Each time government ministers find that they have botched something up, the mantra they follow is “we could have handled it better”. When the Panama Papers secrets were revealed, at first the government accused the opposition of scaremongering and being ‘negative’. Then one government minister, while being grilled by the European Parliament for a top European job stated that “we could have dealt with it differently”.
Grilled by the public inquiry on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, one minister shielded himself from criticism by asserting that he was not part of the ‘kitchen cabinet’. “It was not me. It was the others.” Another minister revealed there was a government within a government, and that the prime minister’s chief of staff had too much power.
Is not this the same Labour government which has governed this country for the past seven years? How come we are now being told that there was not one government but more than one? Labour MPs were certainly one when all of them voted against a parliamentary inquiry in May 2016 into the then prime minister’s chief of staff’s holdings in Panama, and those of minister Konrad Mizzi. In that debate Joseph Muscat had defended Keith Schembri on May 26, 2016, to the point of brazenly stating: “One thing we did Keith Schembri and I: We succeeded in breaking the monopoly on power of the PN which had lasted for 25 solid years; and for this you never forgave him!”
After years of criticising the opposition of being negative in raising the Panama Papers issue, and envious of Mizzi’s ‘achievements’, Labour ended up dumping Mizzi himself and excluding him from the parliamentary group! The opposition was not so negative after all. It was simply right.
The same bunch of ministers who governed us before January 2020 are basically the same who are governing us now- Tonio Borg
Labour MPs were all united in voting against a motion of no confidence in Mizzi at the height of the Panama scandal.
How come only now have we discovered that there were two Labour governments and not one?
“We could have handled it better!” Now that sordid details are being unravelled about the Electrogas dirty deal, which was the immediate cause for the plan to go ahead with the murder of Caruana Galizia, the government will tell us “we could have handled it better”! As to the Montenegro stunningly corrupt scandal, government ministers sat around the cabinet table. They always expressed confidence in the minister who piloted the project and the prime minister who basked in the limelight when it was launched. They will simply declare “we did not know anything about it”.
The order is simple and clear from high above: “Shift the blame on someone else.” When our consul in Shanghai was accused of money laundering, the blame was shifted by the government on the previous administration which had readmitted the person concerned into public service.
Apart from the fact that the constitution obliges the prime minister to act on the binding advice of the Public Service Commission on such matters, this fact does not diminish the responsibility of the government which committed a serious error of judgement in posting him in the first place as our man in Shanghai.
The axing of the popular programme Xarabank from state television, according to Prime Minister Robert Abela, was none of his doing. It was simply and purely the work of Public Broadcasting Services, PBS. And who controls PBS? Government. Who owns the shares in PBS? Government. And who appoints the directors on its board? Government; so much so that government pundits on the Labour Party’s media have boasted of further reforms in the public broadcasting sector, particularly in the newsroom.
As if the situation was not bad enough, even the programme Dissett, one of the few breathing spaces in a suffocating environment, has been axed.
And we shall hear the same words again: “It was not me it was the others”. “I did not form part of the kitchen cabinet”. “Yes we could have handled it better”. “I would have dealt with it differently”. These are all excuses to hide the fact that the same bunch of ministers who governed us before January 2020 are basically the same group of ministers who are governing us now.
The only difference is that before Muscat was prime minister and Abela an advisor to the government. Now it is Abela prime minister and Muscat an advisor to the government!
Tonio Borg is a former European commissioner.