While we’re busy celebrating the fact that Marsascala Creek will not after all be claimed by a yacht marina, there’s some serious geo-political shifting happening on the Continent. I don’t seriously expect the goings on at the Ukrainian border to become an electoral issue. Though if things go down a darker road we will wonder how at around this time we could be thinking about anything else.
There’s far more competent analysis about what’s happening in Europe than I could ever attempt. So, I won’t. I’ll just say this.
The scheme of selling Maltese citizenship to hundreds of pro-Putin Russian oligarchs, the deal with the Azerbaijani state-owned gas production company to purchase energy from a company they own, the single-minded pursuit of gas as the primary raw material for our energy needs: these are parameters that will condition our place in a new geo-political framework that may be forming.
If there is, as has been suspected for long, an undeclared financial relationship between any of these players (particularly oligarchs from Russia and Azerbaijan) with the Labour Party or its leadership of the past 15 years or so, things are going to be very complicated for any government run by the Labour Party.
On the one hand there is a definitive dependence on resources and engagement secured with people who were prepared to bribe our government ministers over the last several years. On the other is the rest of the world.
A genius troll tweeted this morning that “FATF is not the world” and our economy is still doing well in spite of the fact that they grey listed us. FATF is indeed not the world. It is the agency set up by the seven largest open economies of the world to identify the countries that refuse to operate within the standards of transparency that they require. Those countries are the G7 economies (the US, the UK, Canada, Japan, Italy, France, and Germany).
They are not the world. But the world is changing and it may soon become much harder to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in the new world that is coming. And when that happens, perhaps sooner than our distracted navel gazing allows us to expect, we may not merely find ourselves forced to make choices. We may just come to our senses in time to realise that the choices we have made over the last decade make it impossible to secure the trust of the friends we would want.
Geopolitics does not a topic of an electoral debate make. That doesn’t mean that the choices we make in an election might not hurt us as changes altogether beyond our control transform the world we live in.