Stefan Zrinzo must be very young, or very naïve, or very desperate to rewrite history when he says in The Times' interview "today's middle class is a result of Labour governments policies".

Let's write and right the present first of all. Today people are very fed up with parts of the government and most of the Nationalist Party. There is though a strong admiration for the new PM. Things are very similar to when I wrote a letter to the former Prime Minister, Eddie Fenech Adami, which was printed in The Times under the title 1996itis and the PM of the time angrily denounced it and told me and many others to quit moaning.

So yes times are difficult. But that does not mean that the middle class are looking to the Labour Party for salvation. Far from it. Does anybody think we like mass protests in Valletta over some lost holidays? Or that we like the front page of l-orizzont showing a clenched fist and believe the MLP is the guardian of the middle class? Does anybody think those people who joined in the demonstration last Monday were largely middle class?

You can't have it both ways you know.

In one breadth you're creating class hatred all over again, telling your supporters ad nauseam that a few (the middle class!) are getting it all, while the workers are getting nothing. And on the other hand you're giving interviews to The Times trying to represent us.

And do stop telling your supporters that the ftit (the few) are getting it all and the hafna (the majority) are suffering. There really is no such thing as a free lunch, and this is really rabble rousing at its worst. Three years of this and we will have violent Labour supporters again. There is a whole section of people, a section that is too large when you see the wealth around you, who live off the state for everything: their housing, their income, their health care (plus what they earn on the black market). And who created this dependency culture? I know the MLP did it with the best of intentions but today we have people, a few but it is still a disgrace, living in abject poverty because the many are taking too much and we can't give enough to the genuinely desperate.

There are mothers who don't have enough money to feed their kids. There are mothers who are short sighted yet can't afford to buy any glasses. There are mothers without the most basic necessities, indebted to loan sharks. But in the pocket money culture created, the MLP didn't make any allowances for people's tendency to abuse. So all working class people are heroes and the genuinely poor suffer in silence. I would like to know what the party's solutions are and how it will fund them (not from taxes of course, it'll say!).

This is just rabble rousing and filling Labour working class people with the false hope that things can get better even if one doesn't work hard to help oneself and make a couple of small sacrifices.

These false promises will come back to haunt the party because it won't be able to deliver either. But by then it'll have cemented in the mind of the working class Labour supporter the hatred of the middle class.

Oh yes. Aren't the middle classes looking forward to a Labour government!

Let us acknowledge what Labour did, although the party and the writers who represent it never have the middle class sense and intelligence to acknowledge anything good about the Nationalist Party.

Labour's achievements were mainly for the benefit of the working class and I would be proud of this legacy and not try to rewrite history and say the party helped the middle class because it just didn't! The MLP or Labour governments brought many working class people out of abject poverty. They set up better systems of relief or social security and pensions and for that and many other things there should be acknowledgment.

But it was done at a huge price. The party or its followers did not believe in the free press and the burning down of The Times was a symbol of that in many turbulent years. It did not believe in freedom of educational choice. Ask all those parents who tussled with Labour over Church schools. Ask all of us who were at the university then, beset by plainclothes policemen in our canteen!

I still have a handwritten note from one who strode out angrily when he realised we'd blown his cover. On it he wrote: "I have been following your eyes and ears and know you were talking about me". A note which explains perhaps why the middle classes were so desperate to hold on to a different form of schooling to one this policeman didn't benefit from!

It did not believe in the free market and this was evidenced by the rubbish in our shops, locally made with all the protectionism reminiscent of the former Iron Curtain countries. It did not create wealth for sure. We may have had little debt but this was a sad country where you got excited at the sight of a Mars bar so long as you didn't have to brush away the taste with Chinese chocolate!

And most important of all the party and its officials are completely misreading the middle class if they think they made us! Who on earth does Dr Zrinzo and other political people think they are?

The middle classes in Malta made themselves, very often in spite of the political classes. Do you think this country would stop without politics? Far from it. Look at the wealth in this country. In our homes, in our infrastructure (except our nightmare roads!), in tourism. How on earth was that created by Labour?