GUEST POST: No, thank you
Karmenu Vella looking on in undisguised glee and admiration as Prime Minister Mintoff harangues the crowd with his usual aggressive and violent obscenities.
Karmenu Vella being carried shoulder high with Malta's most disastrous prime minister ever, Labour's Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici
Please note: ‘guest post’ means that I haven’t written this and that it was written by invitation. So any comments addressed to me directly about it, as in ‘you this’ and ‘you that’ are irrelevant.
I have just come back from a business breakfast organised by the Unjoni Haddiema Maghqudin.
The subject discussed was an ‘Active Labour Market Policy’. It is a rather interesting idea, already adopted in various EU countries.
But I had to make a real effort to concentrate everytime Karmenu Vella hove into view, and most especially when he spoke. Here was a man who was in cabinet when the Pijunieri, Dejma, Bahhar u Sewwi and Izra u Rabbi workers’ corps were created, when workers were victimised and transferred from their jobs if they did not support the regime or went on strike, when wages were frozen by government order, when UHM members were discriminated against and when the GWU had a seat in cabinet.
Vella was also part of the government which, in 1996 to 1998, was responsible for the substitution VAT by the horrendous CET, the Keystome Cops of Taxation, and the withdrawal of Malta’s EU application.
And after that, he was part of an act in Sant’s circus, fighting against EU membership on the grounds that it would destroy the Maltese economy, and then pushing the line that Partnership ‘rebah’.
Yet there he was this morning, the very same man, frisk daqs hassa and expressing his views on our workforce in 30 years’ time. The man who was a member of cabinets which crushed every workers’ right and opportunity and whose idea of improving workers’ life chances was to give them a quickie course in welding at some Dickensian Skola tas-Snajja, was right there in front of me, taking notes for Labour’s electoral programme which he is writing.
Clearly, destroying the chances of an entire generation of young people in the 1970s and 1980s was not enough. Now he wants to do the same with their children, to really make his mark.
Joseph Muscat becomes very irritable when he has to answer for his recent past. He desperately wants us to erase from our collective memory the fact that until a few short years ago he was actually proud of being called ‘Il-Poodle ta’ Alfred Sant’, panting with joy at the sound of his master’s off-the-rocker policies.
So it’s ironic that it is now Muscat himself who is not merely reminding us of his party’s more distant and horrible past but is breathing life back into it?
In any other European country outside parts of the former Soviet bloc, the only people who would give Karmenu Vella the time of day would be some specialised historians piecing together the minutiae of politics before they are lost in the mists of time.
By bringing back the likes of Karmenu Vella to the heart of his party, Joseph Muscat has grabbed the past. He has turned it into our present and is asking us to vote to make it our future.
He is asking those whose young lives and chances were destroyed by Karmenu Vella to give Karmenu Vella the chance to damage, this time, their children’s lives.
No, thank you.
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It is still in my possession. It was handed to all teachers who decided to obey their union’s directive to work to rule. The note which teachers were ordered to sign read: I, the undersigned, declare that I will not obey my union’s directives. It is still in my possession, unsigned, and I have E mailed it to friends as far as New Zealand.
Please scan it and put it up on the web for posterity’s sake – maybe even send it to Bencini formerly of MUT, now of FORUM, that way it might jolt his memory.
Could you email a copy to Daphne to maybe upload it?
Hard evidence hits hard.
I wouldn’t have listened to a useless speech.
After all he is not conversant in the subject and clearly cannot utter any meaningful or technical contribution.
To be honest it was never necessary to be particularly conversant in anything particular in Mintoff’s era in government.
What with Agatha Barbara occupying the post of Minister of Education and later President of Malta. Doesn’t that say it all?
What mattered then was an innate hatred against whatever was not socialist.
Thanks for taking the time to write this.
I was very much affected by the Labour government of the 1980s. For one thing, I never made it to university in spite of being quite a bright spark at school simply because of the entrance rules at the time and even though I got excellent grades at A-level.
I still remember the acute loneliness I felt when, one by one, my friends started leaving Malta to get their degree abroad. They were the lucky ones – but my family is large and my parents simply couldn’t afford to pay for both my brother and me to go away, and wouldn’t pay for one and not the other.
Thank God, we all managed to carve out a living in spite of Labour.
Whenever a supporter of the (M)LP retorts that this was a long time ago, I cringe. That’s my disrupted life they’re dismissing, and it wasn’t that long ago. I still feel the effect of those years.
Seeing the likes of Karmenu Vella, AST and Leo Brincat sends chills down my spine because to my mind, they are criminals – guilty of the theft of our youth.
Vote for Muscat’s party? No, thank you.
These people have no shame. Just look at what Owen Bonnici wrote in The Times, today. He wrote about Sir Paul Boffa without once mentioning Mintoff. Incredible.
No thank you….
Karmenu is a man of many faces and facets. This is a particularly scary one.
History inexorably repeating itself…unless we come to our senses.
“By bringing back the likes of Karmenu Vella to the heart of his party……”
Let us not be fooled. The “likes of Karmenu Vella” have always been there. Karmenu Vella was there in Mintoff’s time, in KMB’s time, in Sant’s time and now in Muscat’s time. ALWAYS.
Whoever believes the MLP ever changed and Joseph Muscat is changing it back again is wrong.
The MLP NEVER changed, not even under Sant. If it had, it wouldn’t be where it is today.
Hear hear. Sant’s legacy, opposition to the EU and Europe, is merely the logical continuation of Mintoff’s anti-Western creed.
Excellent analysis.