Promises, promises

There is a particular kind of insult that only politicians can deliver: the ones that smile at you while quietly assuming you’re an idiot. Yes, you, who are decidedly not an idiot, given that you’re reading this.

In other words, welcome to election season.

Both parties have now settled on the same winning (at least that’s what their PR gurus think) formula – promise everything, to everyone, all at once.

No edges, no trade-offs, no costings worth the paper they’re not even printed on. Just produce a blizzard of pledges, each more generous, more humane, more visionary than the last.

Cutting through this saccharine fog, up popped the Malta Chamber of Commerce, hardly a band of anarchists, essentially saying: This is getting reckless.

‘’Reckless’’: That’s the polite word, and when the Malta Chamber, rarely if ever known to dump on the powers that are or may be, gets so explicit, you know we’ve moved beyond normal campaign exaggeration into something closer to collective delusion.
Because look at what’s being served up.

The Labour Party is busy promising a future so exquisitely curated it now requires a “wellbeing index” to measure how blissful we’ll all be under its continued stewardship. You can almost hear the violins.

Meanwhile, the PN is playing catch-up, beat for beat: regional upgrades here, development pledges there, carefully assembled so that not a single voter feels the faintest discomfort.

It’s not politics anymore. It’s retail therapy promised to all comers.

The clear and present danger is that people with a brain cell or six (and there are enough to make a difference) will take this on board and conclude: “They’re all the same. So I’ll switch off and stay home.’’

Why, indeed, need they choose between clones?

Well, when you think about it, if the promises the clones are making are all the same, the choice between them isn’t harder to make. It’s easier.

Once you strip away the identical manifestos, you’re left with the only thing that actually matters: their record as our lords and masters. And on that, there is no equivalence for the Labour Party to hide behind.

They offer you a recent past defined by corruption that metastasised, standards that collapsed, and a political culture where sleaze wasn’t an aberration; it was ambient. A background hum. The water everyone swam in, holding their noses sometimes.

The other bunch? You can carp at them all day long, and people do, but one fact sits there, immovable: they took Malta into Europe and anchored it in something larger, stricter, and, crucially, accountable.

They had their idiots, and there were people who had more than an eye for the main chance, but they did not have their sticky fingers plunged into every single bun that was oozing stickiness.

That’s not ancient trivia. That’s trajectory. That’s fact. So spare me the weary shrug and inane “they’re all the same.”
They’re not the same.

They’re just campaigning the same way, like market traders who’ve realised that if you shout loudly enough, no one will ask what’s actually in the box.

The Malta Chamber has, in its measured, respectable way, said this is reckless. What the Malta Chamber can’t say is ‘don’t look at what they’re promising. Look at what they’ve already done.’

Yet I can say it. I’m not bound by the convention that business is business. To my mind, the choice, given the evidence, is clear and not because of what they’re promising they’ll do (and won’t), but because of what they’ve done.