There are more mosquitoes under Labour...

There are more mosquitoes under Labour… and they’re bigger and nastier, too. One just flew past my earhole right now, and for a second there I thought the annual Air Show had started a few months too early. But not even the entire Red Arrows Squadron would have made quite such a racket. And it probably wouldn’t have been so difficult to swat, either. (In fact I never managed in the end. That mozzie is still out there somewhere – no doubt waiting for the critical moment to strike – so if there are any typos in this article, it’s probably because I’m using the keyboard as a swatter.) 

But the weirdest thing about this mosquito encounter was that it happened in the middle of the afternoon. Mosquitoes have always been an infernal nuisance; that goes without saying. But as far as I can recall, they only ever came out at night. And as a rule, only during summer months (or particularly hot and humid winter nights). Never all year round, and certainly never during the day. 

That sort of thing just didn’t use to happen before. And it’s happening now. Along with rising sea-levels, extreme weather, drought and desertification, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mass-extinctions, the closure of Is-Serkin pastizzeria…

It cannot be a coincidence that all this has come to pass in our time. There must be a rational scientific explanation to account for the fact that we are beset by cataclysm and disaster from absolutely every angle. 

It’s the fault of the Labour government, naturally. No other explanation possible… and no, I’m not buying any of that new-fangled ‘global warming’ conspiracy theory rubbish, either. I don’t care how many countries signed the Paris Agreement last Saturday: this has nothing to do with greenhouse gases and dangerous human intervention in the climate cycle. This is not a problem that can be solved by reducing emissions…

Oooh… well, at least not the same type of emissions. For there is another thing that I don’t recall ever occurring with such alarming frequency in a non-Labour past: and that is the sheer extent of unmitigated nonsense emitted by politicians on a now almost hourly basis. 

I mean, what is this, anyway? Some sort of epidemic? Has there been an invasion of the brain snatchers while I wasn’t looking? It’s like that mosquito buzzing around my ears. Politicians have always spoken a lot of crap; that goes without saying. But never on the same scale as this; and never so often, either.

Let’s carry on where we’ve already begun: the mantra that, if anything really, really, really bad happens… it must be the fault of the Labour government. The latest example came in the form of an opinion column by Claudette Buttigieg – the Shadow Minister of Health, please note – under the headline: ‘Are more people sick under Labour?’

Initially I took her to mean ‘sick’ as in ‘sick and tired’. In which case the answer would very obviously be ‘Yes’… so obvious, indeed, that there wouldn’t even be need to spell it out in a headline.

But no. She meant it quite literally: as in, there are apparently more people suffering from medical ailments now, than there used to be under the Nationalists. And not only that (it is, after all, a statistical possibility, however unlikely); but more people are sick BECAUSE the Labour Party is now in power.

In her own words: “If anybody needed proof of the current disaster” [that word again] “in our health system, this is it. The Ministry for Health is boasting that Mater Dei is overwhelmingly flooded with sick patients.

Later: “Since Government has not announced any particular epidemic or other reason for the increase in numbers then, at face value, this simply means that many more people are getting sick, which means that (1) preventive care has failed, (2) community care is insufficient and (3) primary health care is not functioning as it should.

Yes, that really is a very likely future health minister talking there. But hey, let’s cut her a little slack. Claudette Buttigieg only came to this portfolio fairly recently, having inherited it from Claudio Grech in a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. And it’s a complex issue, too. More complex even than the Eurovision Song Contest (which, as we all know, is really saying something).

So she might be forgiven for failing to ever notice that the number of people needing treatment at Mater Dei Hospital was just as high under the Nationalists a few years ago: in fact, all we ever used to talk about in the health sector at the time was the length of the waiting lists for various operations. 

One simple explanation for the increase in patients seeking treatment at Mater Dei, therefore, is that more operations are actually being carried out there. There have in fact been various announcements to this effect: the most recent being that at Mater Dei today there are also surgical interventions on Sundays. What this also implies is that a not-inconsiderable percentage of those now having operations will probably have been waiting for them since before the election. They are people who were ‘sick’ under the Nationalists and – surprise, surprise – remained just as ‘sick’ under Labour; at least, until they finally got treatment.

But on one thing the Shadow Health Minister is correct. If we allow the possibility that ‘talking rubbish’ qualifies as a symptom of medical disease… there is certainly a lot more of it going around than ever before. Another recent outbreak concerned the Justice Minister, this time commenting on the most earth-shattering cataclysm of the lot: the Panama Papers. 

According to Owen Bonnici, Konrad Mizzi ‘did not try to hide anything’ when opening a trust fund with a company in Panama. No indeed. He chose Panama for the weather, not for the inscrutability of its legislation as a tax haven. And Bonnici can prove this, too: “Dr Mizzi was transparent, as he declared his Panama company in the declaration of assets handed to the prime minister….”

Like Buttigieg before him, Bonnici’s symptoms seem to also include failure to observe certain details relevant to his own argument. For while it is true that Mizzi (eventually) declared the company to the prime minister … he did not declare it to the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, as necessitated by law. 

Don’t get me wrong, now: it was awfully nice of him to inform the prime minister of an issue that posed a major threat to his own government… even if only after the excrement had already hit the fan. The crux of Bonnici’s entire argument, however, is that Mizzi ‘did not try to hide anything’. How does he square that up with the fact that Mizzi faces a (possible) fine for ‘trying to hide something’ from the taxman?

Leaving aside the original choice of Panama to begin with. You can almost picture the faded map, with the ‘X’ marking the spot in blood. Nothing to hide, naturally. Nothing whatsoever…

But again, let’s go easy on Owen Bonnici. He’s not well, you know. And it’s not nice to comment about people who are not well...

This brings us emphatically to the next bunch of epidemic victims: the Nationalist Party, which has taken mortal offence at ‘attacks’ targeting its two deputy leaders, Beppe Fenech Adami and Mario de Marco. Both have experienced health issues of late, and Simon Busuttil was beside himself with outrage: “It is normal for politicians to get attacked by the other side, but it is utterly immoral and shameful to spread lies about people who are passing through such difficult health conditions. Such attacks have downgraded local politics to their lowest levels in history.”

Got that, everyone? ‘Utterly immoral’ to ‘spread lies about people with health problems’. 

Again, Busuttil displays the same symptoms as all the others. He seems not to have noticed that his own party, even as he spoke those words, was going into overdrive trying to spin the imminent retirement of Police Commissioner Michael Cassar into a tale of government pressure into a police investigation… when Cassar had actually taken long leave of absence citing health reasons.

Some people’s health, it seems, is more sacrosanct than others. Attacks on Nationalist MPs? That’s a big no-no. Attacks on public officials who aren’t even politicians, and who suffer from personal health issues just like everyone else? That’s perfectly fine… as long as it can somehow be blamed on Labour: along with the deterioration of public health… earthquakes… tsunamis, the next Justin Bieber album….

… and mosquitoes. Let’s not forget the mosquitoes. Speaking of which: where is that bugger hiding, anyway?