Unlike the Prime Minister, The Maltese Body Politic Will Never Give in to the Demands of the Press
Oh who am I kidding, I'd do anything for a spot of publicity, or at least infamy
Oh hello, didn't notice you there. Welcome back to the Maltese Body Politic, the premiere weekly newsletter about, of course, Maltese politics. I failed to send out one of these last Friday because I had some travelling to do, not to mention needed a bit of a break, but here we are now. What happened over the last couple of weeks, you might ask? Well, let's find out!
Sunday the 6th of November had the Times reveal that it finally got what it wanted for so long - an interview with prime minister Robert Abela. One can say that this means Bobby got himself a big ol' "L", as the kids apparently like to put it this way, as he gave in to the media's demands like the weakass baby he is. And this is an interview where both sides come out looking pretty badly, as the Times' Mark Laurence Zammit1 is no Paxman, while Robert Abela cannot even handle any pressure, no matter how mild, from the press. Like say what you will about Joseph Muscat - fuck knows I say a lot, and will continue stating more even in this very edition of The Maltese Body Politic, but he could run rings with the morons making this nation's journalist class. Take, for instance, the pointing out of very obvious corruption within Transport Malta, something that has been unveiled in the courts of law. Bobby not only insists that this is proof that "the institutions are working" as the police investigating the case, but then claims that such meddling used to happen during the Nationalist Party's days in government a decade ago. And sure, maybe it did, but it's no justification for what is happening now, is it? Then there's the matter of abortion, which is touched upon at one point. Bobby reveals that the government is set to table an amendment to the law sometime "in the coming days" covering cases when the mother's life is at risk. Now both sides of this particular debate, be they pro- or anti-abortion, will describe this as, well, abortion, or at least the decriminalisation thereof. But not Robert, who insists that this has, in fact, "nothing to do with abortion." He also fails to express his own opinion on any matter, what with his being a weak and stupid daddy's boy who got everything in life solely through the strength of his family name. A final, perhaps not that interesting, point raised in the interview involves the nation's future president, who's set to be named in 2024. There Bobby gets to do a bit of a flex as he insists that, no, former PN prime minister Lawrence Gonzi will never get that position2 - never mind that Gonzi named Bobby's own daddy president during his time in office. You see, Bobby says, "a president needs to unite a nation," something a leader of a political party can never do. So, who can unite Malta, a nation long divided since its very inception? Well, I can think of one name - yours truly, of course. Send your petitions right there, gents, as I can truly be the man to heal this broken nation by making it accept that it will sooner, not later, be swallowed by the waves, before it will be rightly forgotten by the world at large.
Sticking to the topic of interviews for a hot minute, some of you will surely know that Lovin Malta released its second interview with aforementioned former prime minister and overall liberal darling Joseph Muscat. No I did not watch it because I'm not paid enough to subject my limited mental health to that ghoul's sneering visage. Hell, I'm not making any cash from The Maltese Body Politic, and as such I will not offer you that service! And no, I will not go through Lovin's recaps of the interview because I don't want to encourage them to continue subjecting us to such horror. Instead, what I will do is ask you to go through the interview for me. Yes, you! After that you can go to the comments section below and let me know what you think about the former King and what he has to say about the many interesting topics I'm sure Lovin asked him about. Then come next week I will publish all the replies3 for a feature on the Joseph Muscat interview. Wouldn't that be some fun community engagement? You torture yourselves and I get to do very little about it - sounds like a plan to me!
Do you want more recapping of interviews? Because oh boy, we got one more of those bad boys! While the Times got the prime minister on the interview hot seat and Lovin had a lovely chat with Joseph Muscat, on the 31st of October Malta Today got stuck with... Clyde Caruana. Must suck to be them, huh? The interview itself is a load of the usual bibble with the aim of promoting the budget, but it did highlight one point that I missed from that whole affair - Clyde described his budget as "socialist." And that's very interesting when one considers that the Labour Party had dropped such ideology since at least the 90s, when the political failure turned MEP Alfred Sant used to be its leader. The very idea was then wholly scorched from orbit once Joseph Muscat, a man fully cognisant of the fact liberals and centrists would be more than okay with corruption and cronyism so long it was committed by a fellow centrist or right winger, came to power in the 2000s. And now we have Clyde insisting that he's all for waving the red flag of socialism? To be fair his budget does stick to social democratic principles, but those are less left wing and more a centrist compromise ensuring the howling masses didn't tear their governments limb from limb in the name of a glorious Communist revolution following the end of World War 2. Still, why would Clyde - or the Labour Party as a whole - go for something of this sort? A hint might be found within Lovin Malta, which has a feature titled "Clyde Marx: Was The 2023 Budget Really As Socialist As He Described?" This piece is a collaboration with Spunt dot emm tee, which is... well, actually I don't know what Spunt is. So let's go to the source, shall we? Spunt dot emm tee's About Us page claims "Spunt is an independent group dedicated to analysing the big issues in society and public life, and providing fresh perspectives to the public debate." Now I once heard rumblings over on the Maltese wing of Twitter that Spunt is actually a tentacle of Labour propaganda, but considering the anonymity surrounding both the sites and its contributors I'm going to put such suggestions aside, at least for the time being. What is concrete from the Spunt site is that the company offers a full set of services ranging from editing to photography and, and this is the most relevant part, content writing, for a price. And you know who has money to spread for such services? Why, the government, of course! You surely know the current bane of anyone accessing Youtube from Malta without an ad block in place - the deluge of adverts promoting Clyde's oh-so-very socialist budget. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, the Labour Party hired this group of definitely independent writers and academics to push a "socialist" analysis of the latest budget to the ever-popular - and not too discerning - Lovin Malta? Heck, as per former Labour insider and friend of the newsletter Mark Camilleri the Spunt articles are the result of the prime minister's very own propagandist, Aleander Balzan, and while I hardly, if ever, agree with the ex-Book Council Chairman I gotta give the man his dues should he deserve them. There's more to this trickling re-introduction of the term - not to be confused with the actual the ideology - "socialism", and I'll get to this... now!
Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici died on the 5th of November age 89. In case you're asking who that was, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici - or just KMB for short - was the prime minister of Malta during the 1984-1987 period, a rather tumultuous time for the island marked by protest and political violence. KMB came to power without having to deal with that pesky democracy business, as he was hand-picked by then prime minister Dom Mintoff to take over a country that had violent and criminal elements on the government's side and increasingly radical members in the opposition's. Did KMB manage to put an end to that violence? He did piss. And that's all there is to say about the man, really. Come the 1987 election the PN came to power and KMB was relegated to the opposition, where his most memorable moment comes in the form of the parody tape found above. Hell, following that he was sooner, not later, relegated to the dustbin of history, and by the time Joseph Muscat took over the Labour Party the recurrent narrative was one of a direct link between Joseph and the all-mighty Dom Mintoff, as KMB was left spreading his anti-EU message with the weirdos at the Campaign for National Independence on Smash TV, having been deemed not good enough for the party he once led4. And now he's dead, and while the powers that be respected his commendable wish for a regular (as opposed to a state) funeral, the country still had to go through a couple of days of national mourning, not to mention plenty of hagiography over on the state propaganda channels. And that's an unexpected twist since, as mentioned earlier, KMB and his socialism have been long deemed as little more than trash, and as such seeing the hours-long honouring of the man was more than a little weird. Maybe Labour is well and truly set to go for the socialist branding? Will we see a return of the red flags come mass meeting season? We only have to wait and see, I guess.
Let's go for something completely different that, at least for the time being, marks some good news on the environmental front. Last Wednesdays saw the courts declare in a pair of separate judgements that the government's decision to hand management of the Miżieb and Aħrax lands in the Mellieħa whereabouts to the hunting lobby is, essentially, "null and void." For those who might not have been keeping note, the Miżieb woodland had been handed to the hunters back in 1986 by - oh look at this clever piece of linkage with the previous story - Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici... although the specific paperwork was, apparently, misplaced, and the only "proof" of the matter lies in a 2011 letter from KMB himself saying that it was government "policy" to have the hunters run Miżieb. Fast-forward to October 2020, when as the world was kicking and screaming at the first waves of the COVID pandemic the Maltese government quietly signed a "guardianship deal" with the hunters that handed over the Miżieb land - plus the chunk of land known as l-Aħrax tal-Mellieħa - for all of an annual payment worth €400. In case you're curious the deal represents 1.5 million square metres of land, and public access was restricted to diminutive "picnic areas," a concession gracefully granted by a lot of bullies with a tendency to blast anything that flies with shotguns. In turn the environmental lobby did what's right and appealed against the decision in the courts, which finally brought about this week's decision. But will this lead to any change in the matter? Probably... not? Look I've lived in this island for nearly 40 years, I know how these things go and can only by deeply cynical in this particular regard. After all, what power does the court have to enforce its decision? True power lies in the hands of the government, which says it "took note" of the legal decision but will let the hunters do whatever they will because hey, their votes are more important than, frankly, anyone else's. Well, maybe the government will do a big song and dance of "legally" handing the hunters the land through a corrupt public deed, but I don't any hope it will do even that. As such, I don't recommend celebrating with a nice Autumn walk in the Mellieħa vicinity, unless you want to receive a fistful of lead right in your face.
As stated in The Maltese Body Politic's About section, nothing about this weekly newsletter is satirical, unless it is legally required to declare it so in which case, yes, it's all just satire. It's jokes! Funny jokes, for laffs! That said you should also know that Malta is no place for satire, as it's where headlines such as the above can be produced with a wholly straight face. As Lovin Malta reports, tourism minister Clayton Bartolo took to Sky News to announce that Brits worried about their heating bills should instead come to Malta where it's... warm? For now? Truly the kind of logic only an empathy-bereft member of Malta's worst generation - Clayton is all of 35 years old - can produce with fistful of mud he has in the place of both a brain and a heart. Imagine being British and you watch this barely comprehensible hog beast telling you to spend your savings on a holiday to nothing island, where other hog beasts will eagerly fleece you for all you're worth before you go back home, where you can't afford your heating bills. If the British people knew what they were doing - which is perhaps debatable, but that's not here or there - they'd just boycott visiting this island all together. And why should they, or anyone else for that matter, come here anyway? To look at cranes? To get stuck in traffic? To overpay for mediocrity? To be patronised by hog beasts? Better stay home or, in the case you afford it, just go literally anywhere else. There are events and restaurants in most places on God's green Earth, there are more than a few countries where the winters are warmer, Malta is absolutely nothing special and, on a lot of counts, is actually more than a little bit shit.
I went on a bit of a rage bender there so let's close off with something light. Something fun, for shits and giggles. We all know about John Dalli, the man who used to be the personification of Nationalist Party corruption before he joined Joseph Muscat's Labour government and was turned into a Business Saint, or at least someone all the macrocephalic liberals would insist is very good and cool and in no way corrupt, actually. Now, would it surprise you that this man is involved in a cryptocurrency-based Ponzi scheme? Wait, you're insisting that all cryptocurrency is a grift anyway? Well, that's true, but "QuickX" - the particular scheme Dallis is involved with "in no small way," as per The Shift - smells enough of Ponzi that even the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) has noticed the fact and is informing the public to stay well away. However the MFSA has been way too late to catch on the affair, as The Shift says it has been working on the story for months, having sent questions relating to QuickX to the authority way back in January 2021. To think this story has started way back in 2018, when a press conference in New Delhi, India, announced the addition of the latest recruit in the QuickX "advisory board" - John Dalli, who was going to help with his access to regulators and - here I'll just opine for a bit, definitely not throwing any shade in the great man's direction - knowledge of how to best corrupt politicians and governments. As such, QuickX was set to join the "Blockchain Island" deal before that nonsense just fell apart and, in any case, was accused of both listing on a crypto exchange without MFSA approval and running an unlicensed crypto exchange of its own. In addition, Dalli even lends his address to QuickX and related company CNexchange, as both are hosted in his Portomaso business address, even as Dalli does not appear on the companies' paperwork. This wasn't even Dalli's first scheme in India, either - back in 2017 the man known as Johnny Cash was involved in something called "Genius Capital Markets Ltd," a designed to do little more than grift investors out of their money. Truly, John Dalli is a man of the world, and one that makes all of us Maltese so very, very proud.
And that's it for this edition of The Maltese Body Politic! Since I said something nice about Mark Camilleri's blog it's only fair to say something shitty, so here goes - - the man claims he works for four hours daily on the damn thing and... what? For posting a couple of tiny blogs every couple of days? I don't even work on this damn for four hours a week and look how much I write and... fuck! I shouldn't be saying things of this sort! I should be insisting on how much I work and am deserving of people's money and now that I think about it NEVER MIND BYE.
Note how I'm not referring to his former employment on Friday night "discussion" show Xarabank, or pointing out the floppiness of his hair, or describing him as a dipshit.
All of that said the decision of who actually gets to be president is taken by two thirds of parliament, so Bobby’s opinion means squat in this case.
I'm not even half-joking about this, by the way, so get on it.
At the time Labour's anti-EU propaganda efforts were led by no other than Joseph Muscat, but that's a fact you should be well aware of by this point.