A Lent of Politics

The Malta Independent

The holding of the election campaign during the Holy Lent is giving related keywords to the Prime Minister to explain the poor contents of his manifesto.

The keywords this week were pardon and sacrifices.   Indeed lent is the time of spiritual cleansing, for asking pardon for our shortcomings and for making sacrifices in reparation for our sins.

The Prime Minister is however transporting this religious analogy to the political field in a very strange and puerile manner.  While asking the pardon from those who have been left out in the cold whilst he has been governing from Brussels these last four and a half years, he expects us to do the sacrifices rather than offering us proper reparations for his failings.

“The keywords this week were pardon and sacrifices.   Indeed lent is the time of spiritual cleansing, for asking pardon for our shortcomings and for making sacrifices in reparation for our sins”

What logic, may I ask, is driving our Prime Minister, to ask for our pardon and then to ask us to do more sacrifices to vote him back into power?

I have no doubt that after sixteen years of nearly uninterrupted stay in power, the time is overdue for the Nationalist Party to spend a whole legislature in Opposition to cleanse itself and re-discover its nationalist inspiration.

No amount of demand for forgiveness will cancel the fact that especially during this last legislature, the government has detached itself completely from the people.  It has obsessed itself with a single issue which it pretends can offer a solution to all the problems the government itself created.   Problems best typified by the twin mountains of debt and debris which the PN government is leaving behind as an unwanted legacy to its successors.

This detachment is coming clear during this campaign.  It boasts of creating 14,000 jobs when in fact most of these were just replacement of people retiring on pension and the net new jobs created were merely 3,000 most of them unproductive as they reflect administrative jobs related to the EU project which is evidently leading to nowhere; when the major issue we find whilst home visiting is exactly the desperation of young people and the over forties at not finding decent work opportunities; when official unemployment exceeds 10,000.

“The PM is right in asking for forgiveness.  He must however accept that as reparation he has to go to opposition gracefully”

It boasts of massive expenditure on our education when in fact public educational services are producing illiterates at an alarmingly high rate.   It shouts about millions invested in our road system when we still experience the daily passion of driving through sub-standard roads.

It gloats at the hundreds of millions being spent on the Tal-Qroqq hospital when at basic grassroots level public health services are not delivering at the minimum standard required forcing many social assistance cases to buy from their poor pension medicines they are entitled to receive free from the State.

Clearly government measures its success by its ability to spend.  The electorate should measure it firstly by its ability to earn, and secondly on the efficiency of its spending.   There is a generally accepted opinion that Labour are much better administrators and they provide much better value for money for public spending so that even without the need to tax people excessively in terms of recent experience, the country can go much further.  Labour will spend less and get more, much much more.

The PM is right in asking for forgiveness.  He must however accept that as reparation he has to go to opposition gracefull