Much as I heard the story so many times, I am still unsure whether it is legend or fact. In Maltese towns and villages, as used to happen and still happens, the feast day approaching would see the inhabitants whitewashing house façades and freshly painting all woodwork. Frequently, in pursuing this task, the inhabitants astonishingly would manifest a prevalent colour taste, with so many balconies painted a conservative battleship grey!
Some knowledgeable but mean individuals would hint that taste did not come into it at all. It probably had more to do with forays into Her Majesty’s naval dockyard stores! More often than not, the profligate naval authorities would hardly notice or could not be bothered by the ongoing pilferage.
It appears that a good part of colonial Malta’s population that found employment with the British services would feel justified to take advantage of the British occupier. In their eyes, anything to do with British rule, including, by inference, central government and the public sector, could be fair game to be taken advantage of.
Unfortunately, so many of these citizens still seem unaware that Malta, since 1964, enjoys independence and there is no coloniser anymore to be exploited. In their collective imagination, it seems, these people have replaced the British coloniser with the Maltese public sector and the European Union.
Could this be why, currently, under Labour, we are witnessing an unprecedented abusive assault of epic proportions on our public sector? Could this be why our public sector is being pilfered and robbed through hundreds of uncompetitive direct orders and major projects negotiated disadvantageously to benefit corruptors? Could this be why we have so many thousands of positions of trust, unproductive unnecessary jobs and positions and consultancies for practically all Labour MPs?
It appears there is more to it than just colonial conditioning. There is also another significant factor and that is the 35-year political dominance of Malta, and the Labour Party, by Dom Mintoff, ‘il-perit’. To his political advantage, Mintoff nurtured and manipulated a sense of outrage among his followers, outrage at being exploited by the British and local ‘sinjuri’. He craftily spread among them a sense of victimisation. He promoted the conviction that a victim deserved compensation, so giving rise to a pronounced sense of entitlement among his supporters.
A Mintoffian style colonial mentality still prevails among the Labour Party leadership, in particular an inclination to take short-term dubious shallow advantage of particular situations. A leadership constantly seeking cheap and shrewd scoring of points against adversaries. In the process, positive ethical values are discarded in favour of an end-justifies-the-means approach.
After he unsuccessfully tried to convince that joining the EU would bring the ruin of Malta, Joseph Muscat, for what turned out to be a very greedy short-term monetary advantage, proceeded to indecently sell EU passports to quite a few shady people. Malta, no doubt, obtained a lot of money from this quick fix but in the process lost face with the EU where the island now counts few friends and even much less respect.
Up to 2013, Malta’s financial sector enjoyed relative respectability with modest steady growth. By allowing an unprecedented surge in filthy lax monitoring and governance, Labour proceeded to achieve a spectacular expansion of this financial sector. Now, never mind that, in the process, Malta attracted the custom of very shady international operators. Never mind Malta got accused of being a money laundering island, possibly aiding the financing of international terrorism.
A Mintoffian style colonial mentality still prevails among the Labour Party leadership- Arthur Muscat
Never mind that FATF slapped Malta with a greylisting, that is, an international untrustworthiness certificate. Never mind that the sector is reeling, with its future bleak. But, there you have it, we have to be happy that we are ruled by shrewd and super intelligent competent people who presided over the best of times for the island.
In his career, Mintoff appears to have followed a belief whereby an interlocutor had to be either a pliant supporter or an absolute adversary, with no in-betweens. Adversaries would be contrasted with unrestrained harshness and contempt. His prevalent style seems to have been belligerence not negotiation; in pursuing objectives he would denigrate and belittle whoever would be sitting opposite him.
The recent Mintoff biography by Fr Mark Montebello alleges that this ruthlessness extended to particular personal relationships.
Now displaying its dictatorial conditioning, the Labour Party, acting as the guardian of the Mintoff cult, will have none of this. We are ordered to believe and accept that Mintoff had a split personality, that is, yes, a rather vicious public one but then a very endearing private one.
Dictatorially, the party tells us, however, to accept those passages of this biography where the exploits of the great leader are elevated to high heaven. We are told to consider Mintoff’s achievement of good cash revenue through renting a military base to the British on a higher level than George Borg Olivier’s independence achievement.
Borg Olivier, at the head of what was still a colony, negotiated intelligently, with dogged patience and determination, skilfully achieving a complex but valid independence settlement, maintaining the goodwill of friendly allies. Handed a sovereign nation on a plate, a nation enjoying full power and authority, yes, Mintoff did play well the straightforward part of the shrewd landlord. He achieved a good rent and created quite a few enemies.
Unfortunately, it has to be confirmed that a majority of Maltese people are the children of Mintoff and fiercely loyal and Labour at heart. They will only castigate their party when bad governance reaches the pits with a direct negative effect on their material well-being.
So, are we ever going to see a stop to the current high levels of incompetence, corruption and all-pervading bad governance? When are these children, current leaders and party followers, going to grow up? When are they going to mature and stop being a cyclical scourge on what probably could be a successful, peaceful and democratically cohesive Maltese society?