Attack of the clones

This week I had an unpleasant and deeply disappointing exchange of ideas - well, more of a one-way traffic on the ideas front, but anyway - with a prospective candidate ahead of next year's European parliamentary election.

I won't bother naming names because there is precious little to distinguish between the lot of them anyway. Nor will I even bother specifying whether it was a Labour or a PN candidate, because... let's face it, they are all exactly the same. I mean that quite literally: they look the same, act the same, talk the same, walk the same, and they all use the exact same bullshit arguments which haven't changed one iota in the 10 years we've been members of the EU.

In fact, the entire pantheon of MEP candidates representing both Labour and Nationalist parties (AD haven't unleashed their super-candidate yet, so I guess we'll have to wait and see) could almost be clones of a single prototypical Maltese politician: one who was genetically engineered to just repeat the same old line, over and over and over again, regardless of whether it ever achieves any results whatsoever.

The line goes something like: "We're too small! We're too tiny! We're too pathetic! We need money! We need help! Help us, help us, help us, help us, help us!" played out endlessly on a loop in the background, until it becomes precisely the sort of noise everyone simply ignores. Like the humming of a fridge, or the distant sound of traffic, or the twitter of birds in the bushes (at least, in countries where birds are actually allowed to twitter without being blasted to smithereens).

Ultimately, it is nothing more or less than meaningless, low-level noise pollution. And it is also the only argument Malta has ever presented to Europe on the issue of immigration.

And guess what? It doesn't matter how many times the European Commission comes back with the same old answer - which can be summed up quite succinctly in two very simple French words: 'VOTRE SALADE!' as in, your problem, not ours... Why the heck should the rest of us give even the most microscopic of floating turds that Malta is by its own admission too tiny to even qualify as a sovereign state, let alone handle the responsibilities of EU membership? And so on and so forth.

Well, they can express the above sentiment as often as they like... as in fact they already have on countless occasions: the latest example being Cecilia Malstrom's unequivocal 'No' to mandatory burden sharing just last month. It doesn't matter, because the Maltese clones have evidently been programmed to simply never take 'No' (or 'Non', or 'Nein', or 'Nay', or 'Niet', etc.) for an answer.

Never. Nunca. Mai. Jamais. Qatt...

So the more the EU repeatedly rejects this same argument, the louder and shriller the Maltese MEP candidate-clones will simply repeat it all over again. At which point you have to start seriously questioning these people's intelligence. Or at the very least, their assessment of the electorate's intelligence, which they routinely insult every time they cling to a ludicrous political platform that is unworkable in practice, and which in any case is already patently dead in the water.

OK, in the interest of fairness it must also be said that there is one (1) candidate who has so far sung to a slightly different tune on this subject: a certain Therese Comodini Cachia (PN), who breaks the mould by at least recognising that there is more to being an MEP than merely repeating other people's arguments (which in any case have never got us anywhere). 

But as for the rest... tell you what, let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth, shall we? I'm going to list out a few random quotes from statements, reports or articles by Maltese MEPs - actual or hopeful - and it's up to you to guess which candidate said what, and which party they represent.

Ready? Here goes:

a) "It is undeniable that Malta is not able to withstand large influxes of migrants. EU member states must shoulder their responsibility in sharing this burden."

b) "If there is a real commitment by the European Union and the European Parliament to solve this human tragedy, then we must insist that the relocation of irregular migration is done on a mandatory and not on a voluntary basis."

c) "Readers will surely recall that in May this year, the European Parliament voted at first reading on the review of the Dublin Regulation, calling for the introduction of a mandatory burden-sharing mechanism. May I also recall that my report on a Common Immigration Policy adopted by the European Parliament in April this year also called for mandatory burden sharing and was the first European Parliament resolution to do so explicitly."

d) "No single country will be able to tackle the great and complex difficulties brought about by large flows of migration alone, and this is particularly true in the case of smaller member states.... What we need is a burden-sharing action plan to help resettle refugees..."

I will stop there, but I could very easily go on like this forever. There is simply no end to the permutations of how often this same argument has been repeated by MEPs representing both sides of the political divide, without any results.

As for the above quotes - which I think I can safely say are indistinguishable insofar as the implicit argument goes - well, these are the people who uttered them:

a = David Casa (PN);

b = Marlene Mizzi (PL);

c = Simon Busuttil (PN);

d = joint statement by Louis Grech, John Attard Montalto and Joseph Cuschieri (PL).

And there you have it. The people who will come knocking on your door in a few months' time - all claiming to be more worthy of your vote than the other candidates, though they never quite tell you why - are simply echoing each other to the letter. They are so incredibly lazy that they can't even be bothered to try and think up something new... no, not even a slight variation of the same argument, which seems to never change in any detail whatsoever, regardless who uses it.

And this is what I found so utterly depressing about the above-mentioned trudge through mediocrity that passed for an online 'discussion' this week. I can't claim to have had high expectations of this particular candidate (or any other); but I did expect Malta's political class to at least make an effort to pull its socks up, and to do a tiny spot of homework before appealing for our vote almost as if it were owed to them out of some mediaeval sense of political allegiance.

Sorry folks, but those days are over. Personally, I would have thought that the divorce referendum alone had single-handedly raised the bar for political discussion in this country of ours... that, following the shock of the entire electorate flipping its collective middle finger at the traditional establishment, candidates for any election would at least give a little thought to their political programmes before launching their own candidacy.

If nothing else, that would be a small mark of respect towards an electorate which has proved to be infinitely more discerning than ever before. But no! It is as though the Maltese electorate responded to the realities of EU membership by evolving beyond recognition... but no similar quantum leap was ever made by the political parties themselves, which just keep churning out an infinite number of clones, indefinitely, in the hope that none of us will ever notice.

But back to the argument, and why I believe these people should really crawl back into the woodwork from which they so unwisely once crawled out. There are several reasons why 'mandatory burden sharing' is an archaic, outdated and utterly pointless political platform from which to contest a European election in 2014. I've already mentioned the first and most obvious: it has been rejected around three dozen times already. Exactly what makes these people think they can succeed where others have failed is at best a mystery... especially considering that they haven't actually added anything new to what has effectively been Malta's only official (failed) immigration policy since the days of Tonio Borg.

But there is no mystery at all surrounding the untold damage these people are causing to our country by repeatedly insisting we are 'too small' to cope with the arrival of just over 300 immigrant arrivals in two weeks.

Do I seriously need to spell out the danger in that argument? OK, here goes. Imagine we are sitting around the negotiating table at the next Council of Ministers meeting. Joseph Muscat argues that Malta is 'too small' to handle what most other countries would consider a minor inconvenience. Barroso replies that... well, if Malta is too small to cope with such a small matter as 300 immigrant arrivals... how can we trust the same piddly little country to also assume full responsibility for the presidency of the EU in 2018?

How would Muscat respond to that argument, I wonder? "Oh no, Jose Maria, when I say we're 'too small', I only mean we're too small to handle all the things we don't actually want to handle. When it comes to all the other things - like, for instance, wielding real power in Europe - suddenly we grow in size and become perfectly big enough to cope with even the biggest problems in the world, thank you very much..."

I mean, honestly. Oh, and please note that this is not entirely a fictitious scenario cooked up by yours truly for the sake of argument. Believe it or not this really is the state of play in Brussels, and has been for some time now. It has already been publicly suggested (by Germany, as I recall) that small member states like Malta shouldn't be allowed to assume the EU presidency for purely practical, logistical reasons. Now just consider for a second how enormously this argument has been reinforced by the constant background wailings of 'we're too small, we're too small, we're too small', emanating endlessly from the very people we elect to represent us in Brussels every five years.

And do you know what the worst part of all this is? The entire argument isn't true. It's a goddamn, barefaced lie. Fact of the matter is that Malta has time and again proved to be perfectly capable of handling such influxes, and can handle much bigger ones, too. We demonstrated this throughout the Libya crisis, and I for one can't understand how certain MEPs and wannabe MEPs can even sleep at night, after spending so much of their day painstakingly dismantling our reputation as a country that can (and always does) rise to the occasion, and overcome even the most serious challenges in spite of our limitations and constraints.

As a Maltese citizen I feel insulted every time my country is described as too minuscule to cope with what is ultimately only a minor logistical headache that most other countries would simply take in their stride. This would be a shockingly unpatriotic thing to say, even if it were an accurate description of the reality on the ground.

Just imagine how utterly demeaning, slanderous and reprehensible it is to go to Brussels and belittle your own country on the basis of an abject falsehood.

So a small word of advice for the contestants in next June's election. If the most you can say on immigration is 'mandatory burden sharing' - a proposal that has already been shot down a million times or more - quite frankly it would be better if you said nothing at all. There are other, more attainable goals that can be pursued instead: a revision of Dublin II, for instance... or the reduction of Malta's unfeasibly large Search and Rescue Zone (which stretches from Tunisia all the way to Crete), and with it the extent of our own responsibility for rescued migrants.

But coming up with alternative proposals that might actually work also requires a thorough knowledge of the actual issue at hand, as well as the ability to occasionally think outside the box. If both these things are beyond your grasp... well, quite frankly you have no business to be running for the European Parliament in the first place.