‘Stand up to foreigners,’ he said.

Adrian Delia’s call to Maltese people “to stand up to foreigners” is the pits. It is the lowest point a politician can reach when they seek to split the community into subsets, creating division and drumming up the hate for the vulnerable.

There have been signs the PN was going to lurch to the right since Adrian Delia showed up a year ago campaigning like a thug. Those angry, burly men barking at anyone who dared question or doubt were never going to sit down to discuss the subtleties of integration, moderation and solidarity.

The discourse on the need for security is covered by the oldest excuse of any racist: ‘I am not racist’. But ‘something’ must be done.

The leadership’s official candidate for the MEP elections, Dione Borg, microphone in hand kept one foot in his heritage of a party reporter even as his other foot was touring festas. He visited Ħamrun worried, apparently, about the security risk of black men and women setting up businesses and selling products from their countries of origin. Oh what are we ever going to do now you can buy cheap plantain chips in Ħamrun for a fifth of the price Arkadia sells them for?

The dramatic reporting of street brawling is putting a racial and racist spin on everyday occurences. Somehow the exact same set of actions committed by black people is more dangerous to innocent bystanders than those committed by white people.

This is truly appalling. The usual suspects will say this is another unmissed opportunity to harm the prospects of Adrian Delia’s leadership of the PN. I have been somehow elected to the pantheon of backstabbers by the Kull Ħadd cartoonist too (rather flatteringly I might add).

I could never be part of a political party that exploits fear of ‘foreigners’ to mobilise partisan support. This is not about Adrian Delia or factions in the PN. It was not just Dione Borg applauding at the Tarxien party club last Sunday. Michael Briguglio, another PN MEP candidate but with a splendid pedigree of civil society activism, stood in Tarxien applauding this abhorrent rhetoric too. That I cannot explain.

Nickie Vella de Fremaux publicly contradicted her husband on Facebook. She said he should not have included the abandoned baby story in his evidence pack to prove the country has lost its soul. It seems to me that for his wife, Adrian Delia’s error was in including the actions of a white mother. Had this been an abandoned black baby we would be making no exceptions.

NGOs working with refugees, the rare exception to the fashionable soullessness of our society, though not the soullessness Adrian Delia means, did not mince words. The Leader of the Opposition’s pandering to the basest racist attitude is utterly revolting.

This politics is based on slander: attributing collective guilt to people because “they are foreign”. It is based on vagueness: demanding ‘something’ is done when the specifics are too atrocious to say aloud. It is based on error: that by somehow isolating poor black people, the lives of poor white people can somehow be improved. It relies on danger: that as is happening in Italy in the shadow of that vile role model Matteo Salvini, people take up the cue for irrational actions, first breaking the intuitive bonds of solidarity but proceed to indulge in irrational hostility, even violence.

Therese Commodini Cachia in a Facebook post a few minutes ago did not directly attack her party leader. She did share the highly critical statement by NGOs and she appealed for the removal of race from political discourse unless this is of factual relevance.

That has been the policy of the PN for as long as I remember. As far as I can figure out the policy of the PN has never been different. The PN is not returning to its roots: it’s well and truly abandoning them.

If politics is to be a force for good, it will not choose between people when seeking to build a just society. Racism is unjust. It must be fought.