The title is borrowed from a hit single by Emma Bunton of the Spice Girls. I find myself asking the same question to Desmond Zammit Marmarà after having read his article in this paper a few days ago.

I admire his confessions both here and elsewhere, as well as his candid conclusion “that only a Labour defeat at the polls will restore the Labour Party to what it once was”.

He adds that it has to return to Paul Boffa’s type of Labour Party, which is not an easy journey to make.

Zammit Marmarà is a decade or so younger than me. We both went to Church schools and we both spent a lifetime in education. We have both been passionate about politics and we have both tasted the honour of being local councillors.

He wrote mostly as a fervent supporter of the Labour Party and I did the same for many years as a supporter of the Nationalist Party.

We both experienced life under all the administrations since Malta’s independence in 1964. Both parties enjoyed close to 30 years each in power, give or take a few years.

Any objective observer who looks at history would come to the conclusion that life in Malta was calmer under Nationalist administrations than under Labour.

The 1970s and 1980s were turbulent years, with violence in many forms, the disappearance of people and impunity, with a commissioner of police involved in a murder.

When a different sort of leadership was tried under Alfred Sant, the Labour Party imploded. It gave the Nationalist Party a good run for their money, enabling them to stay in power between 1998 and 2013. 

The years when governments were led by Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici left their mark on the Labour Party and it has never really found its soul since.

As Zammit Marmarà confirms in his piece, Joseph Muscat was faking it before the 2013 election. He did not keep a single promise and, what’s more, even his conversions – his condemnation of the violent period under Labour as the worst in Maltese history and his admission that ‘partnership’ did not win after all in the EU referendum – were a package jampacked with fakery.

Muscat destroyed whatever was left of real Labour and substituted it with what it has become – a party servile to corrupt barons, a party for whom impunity is a guarantee for retaining power, a party guilty of allowing the death of a journalist on its watch.

All in all, this is not much different from the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps more subtle, more high-tech, with the gods called money and power celebrated and worshipped.

That is why I ask Zammit Marmarà what took him so long.

I remember him writing on Muscat’s e-paper the Malta Star telling his readers not to respond to my articles in this paper about the horrors of political violence under Labour administrations as they would only perpetuate my writing at the same time as Muscat was preparing himself to become Labour’s new messiah.

The same people who were in the Labour Party during the violent periods and never faced justice were still in the party. So were those who were behind them and those who protected them.

Muscat’s cosmetic changes did nothing to continue Sant’s attempt to clear the party of violent elements. He encouraged his self-cult, which camouflaged his evil road map to Panama and to Azerbaijan.

There is no hope Labour will change. It has to be a new party with no strings connecting it to past or present- Salvu Felice Pace

He started the way he intended to carry on with the Café Premier scandal and continued with so many in between, up to Panama, Pilatus Bank, the American University of Malta, Electrogas, the Vitals-Steward hospitals concession debacle and Montenegro.

The Labour Party never changed.

What changed was its style as they busied themselves creating a libertine ideology of ‘anything goes’, which has destroyed the moral fibre of a large section of the population.

Another huge block of power that stayed constant under every Labour Party administration was the material and political support they received from the General Workers’ Union.

Labour in government has morphed the GWU into one of the greatest capitalist establishments in the country that has enriched itself beyond all limits.

Was it a coincidence that on the evaluation committee appointed by Konrad Mizzi which examined (?) the Vitals contracts was none other than the GWU’s accountant?

Unless Labour cuts its umbilical cord from the GWU there is no hope of a return to Boffa’s party.

The present administration under Robert Abela shows that it cannot set itself free from either the GWU or Muscat and his strong clique.

Any criminal action against Muscat will bring about an implosion within the Labour Party with worse effects than those in 1997/98.

The future leaders of Labour are already being compromised by the tenders they are being given and salaries well above their merit, while donors to the party are getting similar treatment.

There is no hope that Labour will change.

It has to be a new party with no strings connecting it to the past or the present.

Labour may still enjoy political successes – their hold on a section of the people is being fed continually by money, jobs and non-jobs and promises of more of the same so long as they are in power.

A strong Nationalist Party is an absolute necessity, as Zammit Marmarà is wishing for.

The question remains: what took him so long?