Yesterday, the Labour Party commemorated the thirty year anniversary since the opening of its headquarters in Hamrun, known as the Ċentru Nazzonali Laburista. The anniversary coincided with an ongoing battle for the face of the Labour Party between the Prime Minister and Joseph Muscat’s acolytes, whom he had previously axed from Labour’s official propaganda channel, ONE.
Norma Saliba doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job at communicating the Party’s main narrative with its supporters, but this is also because the Labour Leader chose to take power over the Party with the backing of Joseph Muscat. Today, the problem is that the Prime Minister actually kept his word with Muscat and extensively protected him and his friends from prosecution and criminal investigation over multiple criminal and corrupt acts that could very well land them to prison.
A cabinet reshuffle that should have been a party press release.
On the other hand, the Labour Party’s communication along the years, also under the Prime Minister, have been very effective in attacking journalists, the press and dissidents such as Jason Azzopardi, enabling more of these attacks with Labour’s own allies. So, today, unsurprisingly, the Labour Party can’t communicate effectively any public challenge to Joseph Muscat. The Prime Minister had to promote his Minister in order to make such a challenge making it clear personally that he would not be intimidated by Joseph Muscat’s faction.
Yet, the Prime Minister doesn’t even need to put himself into the fire had he done the right things from the very beginning. Joseph Muscat is a textbook case of a politician who would have had his assets frozen and investigated on multiple counts of corruption, yet he was allowed to wield his power and influence with a Police Commissioner unwilling to investigate him and an Attorney-General resisting investigations over his corrupt Labour Party allies.
If the Prime Minister can challenge Joseph Muscat publicly, he can also do so executively: by reforming the Police and the Office of the Attorney General with newly appointed heads who are actually willing to investigate and prosecute Joseph Muscat over multiple cases, along with the offenders in his entire network. That the Prime Minister does not do this is own his choice, condemning the Labour Party to a state of a criminal organisation rather than conventional political party.
It didn’t need to take years to axe Joseph Muscat’s propagandists from ONE, neither to challenge him publicly. Those of us who rooted for Chris Fearne were already doing this in 2019 and the early months of 2020 up until the Labour Party leadership race. The longer the Labour Party takes to dissociate itself from Joseph Muscat and his crooks, the more prolonged and severe its defeat at the polls, and its time in Opposition, will be, even if that defeat comes many years from now.
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