Does anyone know what the Labour Party is on about these days?
I am aware that my duty as a journalist is to transmit digestible versions of the complex narratives which shape our political environment. The answer to the opener question of this piece is the kind of question I should be answering.
But honestly, after spending the past few weeks carefully observing the party’s narrative in the hopes of finding an answer to that question, I am no better off than where I started. They are now so compromised that they are unable to say anything that doesn’t sound like the words of someone experiencing a very vivid delusion.
I first properly noticed it when I read about prime minister Robert Abela’s declarations on this year’s budget. His government’s desperate need to be liked is directly proportional to just how poorly thought out the handouts are. An organised, credible outfit does not need to scramble to figure out what handouts people might be most tantalised with. If the government was such an outfit, it would have a coherent plan that tackles the country’s issues using the best available practices.
The party’s malaise became glaringly visible throughout its recent leadership contest. Labour MEP Alex Agius Saliba consolidated his position in the party by becoming its new deputy leader for its internal affairs. Foreign affairs minister Ian Borg is now the deputy prime minister of the country and the Labour Party’s deputy leader for parliamentary affairs. Alex Sciberras, a lawyer who’s been riding the gravy train since 2013 and is known to be a Muscat loyalist, is now the party’s president.
Throughout the whole farce, the party’s script writers must have had some serious trouble trying to figure out what they could say to give some semblance of normalcy.
Speeches from outgoing deputies ranged from delusional ramblings about ‘being the best’ to sinister calls for the resurrection of criminal libel. Quoting directly from the Times’s report on the subject:
“Just because we won (an election) once, twice, three times, that does not mean we will win again if we do not have the best people by our side,” he (Chris Fearne) said, as the crowd applauded.
Chris Fearne then waxed lyrical about the party needing to attract talent, about not pushing the party’s grassroots aside, and a vague parallel between the €700 million the government assigned to its increasingly shaky urban greening plans and how “the next €700 million” the government spends should be assigned to social well-being priorities. Meanwhile, outgoing deputy leader Daniel Micallef spoke in paradoxes, telling his party’s supporters that they collectively “cannot isolate (themselves) and make everyone the enemy because they are against (them).”
To top off the ridiculousness of it all, outgoing president Ramona Attard gave a vapid speech about restoring humanity in politics while calling for the standards commissioner and the press to be muzzled.
The comments that the new leadership gave to the mainstream press in the run-up to Saturday’s election process also left me in disbelief. Sciberras was forced to distance himself from disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat, even though we do remember just how much taxpayer money Sciberras ate up while at Muscat’s trough. Meanwhile, another one of Muscat’s legal lackeys complained that he wasn’t allowed to submit his nomination.
The sitting prime minister’s failed candidate for the role, Norma Saliba, spoke at length about improvements she claimed she wanted to make if she were to be elected, completely glossing over the fact that she presided over TVM’s conversion to full-blown Labour Party propaganda station.
As for victory laps, we got to hear the new deputy leaders – Agius Saliba and Borg – belt out oxymora, slogans which are antithetical to their own track records. Agius Saliba called upon his party’s own media to be more critical after having spent his entire career cheering on the wholesale denial of evidence obtained through investigative reporting about his government’s affairs while Borg repurposed his previous ‘getting things done’ mantra, glossing over his own evident shortcomings on the same bread and butter issues he was talking about.
And of course, it wouldn’t be a Labour Party conference if the mother of all denials weren’t issued by the prime minister himself.
After yet again trying to soothe the worries of a nation crippled by corruption and chaos with the promise of tax cuts, the prime minister made it a point to dismiss apparent rumours about calls for a snap election (a call which was made by this website and endorsed by a handful of NGOs to date).
Everything I’ve just listed from the narrative which the party was keen to push out can be stripped down to the barest nothingness – it only takes as much as a cursory look at reality to figure it out.
The uncontested election of Agius Saliba and Borg as deputy leaders of the party is a mere reminder of the shortage of allies which the beleagured prime minister has at his disposal. Both of them are men of Muscat’s making, and both played their roles in a manner which maximised the personal benefit they would be extracting from it. The same applies for Sciberras. One shivers to think of what kind of backroom negotiating must occur for all but one of these key leadership positions to be turned into one-horse races.
The Labour Party never attracted ‘the best talent’ that Fearne enjoys indirectly likening himself to. It attracted amoral opportunists who wished to get rich quickly. Money doesn’t necessarily attract talent. Intelligent, competent individuals need to feel like they are free to carry out their work duties without needing to worry about being bossed around by an idiot who just so happens to be friends with a minister. Countless talented individuals left positions they valued because they were tired of taking orders from people who are less skilled than they are.
‘Everyone’ is against the Labour Party because the Labour Party corrupted every aspect of the government. This corruption is so all encompassing that now every single thing we need to depend on the government for is compromised: public procurement, public infrastructure, public health, public data and identification material, law enforcement. You name it, it’s broken, and most of the time, it’s the Labour government that did it.
There is no humanity in politics because the Labour Party squeezed the lifeblood out of politics a long time ago. Ramona Attard and Agius Saliba can extol the virtues of their party’s humanity and values all day long if they want to – none of that changes the fact that their party has been the country’s most visceral opposition towards anything resembling accountability, honesty, and integrity. None of that changes the party’s hopeless dependency on dirty money.
In fact, Labour Party veterans like Sammy Meilaq, who was named by Agius Saliba as someone who will be brought back to the party – likely in a desperate attempt at distancing Labour from the rampant, neo-liberal greed it espouses today – are the same ones who’ve been calling them out for their corruption for years now.
On the same day Agius Saliba claimed that he invited Meilaq to be ‘at the centre of the party’s discussion about the future,’ the Times published an interview documenting the extent of Meilaq’s distaste for Labour’s capitalist attitude (see link in previous paragraph).
I can go on and on, but I think the point is evident by now. All we hear from the government is this constant, pathetic virtue signaling that means nothing. The only real aspects of the Labour Party’s rhetoric are its threats (veiled or otherwise) and its denials, which are often only useful for exposing the degree of effort which they are putting in to cover up yet another scandal. It’s all just hogwash.
Absolutely nothing that these people say can be considered as fact at face value. Most of the time, it’s not even within the outskirts of objective reality.
Don’t let a docile press that quotes politicians verbatim fool you into thinking otherwise.
