The hidden hand of big conspiracy

Something tells me Dr George Vella has been reading too many Robert Anton Wilson novels. Not that I have anything against that, mind you. I've read a couple myself. It's just that there's a small difference between enjoying the thrill of a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory... and lapping up every word as if it were Gospel Truth. That would be like reading Dan Brown and actually believing that... ooh, wait, I almost forgot. Some of you really do believe all that nonsense, don't you?

OK, let's scratch the Da Vinci crap, and stick to the matter at hand. Labour's erstwhile foreign minister George Vella - touted as a future Commissioner himself, by the way - seems to see something 'conspiratorial' about the way Tonio Borg's nomination was received in the European Parliament last week.

This is what he said about it in parliament: "I cannot understand why [Borg was given such a hard time]... I fear that the hidden hand of whoever was behind John Dalli's resignation could have had the interest of holding back the quick appointment of a new commissioner. It was clear that the first obligations of a new commissioner would have been pushing forward the Tobacco Directive..."

Hm. Well, he's right about the last part, certainly. So much so, that 'pushing forward the Tobacco Directive' was one of the Seven Commandments Borg was made to put down in writing. What remains slightly unclear is how this is in any way supposed to bolster Vella's argument that the 'hidden hand' behind Dalli's resignation - in other words, the tobacco lobby (being the only lobby to directly benefit from delaying or derailing this directive) - would have also been behind all the very public objections to Borg's nomination last week.

Assuming that Vella actually watched the so-called 'grilling' - and judging by his description, this is debatable - he would surely have realised that the bulk of these objections came from the European Liberals and Greens... oh, and of course a majority of the Socialists (of which Vella himself is a member, though you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise).

So applying Vella's instant magic conspiracy formula, this would suggest that the Liberals, Greens and most of the Socialists were in reality acting on behalf of the tobacco lobby, with a view to sabotaging EU-wide legislation aimed at restricting sales of tobacco products.

Yes, indeed. Precisely the sort of lobby groups you'd expect to campaign on behalf a ruthless capitalist giant otherwise known as 'Big Tobacco', don't you think?

But let's take a closer look. Limiting myself to just one of those three - the Greens - what Vella is effectively trying to make us believe is that the environmental lobby within the European parliament (who incidentally were the most sceptical of all regarding John Dalli's forced resignation, for reasons which include both health and the environment) were in fact all along hoping to derail the same directive they themselves had been publicly demanding for years. Why? To please their Big Tobacco masters, of course. But in order to disguise their true motives, they hid behind 'official' objections to Borg's long track record of failures and human rights disasters, as well as his constant snide and desultory remarks about the same European values they hold closest to heart (not to mention the tiny detail that Borg himself had built his entire career upon constantly rubbishing the Greens at every opportunity).

In other words: they didn't object to Tonio Borg because is a living, walking embodiment of everything that makes them see red (literally); no, they opposed him because, like Judas, they had accepted blood money in secret from the lobby they publicly oppose. Immensely plausible, I'm sure you'll agree.

And I could say the same for the Liberals, too. They had likewise clamoured for the Tobacco Directive to come into force as quickly as possible (that's why they asked Borg for his assurances in writing), and had also voiced serious doubts about the Dalli affair. But according to Vella, these, too, would have worked in secret to engineer Dalli's resignation, then opposed Tonio Borg out of a secret desire to protect and serve the tobacco industry giants... and not because of their own very real, very serious and very justified misgivings about how he might behave as Commissioner.

The only difference here is that Tonio Borg has not merely 'rubbished' liberals throughout his career: oh no, he has copiously vomited and defecated upon them at every opportunity, while taking great pains to stir up a national culture of hatred in their regard (which great success, I might add -  look at the online comments boards for more info).

But of course this has nothing to do with the liberals' real reasons for disliking him. After all, 'disliking Tonio Borg' is such an inconceivably implausible scenario, that we now need extraordinary hypotheses - conspiracy theories, no less - to explain it.

And this brings me to two hugely important aspects of the colossal flaw in Vella's reasoning... and more importantly, what they tell us about his party at the moment.

One: I can more or less understand conspiracy theories, in cases where there is no immediate explanation for the phenomenon at hand. But here, there was nothing remotely mysterious about the matter at all. From the outset there were a million, million reasons why both the Liberals and the Greens - and of course the Socialists too - should vociferously object to Tonio Borg as Commissioner... I've written about them often enough in the last few weeks, so I won't bother repeating them now... so why speculate about 'hidden hands', when the hands at work in the proceedings have all along been entirely visible and waving in our faces to boot?

Two: by invoking a laughable conspiracy theory to explain the very bleedingly obvious, Vella is effectively detracting from the real unexplained mystery in all this. Why did Malta's Socialists distinguish themselves from their EU counterparts, and become practically the only ones in that group to support Tonio Borg? That, I believe, is the question we should really be asking.

There is of course another small fly in the ointment. Vella talks about Borg as though he 'survived a tough grilling' - and he is not exactly alone either: there is an entire mythology out there, which evokes the image of Borg the dinosaur fighting off an army of rabid liberal pigs intent on tearing him limb to limb... when we all saw what really happened, and how little it resembling a 'grilling' at all.

Even if it were true that Borg had been given a hard time at the European Parliament... well, here's one European citizen who thinks it would have been entirely justified: indeed, it is the whole point of the exercise to begin with, without which the hearing itself would be utterly meaningless.

European Commissioners should be closely scrutinised; they are unelected officials who take hugely important decisions that have a direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of 500 million people. And when it comes to the European Parliament, 'scrutinising Commissioners-designate before their appointment' is about the only really important job an MEP will ever have to do. This because, unlike national legislative assemblies, the European Parliament does not actually legislate at all. It merely fine-tunes legislation drawn up by the selfsame body of unelected officials whom they themselves had approved for the post to begin with.

Indirectly, this also means that 'Commissioner-designate hearings' represent the only chance for MEPs to actually influence EU legislation at source - by choosing good candidates and objecting to crap ones.

Yet here we have Vella - a possible future Commissioner himself - suggesting that it was "unfair and undemocratic" for Tonio Borg to be asked a couple of uncomfortable questions about his own record during that hearing. So what would Vella consider to be 'fair and democratic', I wonder? That Commissioners are appointed by a prime minister, and automatically approved without scrutiny?

For this reason alone I sincerely wish Vella were right about the 'excessive scrutiny' part; I wish, for instance, that MEPs would have tried to verify some of Tonio Borg's incredible claims two Wednesdays ago. Had they done so, they would have realised he had simply lied through his teeth. I counted three clear and unequivocal untruths uttered by Borg at that hearing: he denied making disparaging remarks about gay couples during the rent law reform debate (yet there is a recording to prove this, so how could he get away with it?); he lied about his views on gender quotas - claiming he was in favour, when he himself, wearing his other hat of deputy prime minister, had spent months lobbying against the proposed quotas and had actively blocked them at EU level; and he lied about his ability to distinguish between his personal views and his public responsibilities... which is in fact the one thing Borg has proved incapable of doing in over 10 years as a government minister.

And because the MEPs did not do their homework properly, they failed to pick up the glaring discrepancies between Borg's words two weeks ago, and his actions over the past two decades. So much, I suppose, for 'excessive scrutiny'.

Sadly, the upshot is that an international body of legislators whose laws affect 500 million people, shall henceforth include Tonio Borg: a man with a long and depressing history of abusing his own country's legislative tools, in order to entwine his own warped views of social morality with the fabric of Malta's legal system.

And of course, we are all expected not only to accept this sorry state of affairs without question, but even to applaud. Otherwise, it's 'unfair and undemocratic'.