddies to never answer back or deliver a smart and pointed retort. Nobody in the Opposition is schooled in the fine art of the sharp comeback. They would be terrible failures in the House of Commons, where it’s all about the quick-witted insult.