Muscat’s May Day mayday

It is nothing short of a move from the playbook of a totalitarian dictator that an under- fire Prime Minister rallies the faithful in their thousands to ‘give an answer’ to pesky journalists asking uncomfortable questions and writing troubling articles about his government and some of its members – stories the government would prefer to be buried six feet under, or perhaps even deeper.

But that is exactly what Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, his minions and his trolls are doing.

They have taken exception to a new round of international news reports emanating from the Daphne Project. And our Prime Minister is not only summoning the thousands to the Labour Party’s traditional May Day mass meeting to ‘ answer’ to the local press, he is doing it to establishments such at The Guardian, the New York Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reuters, and Le Monde.

Now surely these international publications of high repute hold no grudge against Malta’s Labour Party.

But according to the Prime Minister, the masses need to turn out in their droves on Tuesday to answer to the stories that are coming out, and to all this media calumny, to use a word the Prime Minister seems to like so much.

Have we missed something here? Since when is might right? And since when does filling a square prove anything to be factually correct or incorrect?

The Prime Minister’s call to arms, as it were, on Tuesday is nothing short of a desperate mayday call from a pilot whose plane is about to crash.

The only answer that the people of this country deserve from the Prime Minister to all that has been exposed over the last two years, in fact, would be the immediate sacking of his chief of staff Keith Schembri and Minister Konrad Mizzi, the two people who have brought our country into such disrepute with their financial shenanigans and scheming.

May Day – or Labour Day, or International Workers’ Day – is a traditional Socialist event. And the Prime Minister, perhaps the least Socialist Prime Minister the country has seen, is using the occasion to gloss over how his government and some of its members have been selling off state assets lock, stock and barrel while others are facing very serious evidence that they have been dipping their hands, through those deals, into the state coffers very deeply indeed.

State assets are being stripped from the people in what appears to be a blueprint modus operandi that would not be accepted in any but the most far-flung of countries in the remotest of backwaters.

Yet this government in a modern, democratic European Union member state has allowed this to happen time and time again.

The flag-waving masses will undoubtedly turn up in their hoards to cheer on a Prime Minister who is very clearly taking them for a ride, sweeping the rug out from under their feet at every opportunity, hoodwinking them and playing on their fears and aspirations so masterfully.

And in the meantime, crony after crony is let off scot-free irrespective of the gravity of the nature of their crimes and the evidence that has been brought against them.

The Prime Minister needs to understand that the press is not the country’s enemy, he and his cronies are. The country’s enemies are those who have landed it in this multifaceted, ugly predicament.

In addition, attempting to turn the tables on the messengers who are doing their duty by providing the checks and balances required of a democracy in such a dastardly way is entirely unbecoming of a man in his position.

This is an entirely irresponsible and reprehensible approach. A responsible action, actually the only responsible action the Prime Minister could take at this juncture, would be to immediately fire Schembri and Mizzi.

That, however, is very clearly not in the playbook from which the Prime Minister is reading.