Same Labour, same tricks

After the 1971 election, won by Dom Mintoff ’s Labour Party, former minister Sandy (Alexander) Cachia Zammit and his brother Lawrence were arrested and charged with stealing government property on the basis of some documents found behind a trapdoor in Law

After a trial by jury, they were unanimously freed. I remember a crowd of PN diehards hoisting Sandy and his lawyer Guido de Marco on their shoulders around the streets of Valletta. This was in the worst years of the first term of the Mintoff post-independence administration.

I was reminded of this when I saw Giovanna Debono and her husband emerge from the Gozo Law Courts together with lawyer Joe Giglio after Mr Debono was freed from charges of corruption.

There were changes, of course. No crowds of supporters, no hoisting on shoulders. And the small group ran down the steps as if they had a ship to catch.

Coming as it did in the middle of days filled with reports from court highlighting charges of corruption and involvement in the murder of Malta’s most famous journalist, this judgement highlights the tendency of Labour administrations even after so many years, to claim corruption by Nationalist politicians and then being unable to prove the charges.

The current cases which led to preventive incarceration of no less than ten persons last Saturday are under many aspects a first for our country. And there are other cases which may lead to further arraignments and possible jail sentences.

This flurry of arraignments and court action came too late to stop the European Parliament from spending Thursday’s sitting almost unanimously condemning Malta, not always without mistakes. It may yet lead the Council of Europe to tone down the coming Moneyval verdict, or, again, it may not.

Whether all this court action will lead the Maltese electorate to be more benign in its judgement of the Robert Abela government in the coming general election is again not given.

Certainly Abela is between a cliff and a rock face. On the one hand, he was elected as the ‘continuity’ candidate following Joseph Muscat and he thus has to accept and confirm Muscat’s decisions. But on the other hand, he is forced more by international pressure than by internal pressure to clean up his government’s act.

At the same time, he is being forced to defend the actions of people he confirmed in his Cabinet, from Ian Borg and his uprooting of trees, his taking up of arable land to create more roads, to Justyne Caruana and her easy handouts to select friends.

As he showed in Caruana’s earlier resignation, Abela does take drastic decisions but then when lightning strikes twice in the same place, he may feel impotent in the circumstances. Which may explain why he then took it out on the hapless and soft-spoken Bernard Grech before the House rose on its Easter recess.

Either today or more probably today week the monthly survey will show the outcome of these conflicts. The day of the muchawaited ‘sorpasso’ may be fast approaching.

And we have not spoken so far on the Covid pandemic. Forced by numbers, the government imposed a sort of lockdown some days ago. It is as near total lockdown as can be, though select outlets are still open. This is slightly less strict as elsewhere, such as Britain, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson still must wait two more weeks until hairdressers reopen and he can trim his unruly mop of hair.

The Maltese almost-lockdown seems to have been effective as the daily amount of infected persons has come down from around 500 a day to just 100.

Other countries have done even better such as Israel and also Gibraltar which is now planning to reopen.

Malta is almost cut off from the rest of Europe. There are days when the national airline barely manages one flight per day. Other countries have far more connections.

Much depends on the rate of people being vaccinated. While abroad the main issues regard this or that vaccine, here the main question remains that large sections of the population have not been sent for while we continuously hear of younger people getting vaccinated by a variety of ruses ahead of older people.

Here too, the government which hogs all areas, gets blamed for this ramshackle situation.

The fourth estate is not without blame for this state of affairs and the widespread despondency that has been engendered. The continued revelations of the interplay between the prime minister’s chief side, who is also a key entrepreneur in printing and allied sectors and the principal mass media organisation in the country shocked many including the key employees in the company who have taken steps to disassociate themselves from the so-called bridge-building.

On the other hand we have had yet another example of the ‘publish and be damned’ school of thought, so beloved by, among others, Daphne.