‘Without honesty and realism, Labour will go the way of the dinosaurs’

The veteran Labour minister Evarist Bartolo has likened Labour’s fate to that of the dinosaurs, unless the party starts facing its predicament with honesty and realism.

Bartolo posted his Facebook status a day after the Tumas magnate Yorgen Fenech was charged with being the mastermind behind the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, in a case that is now implicating the prime minister’s former chief of staff Keith Schembri.

“The dinosaurs were gradually made extinct by the catastrophes that struck them. Labour is a great party, which has done much good for our people and our country. But if we don’t react with honesty and realism at what is happening, there is a big chance that it will go the way of the dinosaurs. And it would be suicide. Why should we commit this suicide if our party can still do much good?”

Bartolo, one of Labour’s only vocal critics of the way Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi were protected during the Panamagate scandal, has previously said Labour was at a crossroads. “We will be a worse-off country if we protect murderers and money launderers; a better place if justice is carried out with everyone without fear or favour.”

Bartolo has also harkened back to the founding ideals of the Labour Party, suggesting he wanted to remind activists what the party stood for.

“Some 100 years ago, honest people who loved their country worked to create the Labour Party because they wanted a just society: not only in the redistribution of wealth but also in the safeguarding of the law, where everyone would be equal before the law and not people of wealth or in power ruling over all.”

He previously also reiterated his call for the PM’s chief of staff Keith Schembri and the tourism minister Konrad Mizzi to resign, this time calling them by name in a Facebook status.

“Even the strongest tree that bears the most fruit must be taken care off and be pruned once in a while, otherwise it might fall sick and die. And who would suffer should the Labour Party tree be allowed to die? Those whose bed has already been laid? No. It would be those who are voiceless and the weakest,” Bartolo said.

Bartolo then said Labour was greater than any part of it, a reference to Mizzi and Schembri, by saying “the tree is greater than any of its branches”.

He said that without Mizzi and Schembri, the Labour Party would tend to the “tree so that it does not fall sick and die. Before it is too late.”