Parliament issued a statement announcing that Malta has been admitted as an Associate Member of the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO.

Two Maltese MPs are in Sofia for Malta’s first time attending the Assembly. Randolph De Battista, Labour Party CEO, was one of them and he spoke about “concrete action to fight disinformation and to attack the sources of disinformation”. His audience will have been thinking of Russian propaganda. Perhaps he was thinking about the TV and radio stations whose management reports directly to him. You know, the stations that carried an interview conducted by Emmanuel Cuschieri with Joseph Muscat spinning the case for his prosecution and wilfully misleading the public.

I don’t have particularly strong objections to Malta’s accession as associates in NATO’s parliamentary assembly. It feels like realpolitik to me. You need to know what’s going on and if we won’t take the commitment to  enter a military alliance we might as well have MPs pick up some feelers.

But hasn’t the Labour Party come a long way in its international outlook? And has it really come this far?