To Labourites

Who doesn’t remember Joseph Muscat and his Amazing RainbowColour Dreamcoat? It was more or less ten years ago when the Burmarrad Wonderboy mesmerised the nation.

He promised a Brave New Malta, but more importantly a Brave New Labour, that would depart from its old socialist dreams and embrace a new, liberal-progressive dream. The Wonderboy struck a Faustian bargain with different lobbies, entering Castile on a huge wave of popular support. A New Era had begun, the winds of change blew over the country, and Malta was on its way to become the Best in Europe.

In some aspects, Muscat’s government succeeded. In others, it failed. Miserably. Muscat’s model was lopsided. It wooed the markets and certain sectors of society and the economy and forsook the classes the Party had been founded to look after.

Like a truant sneaking out of class to play football with his friends, Muscat’s Labour stopped paying its Socialist International membership fee, and ultimately left the group. It also left – to their fate – the vulnerable and the downtrodden... and these people were too infatuated with Muscat’s rainbow-colour dreamcoat even to suspect that their ship had changed course.

Muscat left the Left and embraced laissez-faire, a political vision that favours the greedy, unscrupulous few at the expense of the tax-paying middle classes and the directionless lower ones. He flirted with the lobbies that clamoured for laissez-faire in certain sectors of the economy and laissez-faire in social matters and mores. He christened this flirtation “liberal-progressive”. He promised social progress and moral and economic freedom.

But in his frenzy, Muscat left out that progress and freedom are like wine: in small quantities, it complements your dinner and helps you relax; in huge quantities, it makes you drunk and accident-prone.

The accident did happen, when Muscat, Schembri, and Mizzi were drunk on power. The Panama Papers scandal exposed what was going on behind the scenes: the opening of secret companies and trusts in secretive jurisdictions to conceal monies that purportedly came from recycling businesses in the Gulf States and the renting out of a modest house in the outskirts of London.

That accident was followed by tragedy: the assassination of a journalist.

And Muscat’s downfall. A scramble for power ensued, with one candidate speaking enigmatically of devilish pacts. The phrase has never been properly deciphered, but at the time it was rumoured it could be a reference to the socialist colours that had run from Muscat’s Rainbow Labour.

Indeed, a current claimed that with Robert Abela at the helm, Labour would return to its socialist roots. This current couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Under Robert Abela, Labour has doggedly continued prowling the streets, looking for morsels of liberal and progressive meat.

According to the latest European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey, the rate of poverty in Malta increased by 0.4% in 2021 when compared to 2020: 20.3% of the population.

While the poor got poorer, the middle-class started feeling the pinch. In September 2022, KPMG issued a report stating that it computed Malta’s Housing Affordability Index at 76.4%: “a household earning the median income would only be able to borrow 76.4% of the financing required to purchase a medianpriced apartment”.

The Party that its supporters knew as the champion of the vulnerable and the downtrodden was now contributing to the impoverishment of the middle and lower classes, in the name of an economic freedom that benefitted the greedy few.

But the same Party – despite the change in leadership – also gave in to the siren’s song of radical personal and moral freedom.

Despite its new leader’s banging on his chest that pro-abortion lobbyists would find in him their staunchest enemy, steadfastly defending life from conception, Labour is now pushing an abortion law that will eliminate the most vulnerable, the weakest members of society – the unborn.

The son of the Deputy Leader who abandoned his party in 1998, contributing to its defeat in those crazy early elections, is now abandoning a sane principle upheld by most Labourites: the sanctity of life.

I ask Labourites: is this the Party you voted for? Is this the Party you believed in, donated to, volunteered for?

Times change, that much is true. But principles don’t.

I ask Labour MPs: why did you contest the elections with the Labour Party? To wield power, or to strive for the principles you claim(ed) you believe(d) in?

Perhaps Silvio Parnis was derided as a simple man because he cherished Labourites’ values. He championed the vulnerable and was pro-Life. If he was derided for giving witness to Labourites’ values, what do you deserve for forsaking those same values?

Remember the core belief found in your Party’s Statute: “the health of society is measured by the progress of the weakest among its members.”