I'm with Joseph on this one

Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party have tabled a parliamentary motion calling for a debate on the Eurozone's dire financial situation and its effect on Malta. Good idea. Greece is a basket case, so are Ireland and Portugal and Italy is beginning to look like another one, although typically more elegant. The financial picture looks like a very worrying domino game with Malta teetering at the southern end of the continent. So Joseph Muscat is right. A parliamentary debate at this time is vital. And the government seems to concur.

Unfortunately there is a more to this than meets the eye. My sources tell me that Joseph Muscat is at loggerheads with the one and only Alfred Sant about the way that this debate should be conducted. The man who holds the absolute record for leading his party in three back to back electoral losses, is putting on his armour to go for another one of his anti-Europe crusades.

Sant has been against the EU since the late 1960s and has not changed his mind. Four decades have elapsed since then, today's EU is unrecognisable from its 1960s version, Malta voted for membership in a referendum and two elections, and all his silly arguments have been flattened under the weight of evidence to the contrary. None of this matters to him. He was against EU membership, remains so now and will be for as long as it exists. That is the man.

Alfred Sant wants his party to call for an open parliamentary debate on the Eurozone situation, rather than have the prime minister make a statement to which the opposition leader responds. It is clear why. He wants to embark on yet another tirade against the EU. A sort of Custer's last stand.

Which brings us to Joseph Muscat's problem. The last thing that the PL leader needs is for his predecessor to start rattling the bones of the anti-EU skeleton locked in his political closet. Criticising government is fine and so is criticising Europe. Calling Malta's Eurozone and, even worse, EU membership into question is quite a different matter. It certainly would not the PL leader's political sweet spot at the moment.

I share Muscat's concern. This country does not need a debate on what has been done and dusted for years. It is not only the PL which will suffer if Alfred Sant gets on his parliamentary soapbox to rile against Europe. It will be the country as a whole.

We are EU and Eurozone members and the way forward is only within them. Any so-called debate from outside these institutions is dangerously pointless for the country. Alfred Sant, of course, couldn't care less for the country let alone his party.