Yesterday, Labour Party MPs recorded in the history of Parliament one of the worst and most authoritarian attacks against journalists and the press. They basically gave a typical fascist diatribe against “bad press” while applauding “good journalists”. It reminded me of another parliament session when Labour MPs such as Chris Cardona and Rosianne Cutajar protested against the press reports of Daphne Caruana Galizia while Ministers Evarist Bartolo and Owen Bonnici tried to push a law that raised libel damages. The law was later on redrafted by the Front Against Censorship and myself, and we also ended removing criminal libel completely.
Following the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Labour Party was compelled, especially internally, to take up a legal policy biased in favour of free speech. Labour MPs are now trying to backtrack from this policy bias which has been adopted since 2017.
So far they don’t seem to have successfully implemented any reforms that raise libel damages but clearly that is their intention and that is what they are trying to do.
Yesterday, in Parliament, the Labour government has presented its press reforms, and rejected amendments by the Nationalist Party which would have created symmetry in libel cases: amendments which were even supported by the pro-Labour Institute of Journalists (IĠM). Now, the IĠM is describing yesterday’s show by Labour MPs parliamentary as “disgusting”.
I’m not going to add adjectives here because if even the pro-Labour Kurt Sansone finds the situation “disgusting” the situation is probably even worse than it appears. We had the Minister of Justice Jonathan Attard and the Minister of Justice Owen Bonnici lambasting journalists and the press and the Minister of Justice even referred to me after condemning Jason Azzopardi. Then Carmelo Abela gave us a sad party about his “martyrdom” about what he described as the calumnies made against him by Jason Azzopardi.
They are not calumnies. Carmelo Abela was investigated by the Police for his suspected involvement in the HSBC Qormi heist. HSBC Malta’s board of directors also discussed Carmelo Abela and eventually the bank decided to terminate his employment quietly, permanently closing the door for him to ever get back his job. The suspicion that Carmelo Abela was involved was confirmed by directors at the bank, and it’s not an invention by Jason Azzopardi. This politician has done nothing in his career deserving praise, merit or credit, but he is crying like an infant in parliament about press reports as if he has just been freed from Sednaya after 30 years in prison.
Cry me a river.
After Carmelo Abela, it was the turn of Labour’s spiteful propagandist Ramona Attard to engage in some fascist and infantile rhetoric. Ramona Attard’s career in Labour mainly involved creating hateful propaganda against Labour’s critics and journalists including Daphne Caruana Galizia, all the while getting paid for fake jobs with the government. By hindsight, the Prime Minister’s decision to co-opt her to Parliament makes sense: he’s rubbishing even further Labour’s legacy with infantile and criminal imbeciles to the extent of making Alfred Sant’s and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s ministers and associates look like geniuses.
The standards at the Labour Party have never been so low. If they keep at it I may as well open the Malta Labour Party just to remind them that once day, this was the Party of Ċensu Bugeja and a host of intellectuals and journalists. It’s now the party of infantile and criminal imbeciles.
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