A big and collective no from the Labour Party in the upcoming Parliament vote on the EU membership treaty will be greeted by the hardliners who see merit in hard-headedness. Those MPs who in their hearts want to vote yes but still will vote no will get kudos from the faithful who admire zealotry. For the rest of us, a no from the Opposition will once again delay the coming-out of the long promised 'new' Labour Party.

There are plenty of elements within the Opposition that want to turn a new leaf, but a combination of obstinacy and opportunism will probably result in lingering ambivalence.

Reasonable Labourites want their reluctant party to assume the roles and responsibilities of a political party inside the EU. The anti-EU sentiment of certain Labourites was always skin-deep, if not bogus. Now that the country has spoken unambiguously for membership, these same persons know which side Malta's bread is buttered. Across the wider party, there is the temptation to visibly jump abroad as advantages materialise from membership.

Yet there is also the temptation to hold out for the political capital that Labour can extract from the national challenges and the inevitable adjustments that membership will bring. Many see potential profit if they assume the role of obstructionists and Euro-sceptics. In membership they see an arsenal of ammunition against the Nationalist government.

The membership issue was settled with the election and the referendum, but EU issues will long remain a lightning-rod of Maltese politics. At a conference this week, the GWU's secretary general noted that "when we see what is going on in Europe, it is certain that the same things can occur in our country". He was referring to the issues raised at the Prague European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) conference, where delegates brought up the problems relating to pensions, social security, public sector employment and unemployment.

Unrepentant and bragging of his union's prescience, he claimed that "All that was talked about in Prague had been brought up by the GWU in its campaign to warn the people of Malta and Gozo about what the country may face if we join the EU. Now we hear from the mouths of EU countries a repeat of what the GWU had said."

There is a lingering denial that we could have avoided certain fundamental national challenges if we had stayed out of the EU. There is the misconception that EU membership causes an aggravation of certain problems ñ like high unemployment in certain parts of Europe - or that EU keeps its members from tackling these problems in the correct way. Why is it so hard to recognise that the only lasting solution is a sounder economy and faster economic growth, and Malta was not about to achieve that outside the EU? Indeed, quite the opposite.

The other headline in Thursday's l-Orizzont also had something to do with the EU: NSO says that unemployment in Malta is 6.8%: According to Eurostat, unemployment rose to 7.5%. The so-called independent daily persists in misleading statements on unemployment.

The paper reported a "rise" to 7.5 per cent, and it noted that now we have three concurrent measurements of the unemployment rates. It may come as a surprise to them, but they are probably as many ways of measuring underemployment as there are countries in the world, and with Malta becoming first prospective and then an acceding EU member, we have been upgrading the methods of measuring the unemployment numbers. A union newspaper should be the last to be upset about the gathering of additional information about the employment situation.

The traditional method has been the ETC's administrative records that are used to tally up those who are registered as unemployed in one of the ETC's registers of the jobless. The ETC keeps track also of persons in employment. The advantage with such administrative records is that they monitor the entire population directly. They do not rely on any sampling.

The bad news, as far as employment records go, is employer tardiness in turning in reports of engagements or dismissals. Even worse, the tardiness is itself unstable and hard to address. From the Opposition side, we heard complaints that the employment numbers were coming out after the unemployment figures, but with an administrative system, such a timetable is the better way to accommodate the need for both timeliness and accuracy.

On the way to accession and EU membership, the National Statistics Office has been upgrading most aspects of its operations, with technical and financial assistance from the EU. Had Labour gotten elected, further progress in the statistical area would now be in doubt. Before the referendum and election, Labour railed incessantly against rules "imposed" by Brussels. But even a Labour government hardly would have undone what was already achieved.

Part of the statistical upgrade was the quarterly Labour Force Survey, an EU-wide exercise that probes the job market more deeply. To engage in a frequent exercise of such detail, the survey cannot probe the entire population but instead questions a relatively small sample of respondents. It then extends the results to the entire population. While the ETC's unemployment figures include only registrants, the LFS monitors those who while not registering meet other criteria.

By its very definitions, the LFS will report a higher number of unemployed persons. Yet immediately, the Opposition pounced on the new numbers as evidence of a rise in unemployment, presumably though irrationally meaning that they were "up" from the ETC numbers. There is also the underlying and very pernicious campaign to undermine public confidence in the national statistical system just when the quality of the statistics is undergoing a radical upgrade.

Now the propaganda gimmick may get a second wind. Within the EU, unemployment is still defined differently across various countries, and the same is true of the acceding states. For example, for Malta's Labour Force Survey, the relevant population is aged between 15 and 64 For Eurostat, the age bracket is 15-74.

Eurostat has its own liberal criteria for defining the unemployed. It also estimates the unemployment rate for each of the months when no survey is conducted. In sum, Eurostat harmonises the results of the labour force surveys conducted across the continent, and adjusts them for seasonal factors.

The result is a Eurostat estimate of a Maltese unemployment rate of 7.4 per cent in February 2003. Since the months are adjusted for seasonality, any month can be compared to any other month. February's 7.4 per cent is unchanged from January and down from December's 7.5 per cent. How this translates into l-Orizzont's rising-unemployment headline is a mystery, or perhaps no mystery at all. Long critical of the EU, the paper can't accuse EU institutions of understating unemployment. It claims to see rising unemployment at a time of falling unemployment!

A few decades back, temperature measurement switched from Fahrenheit to Centigrade, but the weather report did not talk of a "drop" in temperature from 100°F one day to 43°C the next. With those numbers, what you actually had was a temperature increase. Talking about a temperature drop then would have been as absurd as talking about an unemployment increase now.

Is it too much to ask l-Orizzont and their allies, the Malta Labour Party to be more mature, more factual and more consistent with their arguments? This habit of using shallow, even downright misleading comparisons and assessments, did not work with a majority of the Maltese electorate in both the referendum and the general elections. Indeed, Alfred Sant lost by practically the same number of votes in the last election as in that of 1998. Yet, the Labour-cum-GWU alliance remains ambivalent to the people's ability to reason things out. Surely it's time to turn a new leaf!