As published on the Times of Malta: 08/05/2014.
In this turbulent first year of Joseph Muscat & Co., I thought I had seen and read it all. I was wrong. Going through the pages of Times of Malta in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of our joining the EU, I realised that the Prime Minister is now practically trying to take credit for Malta’s accession.
Now, it is not always a good idea to revisit the past but it is almost as if Muscat believes the entire population is suffering from collective amnesia. He is trying to spin the story that the Labour Party, of which he was its most celebrated attack reporter, acceded to the EU because it “accepted the will of the people”. It did not. Not even close.
Muscat, Alfred Sant and the rest of the PL tried their hardest to deny us access to our rights as EU citizens, so much so that they defied mathematics and irresponsibly claimed that their pie-in-the-sky concept of Partnership had, in fact, won a referendum on the issue. Worse still, after the general election, the entire Labour Opposition voted to reject the EU Accession Treaty when this was presented to them in Parliament. All of them.
Today’s versions of Muscat and Sant do not tell us that they had spent years claiming that joining the EU would mean carrying the “cross of the millennium” or that we should have sent a message by framing our voting document and not bothering in 2003. Today’s reworked versions of Muscat and Sant have the gall to speak about how important it is to vote in the European Parliament elections to send a message now.
While Sant, 10 years later, still talks of “full” membership – as if there is any other kind – Muscat now talks of what he calls his “European values”. Presumably, he does not mean to refer to his illegal attempt at flouting international law with his narrowly-averted push-back of people Malta had just rescued from the sea last summer.
It is a tragicomedy of gaffes exposing a worrying level of inexperience that continuously pits Malta against our partners.
Malta is Europe. We need to keep countering this populist rhetoric that there is somehow an ‘us’ and ‘them’ with Malta and Europe. It is an argument that exposes a lack of insight into how the EU functions. A strong Europe depends on having a strong Malta and vice versa. The PL was wrong about the European Parliament 10 years ago and it is wrong today.
Muscat thinks he can fool all the people all the time. His tactic is smokescreen after smokescreen. His latest attempt at deflection was calling a solemn national press conference to announce a 2c drop in the price of petrol, in the hope that no one would notice that unemployment is skyrocketing. Or that Malta’s spending has exploded to unsustainable levels; or that our healthcare system is under immense pressure. Or that the finance minister has not faced the press since he announced to the European Parliament that Malta “lacks people of calibre”. Or that some Labour MPs and their families and friends have been handed the cushiest jobs available at the highest possible salaries – some of them even have two. It is surreal.
“A strong Europe depends on having a strong Malta and vice versa”
Muscat has gone from Lawrence Gonzi’s ‘Nurse of the Mediterranean’ in the Libya crisis to Muscat’s fiefdom, where history can be erased.
Labour has not made us the best in Europe. What they have done is turned the clock back and transformed the Eurosceptic former leader of the Malta Labour Party into their top EP candidate and started celebrating the painful mediocrity that has become the new face of old Labour.
We forget how close we came to being denied the rights we all now take for granted. It has been left to the Nationalist Party to remind us what standards of governance we ought to expect from our elected representatives and to explain how Malta must make the most out of EU membership. For daring to disagree with Muscat and his version of ‘European values’, we are called traitors.
Muscat has the cheek to write that the people of Malta and Gozo should “congratulate yourselves” on 10 years of EU membership. Well, we certainly will not be congratulating him or his top candidate, Sant. But we do rejoice that we managed to open doors to a future of opportunities… in spite of them.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140508/opinion/Trying-to-rewrite-his-story.518124
