From guest writer George Farrugia Calleja:
While walking past the Malta Labour Party club in Republic Street last Thursday evening, commemorating Daphne Caruana Galizia a month after her assassination, a bottom-feeding troll in the balcony grunted loudly enough that “hemm ser jibqa’” (‘he’s [Joseph Muscat] there to stay’).
Muscat himself echoed this on Sunday morning, when he was reported to have said that ‘the important thing was that the ‘silent majority’ agreed with his government’s way of doing things’.
One of his minions apparently mumbled something on the same lines during Xarabank. Ian Borg, who I believe is a graduate in law, seems to have this strange idea that if a majority has voted you into power, then well, since you were governing on the basis of this majority, mob rule trumps the rule of law.
Put like that it’s obviously rubbish of the worst kind, but those of a certain vintage will recall that no less a fan of the doctrine of respect for law and order, Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, had said something very much on the same lines.
This was just before the second-most corrupt and violent regime we’ve known in recent history was booted out by the electorate, even if by a scant 4000 or so votes.
Just in case anyone is wondering which regime takes the prize for being the most corrupt and violent one of recent history, all I can say is, do what they invite you to do in St Paul’s if you ask where the monument to its architect stands.
KMB didn’t (chose not to) get it, Ian Borg clearly hasn’t the grey matter to get it and Joseph Muscat simply doesn’t care to get it.
Just on the off-chance they read this, or that they care even a stuff, read my lips guys: you are elected to govern by a majority, but you do this because the rule of law allows it and you do this subject to the rule of law. As soon as you take your oath of office, even if your personal belief system revolves only around making as much hay while the sun shines for you and your gang as you can, your majority is worth less than a bucket of warm spit.
Persuading the majority, the vast majority if you like, into voting for you does not absolve you from your obligation to respect the rule of law. You are not absolved from your responsibility to protect whistle-blowers. You are not absolved from your obligation to be fiscally and morally correct. You are not absolved from your duty to ensure that this country is run properly in the interests of all of us, rather than in the interests of a gang of local and foreign thugs who think they can ride rough-shod over all of us, you included.
You are not free to let thugs do what they like, however much this is way more convenient, and perhaps safer, for you.
You can’t, even if you might secretly want to, let people threaten to burn your opponents alive and drive trucks into them and you certainly can’t let officers of law and order exult in the murder of one of your critics.
You can’t simply look the other way, or slink off to obey your orders to sell more passports, when our police force is being run into the ground by the inept and ill-motivated, the betrayers of the pride the real officers had in their uniform.
You can’t look the other way, even if it’s really, really convenient, when the very mechanisms designed to regulate and oversee financial probity are led by people who are – to put it charitably – so far beyond their sell-by date that you couldn’t flog them to Zimbabwe to replace Mugabe.
And yes, it’s the Attorney-General and the Chairman of the MFSA to whom I refer, just in case you don’t get it, them and everyone else who hasn’t the balls to do his or her duty.