A few days before Christmas, a 22-year-old homeless man sought shelter at the airport. He wasn’t wearing a mask. He wasn’t wearing shoes either. He barely wore anything – just bermudas and a skimpy T-shirt. He was swiftly dragged before the court in his tattered T-shirt, still barefoot. His legal aid lawyer didn’t request bail. The man was jailed.
“Are there no prisons?”, the miserly misanthrope Ebenezer Scrooge asked in Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, when homeless children turned up begging for alms on Christmas Day. Malta seems to have no lack of them.
Scrooge elevated money over people. He did not value human life and lacked empathy even for the most vulnerable. He embodied a view where nothing is more sacred than the ‘cash nexus’. Scrooge represented the worst excesses of humanity.
In his joyless obsession with money, Scrooge represents Labour’s government. The nauseating grovelling of our justice minister to a business tycoon, the despicable acceptance of bagfuls of cash by Rosianne Cutajar, and the revolting invitation of a suspected money launderer to the prime minister’s birthday party are just an inkling of Labour’s grotesque submission to mammon.
Justyne Caruana’s relentless abuse of power to financially reward her close friend and her demeaning attempts to hide it, the shameless awards of unnecessary millions of euros in direct orders, the looting of national assets to benefit close friends, the barefaced appointments of hundreds of unqualified persons of trust are all driven by a disturbing adulation of money.
In his perennial quest for wealth, Scrooge abused his loyal clerk Bob Cratchit. Scrooge makes Cratchit work excessively late, even on Christmas Eve, on a meagre salary in freezing cold. Scrooge keeps the coal box in his own room, denying his clerk access to it. His clerk tries to warm himself at the candle on his desk.
Labour too keeps that coal box safe inside its office. It denies the nation access to its own wealth, which it keeps for itself and its inner core. The main beneficiaries are Joseph Portelli, Construct furniture, BEAT Ltd, Nexia BT, db, Aaron Mifsud Bonnici, the Zammit Tabonas, the GWU, Vitals, the Gasans and the Fenechs.
The nation is left with half a piece of coal – miserable abundance for Labour’s friends and abundance of misery for the rest. Those stinking deals Labour struck remain secret. The nation cannot know how much coal was in that box, or where it’s gone. The occasional leak reveals that while a barefoot homeless man is jailed, our coal funds lavish Christmas breaks at the Phoenicia for MTA staff.
Labour has Konrad Mizzi’s ghost to serve them warning- Kevin Cassar
Scrooge is perplexed at the world. He believes only wealth brings happiness. Ironically, he remains miserable despite his wealth. When he returns home, alone and unhappy, he is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner, Marley. Marley spent seven years since his death wandering the earth in heavy chains as punishment for his sins. Those chains are forged of those very sins – cash boxes, padlocks, ledgers and steel purses. Marley is here to warn Scrooge to mend his ways.
Labour has Konrad Mizzi’s ghost to serve them as warning. The minister nobody could touch now soaks in humiliation. Expelled from Labour’s parliamentary group, he is reduced to a wretched waiting game – from one PAC meeting to the next, from summons to the standards commissioner’s office, to a call for police interrogation, to possible arrest and prosecution – or an international arrest warrant over the Mozura fraud.
As his PAC outbursts become increasingly hysterical and pathetic, Mizzi, like Marley, roams the earth weighed down by his chains, discarded and denounced even by his former ‘friends’.
Scrooge was visited by the three ghosts of Christmas – past, present and yet to come. Scrooge is deeply moved. He slowly accepts what he’s been, what he is and what he might yet become –and redeems himself.
Scrooge is shown the young woman who once loved him but who turned him down because of his obsessive meanness, now with her new family, happy. Scrooge hears the woman’s husband tell her how he’d seen Scrooge alone and miserable in his office, doing his accounts, on Christmas Day.
Yet what distresses Scrooge the most is Bob Cratchit’s disabled son, Tiny Tim, who perishes out of hunger and ill-health. The ghost shows Scrooge how Bob breaks down as his son’s shrunken lifeless body lies on the bed.
What moves Scrooge most is the meaninglessness of his own life contrasted with Tiny Tim, who had nothing in life but had everything in terms of the love of those around him. Tiny Tim’s life meant much and is carried on by his family even after his death.
Labour has been shown that scene. Labour has seen that dead body, or what remained of it, and the deep anguish of the parents, the husband and the children. Rather than redeeming itself, Labour, through Owen Bonnici, relentlessly cleared her memorial every single day, denying the bereaved even a small drop of comfort.
Labour pulled down banners calling for justice. Labour did its utmost to hide the murky sickening truths behind her assassination. It vehemently opposed an independent inquiry. When it was compelled to hold one by the Council of Europe, Robert Abela ignored all the inquiry’s recommendations.
The ghost of Christmas yet to come will show Ian Borg the mentally ill man he robbed of his heirloom. He will show Owen Bonnici the broken bodies of those who fell to abuse of drugs.
He will show Labour the suffering, pain and death of those denied services, such as the promised Gozo cardiology Angiosuite, because of the rotten Vitals deal. He will show Glenn Bedingfield, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s face.
Dickens had a solid conviction that people can be redeemed and restored to life. Scrooge’s enduring appeal is his dramatic transformation from miserable miser to joyous exuberant man of justice. As we struggle through the deepest darkness of winter, we can only hope that the new year will return the light.