Only a few weeks ago, Desmond Zammit Marmarà expressed his opinion elsewhere that Labour’s haemorrhage of votes according to some polls was “alarming and substantial”. Indeed, one poll he quoted put the PN ahead by about 3,000 votes.
He considered this partly as a result of the fact that the PL is no longer Labour at all and down to the gaffes that Robert Abela had committed in recent weeks. He also concluded in the same article that the PN still has time to recuperate sufficiently.
Yet, on September 22 in Times of Malta he argued that the likelihood is that Labour will remain in power for some time.
“So the solution is to reform Labour.” Easier said than done, he also said.
Labour has been rotten to the core for many years. During the early Mintoff years, violence was allowed to happen with hardly any of the perpetrators ever facing justice. We all remember the rife corruption under Lorry Sant when even people disappeared and life continued as normal.
We had a treasurer of the party in court for allegedly embezzling thousands of euros selling health schemes to Libyans. He appeared in court several times but we have not heard anything about an outcome. A previous general secretary of the party, Jimmy Magro, was also supposed to appear in court for alleged attempted corruption. Anyone heard anything else about it?
Today’s Labour is totally taken over by outside powerful interests who dictate to the party.
An indication of this was the way Abela emerged the winner against Chris Fearne. The latter was considered to be ready to face Labour’s immediate past and apply justice without looking at faces. That caused Burmarrad to shake.
Abela is no way a candidate for the post of being a redeemer of his own party. He is part of the corrupt set-up which is getting worse, as we have seen since the revelations about welfare benefits for fake disabilities.
Defending the indefensible is no way of going about reform- Salvu Felice Pace
Abela murmured to a journalist that the political price has already been paid for the benefits scandal, meaning the resignation of Silvio Grixti as an MP.
No, prime minister, there is justice due. No resignation on its own suffices, otherwise we end up (we have already done) with one law for ordinary citizens and another for politicians.
Abela is knee-deep in corruption. He knew about the benefits fraud and yes, he informed the police, but then waited until the general election was far gone before he spoke up about it and then only because Times of Malta spilled the beans and fraudsters started appearing in court.
If Zammit Marmarà truly believes that Labour is redeemable, he should help Abela by naming all those he considers to be a liability to the party, starting from Joseph Muscat and continuing with all those who made themselves rich very quickly.
Abela is still harbouring many of them with positions of trust and tenders galore. Unless Labour disowns its own alleged criminals, there’s no redemption.
Accusations that Labour has morphed into a criminal organisation have been made not only by the leader of the opposition but also by other upstanding citizens.
Years ago, Eddie Fenech Adami and his cabinet went to court when they were accused of being corrupt and they were all cleared by the courts. Abela, rather than rebut the accusations, smears others.
There is no will to reform the party. Defending the indefensible is no way of going about reform.