Tub-thumping Labour presses ‘migration’ button on Bernard Grech’s election

The Labour Party greeted the election of Bernard Grech as Nationalist leader by tub-thumping on a familiar gripe of its electorate: migration. 

Suddenly, the party until yesterday led by the migration-averse Adrian Delia (he made unbridled ‘legal’ migration a sort of battle-cry in the 2019 European elections), had become the party of unbridled free movement under Grech. 

Ironic, given that under Labour, migration of legal workers from both the EU and outside the EU skyrocketed in a bid to build Joseph Muscat’s high-octane economy: when he took power, there were 15,000 foreign nationals in gainful employment; by the time he exited, there were 67,000 ‘building the Maltese railroad’.

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“With Bernard Grech, the PN goes back to the policies of yesterday of higher utility bills, a migration policy where everyone is let in, and an inferiority complex before foreign countries where Malta bows down to all others say. A vision-less leader.” 

Labour then married both its sovereigntist spiel to its dislike of former PN leader Simon Busuttil, today the secretary-general of the European People’s Party in Brussels. 

“The people who won are the faction of Busuttil, who agrees that immigrants are brought to Malta,” the PL said, perhaps at its most unrefined for a party-in-government where the rescue of asylum seekers at sea is legally binding. 

“The PN’s establishment has won, the same one that was discarded by the people in one election after the other. The election has confirmed the division that exists between the factions,” the PL said of Grech’s landslide 69.3% victory – just about over two votes for each one that Delia obtained, a resounding reunification of those warring factions. 

“The grassroots sent a strong message with over 3,000 staying at home. If Grech wants to be taken seriously, he should come clean on his tax evasion,” the PL said of the embarrassing reveals about Grech’s habitual evasion of taxes from the 1990s onwards – tens of thousands in dues which he only settled upon deciding to enter the PN election. 

“Simon Busuttil’s faction won. Jason Azzopardi’s and Karol Aquilina’s faction won. A politics that divides, instead of uniting,” the PL said.