Who are the Eurosceptics now?

Funny things happen to people who go in for politics. I'm sure you've all noticed a few examples of your own by now. People you personally know to be intelligent and perfectly capable of rational thought and lucid argumentation... but who suddenly transmogrify into screeching, hysterical baboons the moment they think that's how 'their' party expects them to behave.

I see it all the time, but that's probably because my profession is (or should I say was) replete with former journalists who are now communications coordinators for Cabinet ministers and other politicians. I remember most of these people in their past roles only a few months ago: now an entirely forgotten era, when they would be the ones asking all the probing questions at press conferences ahead of last March's election... and loudly insisting on detailed answers when these were not instantly forthcoming.

Now? Well, many of these same people are themselves in the business of 'managing the press': organising press conferences, deciding which questions to answer and which to ignore; and generally making sure that it is 'their' version of events that gets printed or broadcast, regardless of whether it even remotely resembles the truth. And I need hardly add that some of them will react with unbridled fury and indignation if their own beloved minister/employer is now asked exactly the same kind of probing question they themselves once asked of other ministers, when still wearing a journalist's hat before last March.   

It was exactly the same under the Nationalists, of course: the same roles played out in the exactly the same way... only with different actors, and reacting to different 'scandals' (which, as a rule, are only 'scandalous' when enacted by the other party). So just as the Labour Opposition spent the past 20 years howling at endless distortions of the news by the Nationalist information-controllers at PBS... it is now the PN that decries 'selective reporting' by the same station under its new management (one striking example being the recent omission of Economy Minister Edward Scicluna's gaffe-prone contribution to the 'golden passport' debate, when addressing the European Parliament).

This brings me crashingly to the political metamorphosis of the moment. Something seems to have happened to both parties since the 2003 EU referendum - and looked at again, it is not at all clear whose side either party is actually on anymore.

OK, now for some details. As you may already be aware, the European Parliament will on Thursday take a vote on the issue of 'selling EU citizenship', following a debate precipitated by the PN's two MEPs, David Casa and Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas. Exactly why remains unclear: certainly the EP has no power to abrogate the law, or even force government to amend it. Nor did the same EP debate Ireland's controversial citizenship scheme, whereby EU passports were given out for free.

But I suppose, being an institution with zero power to dictate national legislation - or even to influence European legislation, which remains the domain of the Council of Ministers and the Commission - we have to give the European parliament something to make it feel important.

The aim of Thursday's vote, then, is to humiliate tiny little Malta, in a way that larger countries which had similar issues - not just Ireland: there were also Austria and Hungary - were never humiliated. And in pursuit of this unpatriotic and rather mean-spirited little aim, Casa and Metsola are now busy reproducing various foreign media reports questioning the same passport scheme. Neither seems to have paused to consider that, popular or otherwise, this same scheme is also central to the present government's entire economic policy. All the measures of Budget 2014 - including a reduction in utility tariffs, and all the measures to keep Malta's debt levels to within the Maastricht criteria - depend on revenue raised by selling passports. If the scheme is scrapped or somehow halted, our country will be plunged into an immediate financial crisis... the first phase of which will almost certainly involve excessive deficit procedures by the European Commission.

OK, maybe I am naïve, but - regardless of personal opinions about the scheme itself, which I admit is tacky and distasteful - this is a scenario I would have thought all Malta's MEPs should be striving to avoid. Certainly it is not a scenario any Maltese citizen - politician or otherwise - would wish to see enacted. And MEPs should know this more than most, seeing as how they are supposedly elected to serve their country's interest in a non-legislative assembly where the only way to achieve this aim is to forge alliances.

But then again, working together for the common good has time and again proved to be simply beyond the capabilities of the two parties in any arena. The European Parliament has certainly not been an exception, so their failure to do so now should hardly come a surprise.

What does surprise me slightly, however, is the type of media report now tabled like trump cards by the aforementioned MEPs. These have included articles in The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and - most recently - the EU Observer. And here you have the first inklings of a glaring contradiction staring us all in the face: all are intensely Eurosceptic papers, and all are now being lovingly quoted by intrinsically Europhile politicians as ammunition against a party they themselves describe as intrinsically Eurosceptic.

Doesn't quite add up, now does it? And that's before we even take on board the substance of the arguments contained in these reports.

Let's start with the EU Observer. You might remember this newspaper, by the way. It was constantly quoted by Labour (and GWU) sources in the run-up to the EU referendum of 2003, and one of its contributors at the time was Sharon Ellul Bonici: a Eurosceptic former Labour MEP candidate.

For this reason alone, I found it a little odd to see the EU Observer now held up as a paragon of quality European journalism by people like Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas, whose party still talks of the European Union as if it were actually founded by Eddie Fenech Adami in 2004... and which still uses Labour's Eurosceptic past as a sledgehammer with which to bludgeon the party before every election.

Makes you wonder who the real Eurosceptics are. But onto the article itself, which perhaps predictably highlights aspects of the scheme which stoke all the traditionally Eurosceptic objections to the EU as a whole. Under the scheme, we are told, "every main applicant can also buy additional passports for children up to 26 years old, for their spouse, and his or her spouse's parents and grandparents, for between €25,000 and €50,000 per head".

"The newcomers will have the right to freely travel, reside and work in all 28 EU states. They will also buy the right to enter 69 non-EU countries, including the US, with minimal security checks under Malta's visa-free travel pacts."

The EU Observer helpfully adds that the worst-case scenario would be "a crime, or even an act of terrorism, committed on EU or US territory by a newly-minted Maltese national": suggesting that the scrutiny applied by scheme administrators Henley & Partners will not suffice to ward off these and other threats.

(Side-note: Henley is the same company appointed by the Nationalist Party to administer its own foreign-investor scheme just a couple of years ago... even though Simon Busuttil now thinks the British firm is perfectly capable of suddenly disappearing with all Malta's hard-earned cash stashed away in its back pocket, never to be seen again.)

Even without prior knowledge of the EU Observer's widely-known bias, its coverage of the Maltese passport scheme is clearly calculated to inflict as much damage as possible, not to the Labour Party or even to Malta... but to the European Union . It is not so much an attack on the scheme itself (the same article even notes that other countries do the same, only with more restrictions) but rather on one of the central pillars of the EU's identity: its principle of freedom of movement. Thanks to this freedom, European citizens may find themselves having to share their lebensraum with (shock, horror) non-European nationals... like we don't have enough of those already, etc. etc.

Both the Mail and The Telegraph articles make much the same point: but also highlighting (not without a certain relish) the European Commission's powerlessness to intervene in an issue that may have wider effects across the entire EU. The Telegraph leads with "Malta approves selling citizenship for €650,000 to non-EU applicants, giving people work and residency rights in the 28-member bloc". The Daily Mail says exactly the same thing, only with its trademark CAPITAL LETTERS: "Malta to sell citizenship for £500,000 with buyers allowed to live and work ANYWHERE in the European Union."

By this point, a few of the central arguments should begin to sound familiar. This is not the first time we have been invited to consider nightmare scenarios in which our own country would be swamped by visitors who could come here by the thousand, buying up our properties, stealing our jobs (and our women), and generally threatening our livelihoods and subverting our sense of national identity... all because of the harebrained schemes of foreign countries.

Is it starting to ring a bell? Yes, that's right. It's the same army of Sicilian hairdressers that was supposed to have invaded us at precisely midnight on April 1 2004, the moment we were admitted as EU members. It's the same throngs of loose Eastern European women who were supposed to (and in fact did) come here in full force to make off with every Maltese woman's husband in one fell swoop. And let us not forget the army of tall, muscular Scandinavian men who were likewise supposed to sweep all our women off their feet and cart them off into the Viking sunset... at least according to one former Valletta councillor, who must be bitterly disappointed to discover that her fears were actually unjustified.

The circumstances may not mirror each other precisely, but the primal fears instinctively stoked by both these scaremongering tactics are indistinguishable. Foreign objections to Malta's passport scheme come almost exclusively from Eurosceptic sources, and hinge almost exclusively on an ancestral fear of suspicious foreigners (Who knows? They might be terrorists) settling down and opening shop next door. And what is that, if not the exact same rhetoric used by the Labour Party under Alfred Sant, in a bid to frighten the electorate away from EU accession before 2003?

All that remains is for David Casa and Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas to use their allotted time in Wednesday's debate to echo exactly the same kind of wildly alarmist rumours that had once dominated past Labour mass meetings... and hey presto! The transmogrification will be complete.

But they are not the only ones to have been transformed. Even locally the same passport debate is beginning to increasingly resemble the loony patriotic rightwing rhetoric that infests Eurosceptic thinking, and which lies (literally) at the heart of newspapers such as The Daily Mail. One former PN candidate was even heard asking if 'newly-minted Maltese nationals' (to stick to the EU Observer's description) would be allowed to vote in elections or even contest elections: forgetting that both the right to vote and to run for office are an integral part of citizenship in any country... and attempting to strip citizens of those rights would be a gross human rights violation.

Elsewhere Simon Busuttil himself is on record saying he would revoke all citizenships granted under this scheme... little realising (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) Article 15.2 of the Universal Human Rights Charter, which specifically states that "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality..."

This is the precisely the kind of overzealous, tub-thumping, xenophobic garbage I would expect from the ragtag assortment of vaguely eccentric right-wing organisations that make up the EP's Eurosceptic bloc, and which now seem to be the PN's allies. I certainly do not expect it from representatives of the party which ushered us into Europe only 10 years ago, and which had rubbished similar claims when they were made by an increasingly desperate Labour Opposition before the 2003 referendum.

But like I said earlier: funny things happen to people who go in for politics...