Even the darkest recesses of the world get to witness a glimmer of light every now and then.
In that sense, the Labour government is a black hole of information.
Of course, this is not a bug, but a feature. A party that is fueled by corruption is a party which must, by necessity, enforce tacit compliance.
This is apparent whenever the government passes unpopular legislation with the unanimous backing of its entire Parliamentary group.
Yesterday, the government’s MPs all voted in favour of their administration’s efforts to throttle magisterial inquiries. None of them have publicly commented on the fact that the rest of the country vehemently opposes it. They all just bang on the table whenever one of them says something and then move on with their lives.
Though this totalitarian behaviour is consistent, every so often, the mask slips.
Yesterday evening, news coverage was dominated by the publication of a surreptitious recording. The Nationalist Party’s propaganda arm, NET News, leaked an alleged recording of the education minister’s former chief of staff candidly stating that his old boss isn’t up to the job.
“If he (the minister) does not realise that there all these problems around him, with all due respect, he shouldn’t be minister. This is how I see it nowadays,” the former chief of staff allegedly says.
“I mean, if you don’t have one graduate in your secretariat in the education ministry – not one graduate – it’s a recipe for disaster,” he adds, further asserting that the minister just wants to be surrounded by ‘yes men.’
Education minister Clifton Grima is yet to issue a public response. To date, the minister has proven to be quite reactive to adverse media reports. It is not unreasonable to assume that they’re still scratching their heads over this one.
The party’s official silence on the matter speaks volumes about its inability to handle brutal honesty. Though the recording is barely twelve hours old, the party’s ‘unofficial’ champion of hate, Karl Stagno Navarra, is already out for blood.
A screenshot from Labour Party propagandist Karl Stagno Navarra’s blog.
The dreadfully funny thing about this latest debacle is that it’s not even the first time that a party official or representative was caught being far more honest than we could ever publicly expect them to be.
Let’s go through a quick highlight reel for old time’s sake, shall we?
One must, of course, begin with a generous serving of disgraced former tourism minister Edward Zammit Lewis. Specifically, his iconic ‘Ġaħan‘ quip, richly garnished with heaps of contempt for his own constituents.
Then, there was disgraced former parliamentary secretary Rosianne Cutajar, whose explicit admission that “everybody pigs out” hit home so hard that it became that year’s Nadur carnival runaway gag.
Sticking around for dessert?
Well, here’s one more – remember that one time disgraced former tourism minister Clayton Bartolo forgot to switch off his mic in Parliament, accidentally telling everyone that he “detests” opposition MP Rebekah Borg “with a passion”?
Disgraced, disgraced, and disgraced, on all three counts. And yet somehow, we are expected to believe that people like Ryan Borg (the education minister’s former chief of staff) are one-offs.
The Labour Party wants us to believe that Borg is a wayward traitor without engaging with the content of the criticism he allegedly made. It wants us to believe that its hardly concealed contempt for the notion of good governance is a mere fabrication of the Opposition. It wants us to think that its representatives truly love the country and are hard at work fulfilling their responsibilities. Pull the other one.
Here we are, in a country where power is concentrated in the hands of 17 ministries run by 15 men and two women, and the only time we hear any of them being honest is in a context in which they never expect to be exposed.
At best, we’ll read a Sunday piece from Times of Malta or MaltaToday in which a handful of anonymous Cabinet members will comment anonymously in an attempt to save face and get their own faction’s narrative out in the open.
I wonder what it’s like to live without a spine. Must be nice and easy, never needing to stand upright, never daring to stick your toe past the line in case your master’s butcher knife slices it right off. Just hanging on to your seat and hoping you can continue milking your office for as long as you can last.
I honestly hope that one day, someone within the Labour Party’s ranks finds the courage to speak openly about the rot that has completely gnawed out any semblance of ideology or service in its politics.
I’ll be the first to listen to what they have to say.