There was once a political party called Labour. It’s gone. Photo: Jason Borg

There is a busker in St John Street, Valletta with a sense of humour. Last Friday, the day after news broke out that Malta gaming firms were at the centre of a Mafia probe in Italy, he was playing the theme from The Godfather.

He may have done so unwittingly, because it looked like it was part of his standard repertoire. He played it quite pleasantly though, so pleasant that anyone strolling down the city’s scorching streets at the time could not but realise how well the music blended with the surroundings.

Malta could once have passed for Sicily but, over the years, we have lost their fascinating cuisine, their manners, their easy Mediterranean lifestyle, their olive oil and, yes, the undisturbed landscape. We lost it all to greed, all except for the Mafia.

There was nothing surprising about the fact that six Italians in Malta are to be extradited to Italy following an investigation by the Italian police, who believe the ’Ndrangheta uses betting companies here to launder money. That was inevitable. Sleaze so becomes us. The betting companies involved went through due diligence checks before they set up shop here. Let’s hope Henley & Partners are doing a better job.

This Mafia probe is one you cannot blame on Labour because the Mafia has always been here. Its name keeps popping up again and again.

Corleone-born Mafia boss Totò Riina, on the run from the law for decades, is rumoured to have loved visiting Gozo and drinking wine at It-Tokk. It is just a rumour, of course, because in Gozo you cannot pin anything down.

Riina needed a holiday now and again and what better place to go to but an island where omertà is something that comes natural. Try asking a Gozitan for directions to someone’s house and you’d see where you’d end up. Even worse, ask them for a VAT receipt.

So, blaming Labour for this latest Mafia connection with Malta can be unfair. What would be fair, however, is to accuse Labour of policies that make this country vulnerable to more of this rot and for exposing Malta to the dangers of organised crime. The Malta passport sale racket, ostensibly to attract ‘talent’, is a scheme itself shrouded in omertà and has the mindset of Malta old when piracy was a major industry. We are inviting trouble.

This is a country where you can just come over and chat with the Prime Minister, offer to open a sham university and get in return pristine land with sea views and a lowering of university standards to meet your requirements.

This comedy of government errors looks so feudal that it reads like Il Gattopardo, except that Sicily has moved on from the Gattopardo to join a republic. We went a step further and fed it a banana.

• Planning Parliamentary Secretary Michael Falzon intends to keep the courts busy this summer. He plans to file a raft of libel suits against Nationalist MP Ryan Callus and various newspapers over statements on his early retirement package with Bank of Valletta. As if we care.

Falzon should have disappeared into history the moment the first Gaffarena scandal came to light. As more and more details emerge on what’s been going on under his watch, he wants us to think that the issue is really about his retirement package. It’s not.

Opposition leader Simon Busuttil was succinct in Parliament when he asked him: “What are you still doing here?”

The lack of values and standards in public life is what’s behind the unending series of scandals that have become a daily event

Falzon is history and the longer he drags this out, the worse it will be for him. Sadly, he is not helping his case. He actually called a press conference last week to say that his option to return to the bank runs out in June 2018. There is a country out there waiting with bated breath for him to take that option now. What he’s done to the planning authority is horrendous. But, then, that was to be expected of him because Falzon is as Labour as they come.

Parliament Secretary Ian Borg too is planning to keep the courts busy this summer. He doesn’t like it that a family from Dingli is considering taking legal action against him to reverse the sale of a piece of land to him by their mentally-ill father.

For Borg, a Labour rising star that sometimes cannot contain himself in Parliament, the issue is just a “private matter” arising from internal conflicts between family members. We all sympathise with Borg because he’s a busy man these days. The Permanent Commission against Corruption is hearing a case involving him and the redevelopment of a rural property.

Oh, how heavy the burden of office must be.

If even a fraction of what The Malta Independent reported is true, this parliamentary secretary should have long joined his fellow Cabinet member Michael Falzon for a drink in a bar in Valletta to ponder about their future. They might meet another Labour tragedy there, Chris Cardona.

Minister Cardona is thankfully not planning any libel cases, yet, but the bar he frequents does. The owner doesn’t like the idea of anyone saying there are shady people among his patrons. Now whoever would have thought of that, considering that Cardona, who resides at a high-class Portomaso apartment, is among his guests.

Falzon, Borg and Cardona personify all that is wrong with Labour. This is a party that lacks any sense of decency, of what is the true meaning of public life, of what accountability stands for.

Labour, under Joseph Muscat’s helm, has thrown moral and political values to the wind to attain power. We are paying the price for that, dearly.

Under Labour, it is not doing what is good and right that counts but what you can get away with. The buck stops with the Prime Minister. He leads by example and rents his private car to himself.

He is personally responsible for this political degeneration.

• There was once a political party in Malta called Labour. It’s gone and we should be grateful but the alternative we are faced with begins to look scarier.

The Nationalist Party published a book in 1981 called Is Malta Burning? It was packed with black and white photos of PN clubs burnt or destroyed by Labour thugs who roamed the streets like they owned the place, which they did. It makes very depressing reading. Apparently, the Floriana PN club took pride of place of being the most frequently-ravaged club on the island, over 20 times. As they say, location, location, location.

No wonder there was nothing much left of the Floriana Labour club after the street celebrations of the PN victory in 1987. They deserved it. You can only fight violence with violence.

Socialism is a repulsive ideology because it is built on envy. There is nothing socialist about Muscat’s new Labour. Instead of envy, there is now greed but the result is the same.

A quarter of a century in Opposition, the Labour Party has learnt nothing and failed to move on. It is the same Labour from the 1970s and the 1980s, except that this time around it comes across even worse because it has discarded any sense of value or principle.

You could once sympathise, even if just academically, with Labour’s working class values because we all have an innate sense of justice and sympathy for anyone worse off. That is all gone.

There is a dearth of ideology inside Labour. It is as gutted as a PN club in the 1970s and you can see it in their performance in government. The lack of values and standards in public life is what’s behind the unending of scandals that have become a daily event.

Labour is truly burning.