It’s only been a week. And, yet, there were three, not one, stories of the Labour Party’s battle on the front between authoritarianism and democracy.

In reverse order of what you might have considered as the most important, I’ll start with the case of the social housing tenants of an as yet unfinished Siġġiewi apartment block who have been pressured into declaring an uninhabitable and incomplete apartment as their residence by the officials managing their transition. That way, they can vote for the Labour Party in the Siġġiewi mayoral battle and narrowly overcome the challenge of the opposition in that town.

A court has ruled on a batch of complaints by the Nationalist Party, which gives political parties recourse when the names of people who do not live at their declared address pop up on the electoral register. The court agreed with the Nationalist Party. Other cases may have different outcomes but, from the facts as they emerge, it doesn’t seem likely.

You’d think this was a petty bit of turf war between the two political parties. It’s far more important than that, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, tenants of social housing are, by definition, among the most vulnerable people in our society. They are economically unable to live decently in a market reality which does not take them into account. They depend on State intervention merely to have a roof over their heads. Decent housing is not a gift or a favour, it is a right.

But the authorities have forced beneficiaries to pay them back with the currency that matters to them: votes. A right is not paid for. Introducing this currency of political power is a corrupt act and, in this case, the politicians have not merely solicited a bribe; they have extorted it out of the poorest people precisely because they could, precisely because they were poor.

Secondly, public officials who are not themselves politicians have acted not to serve some administrative requirement, fairly and apolitically, but wilfully to serve the interests of the Labour Party. They have misled citizens and forced them to lie about where they live. The moral decrepitude of such an act cannot go unremarked. Like the fake addresses of Russian oligarchs obtaining Maltese passports to help hide their money in Dubai, our civil servants knowingly record fake addresses of voters to help the Labour Party retain precarious council seats.

Like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a lie is made official because the lie helps the party. And, like the doctors authorising benefit payments to manifestly ineligible people, civil servants follow the orders given them by the self-perpetrating regime.

Thirdly, the Labour Party is not simply organising a lie for the prestige of retaining the Siġġiewi council, the way some football patrons bribe an opponent’s goalkeeper to take a fall and let them win the league title. You would think the Labour Party wouldn’t care too much if the mayor of Siġġiewi is blue or red while they have such a grip on Castille.

But Labour’s hold on local councils over the last 15 years has allowed them to suffocate nearly completely one of the potentially most powerful vehicles of citizen engagement and participation in the running of our lives. Labour’s hegemony at the local level is crucial for Castille. It spares them having to have uncomfortable conversations with people whose affiliations discourage them from being sycophants.

Abuse of the vulnerable, administrative fraud, partisan hegemonisation: classic methods of authoritarianism and Siġġiewi is no special case.

Consider a second thing that happened this week. After 11 years of the most wilful abuse of the judicial system perpetrated by the government and its Labour Party team of lawyers, the courts have finally ruled what was obvious to everyone in 2013. Norman Vella was unlawfully removed from TVM because he was an independent mind on national television.

Labour’s hegemony at the local level is crucial for Castille- Manuel Delia

Norman Vella. Photo: Facebook

Like he did with the Nationalists in government before 2013, he would challenge the Labour government and hold it to account on his daily show. They couldn’t allow that. Vella sued because his removal breached basic employment laws. But his case documents something far greater than his rights.

It reminds us that the Labour Party behaved in 2013 not like a magnanimous victor of a democratic election but like a power-hungry military junta taking over the country in a hostile coup.

Read the manual. What do you capture first? The broadcasting media. We forget, because we’re tired of remembering and because we have no public broadcaster to remind us, that they abolished independent thinking in 2013 and banned it from any media they owned or controlled. We forget that we have a national broadcaster utterly free of debate, a space where only one voice is heard, the one that belongs to the authorities.

To abuse of the vulnerable, State-perpetrated fraud and partisan hegemonisation, add then the dismantling of pluralism and the censorship of the free mind.

Then, of course, this was the week that we heard, prematurely, the case for Joseph Muscat’s defence, before he’s even been asked to plea in a court room for charges of corruption and money laundering. He’s been given privileged access to the case against him, well beyond the rights as any ordinary accused person would. The attorney general saw to it that he continues to carry his privileges as demigod of the Labour firmament even as she asked a court to send him to 18 years in prison.

Joseph Muscat. Photo: Times of Malta

He says there’s no evidence of the money he’s supposed to have laundered, though, presumably, his lawyer will have told him that it is for him to prove that money does not exist. He says the whistleblower was “an Indian”, pronounced with that pejorative and slimily racist tone he used against “the Russian” who blew the whistle that brought down Pilatus Bank. He didn’t mind billing “Indians” for “consultancy” when, as prime minister, he fixed the transfer from the already bankrupt Vitals to the soon-to-be-bankrupt Steward. But now he whips up racial hatred to intimidate witnesses.

And he promises retribution to my colleagues at Repubblika and myself who signed a request to a court to collect evidence and assess whether a crime was committed in the privatisation of the hospitals.

Because the audacity of asking institutions to do their job, if that job inconveniences Muscat, deserves to be “washed away with a tsunami”. Muscat’s threat that, straight out of Nuremberg.

Finally, then, another ingredient to the recipe of abuse, fraud, hegemony and censorship: violence. Or the threat of it, which is, one would hope, sufficient to satisfy the desperate ends of the Labour Party. What ends? Preserving the power that allowed them to enrich themselves, guaranteeing their impunity and fending off, by any means necessary, any challenge to their unshakeable authority.

Three stabs to democracy, just this week.