I just can’t believe they haven’t changed for the better

This was my column in The Malta Independent last Sunday. I’m uploading it again.

I lived the first 23 years of my life, bar the initial six which really don’t count, in a Labour hell. The worst of it was not the economic disaster, the lack of jobs and opportunities, and the consumer nightmare.

No. The worst was the perversion or destruction of every one of our pillars of democracy, and the removal of safeguards against widespread abuse. The individual was completely vulnerable to the excesses and depredations of the state.

Despite having an elected parliament, we had no democracy whatsoever. Almost every one of our rights was trampled upon, we could seek no redress and there was nobody to save The People from themselves and their poor choices at the polls.

It was a disaster, and Malta made the news regularly, for all the wrong reasons, in those European countries which had true democracy and not just the parliamentary sort.

So I am not surprised at anything that Labour can and will do, but as I said yesterday evening to somebody half my age, what shocks me now is the sight of people like Leo Brincat and Karmenu Vella and Alex Sceberras Trigona and Joe Debono Grech and George Vella still there and still doing it.

I find this offensive and frightening at a level so profound that I cannot even begin to understand it myself.

What it tells me is that democracy in Malta has continued to fail at a less visible level than it failed before. We have all the instruments in place now, all the systems and virtually all the safeguards – except those, apparently, against dragging ambassadors before a parliament to which they are not answerable or accountable.

But we don’t have the democratic spirit, and because of this, the safeguards can be and are sometimes negated, undermining democracy itself.

We have large numbers of people who now subscribe to the view that democracy is the will of the people, or the will of the majority. They are egged on in this catastrophic reasoning by dangerous fools like that woman with her megaphone and the Labour leader with his all-consuming self-interest.

No, my dears – democracy is not necessarily the will of the people. The will of the people, the decision of the majority, comes into play only when the decisions taken, and their consequences, do not fly in the face of the spirit of democracy or the rights of the individual.

It is not democratic to deny women the vote, restrict Jews to ghettos or force black people to sit on one side of the bus, just because the majority have voted that this should be so. It is not democratic to round on an individual because the mob has decreed it.
It was not democratic to do so very many of those things – practically everything, in fact – which the Labour government of 1971 to 1987 did.

It did them, between 1971 and 1981, with the backing of the will of the people, most of who were mired in the most appalling ignorance and hate.

And between 1981 and 1987, Labour continued to do them, with the situation worsening to the point where people were being shot at in the street and the police were the enemy, justifying it all by saying that they had the majority of seats in parliament.

Similarly, it is anti-democratic to use the parliamentary vote to lynch an ambassador on the basis that the majority don’t like him, bear him a grudge, or want to pay him back – in Labour’s case – for being instrumental in six general election victories against them, to say nothing of his significant involvement in undoing their project to keep Malta out of Europe.

Regardless of who the person lynched by parliament last Monday is or what he does, the lynching itself was horrendous. A man without a seat in parliament is brought before parliament and beheaded, and not because of any particular issue, but because the palace eunuchs are jealous of the sultan and his perceived favourite, the prime minister and his adviser.

The eunuchs then emerge from parliament and crow that the majority have decided and democracy has won the day. They are disturbed to see the visceral reaction, and that few are crowing with them except those who would have crowed anyway, whatever Labour might have done. They wonder why others do not think it democratic as they do. They wonder why others are shocked. But they thought we didn’t like Richard Cachia Caruana, they protest between themselves, so why aren’t we pleased and grateful for what Labour has done for us?

I’ll answer that question for Labour. People are shocked because no matter how little they might like a man, and no matter what was said to them about him, the more decent, civilised and truly democratic among us cannot bear to watch a kangaroo-court lynching, no matter our personal views of the mob’s victim.

It fills us with fear. Its ugliness instils revulsion and dread, because unlike the false democrats in the Labour Party and the rats on the government benches, we know that this is not a game. We know that this is how bad things were done to enemies of the state throughout history.

As I shouted with relief and breathed freedom and a semblance of normality for the first time ever at the age of 23, if you had told me then that 25 years down the line, with the babies I hadn’t yet had now grown up and gone, I would still be looking at those very same political ghouls and worrying about them being back in government, I wouldn’t have believed you.

It barely seems possible. At 23 I cheered and celebrated because I thought I had seen the end forever of people like Leo Brincat. At 47, I wake up almost every day, like I did back then, to the sight and sound of him and his friends from the Golden Years, spurred on by neo-Mintoffian Joseph Muscat, knowing that these same individuals who ruined Malta while I was growing up, will ruin it again yet.