Tony Blair's no-holds-barred warning to Euro parliamentarians on June 23 was one of those dashes into realism so rare these days at the EU. Hard as EU politicians try to shrivel away from admitting it, the EU is seriously distancing itself from the common man.
The argument is not about which model to choose to shape the EU's future, whether to opt for the Anglo Saxon or the French model. No such models, in fact, exist.
The choice is between the EU being able to affect some of the big issues of our time - low economic growth, unemployment, poverty and terrorism - or trundles on as 'Old Europe'. In the meantime, India and China are fast catching up.
The argument runs deeper than that. It is about relevance. If significance was palpably clear for the post-war generation of Europeans, it is less so today for a generation that has but a foggy notion of why Europe went to war.
The fault lies with les élites of Brussels. It is they - and the nodding approval 15 member states for too long gave France to act as the measure by which the rest of Europe sets its clock - that account for the economic, political and social shambles towards which the European project could be heading.
The EU is no longer a vision. Today's Eu is all about ambitions, most of which are not widely publicised. What many in the EU want is to prop up the continent as an equal of the United States.
Given how much the EU lacks, both as a trading as well as a political bloc, not least consensus over its own far time horizon, that remains a bit of a pipe dream.
It is ambitions like these that have made people lose faith in the EU's ability to meet their expectations, a faith they want to keep in their national governments. EU politicians and bureaucrats hardly make things easier funding wrong, wacky policies of which the Common Agricultural and the Common Fisheries policies are towering examples.
One feels sorry for French farmers, blamed as they are, all round, for sucking up massive funds from a CAP that bolts down 40 per cent of the whole EU budget. French farmers are not the porkers with snouts in troughs many crack them up to be.
Those with small farmsteads can barely make ends meet. In the North farmers grow sugar beet to extract ethanol as a cheaper alternative to diesel. Their larger competitors are in no better shape. Many have pawned their souls to banks to stay afloat - despite their EU subsidies.
The swiftly diminishing community of French farmers that remains - agriculture accounts for only four per cent of economic activity in the EU - is enthusiastically opposed to subsidies and favours instead a liberalised market. Danish farmers, who know few peers, are in the same boat.
Only politicians remain latched to subsidies, introduced under vastly different economic conditions many years ago - and hugely profitable companies like Tate and Lyle. This too explains why people all over the EU keep dislodging themselves from politicians in significant numbers. They have stopped believing that politicians know best.
What does this have to do with us in Malta? Plenty. Mr Blair may well have had Malta in mind when he urged EU parliamentarians to seek fresh-faced ways of doing politics.
Our arrival in Brussels, admittedly only a year ago, shows no signs of providing us with much better hopes of beating our social and economic problems fast, and very probably for lack of wanting to appear difficult.
Maltese politicians are as much entrenched in 'Old Europe' as Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, as immobile in their political strategies as those in France and Germany.
We have been in the midst of a whacking financial mess for more than a decade and have been living with sluggish economic returns for years. Our national debt and the government's budget deficit continue to defy the law of gravity and head north.
Yet rather than scythe down bureaucracy and lower tax ceilings - moves likely to whip up a fresh fighting spirit among our investing few and our working class - Government insists on lining itself up with the provisions of the EU Stability Pact and raise taxation without however creating alternative growth opportunities or providing us with distinctly improved services.
We all expected things to take a different shape, yet promises trumpeted enthusiastically during the EU referendum are hardly taken seriously today. Why? Because the EU tends to be a little bit like God, helping only those who help themselves - not necessarily only by swallowing their directives wholesale but also by putting up a fight for alternative, suitable deals.
In Brussels it's the wheel that squeaks that gets the oil. Somnambulate as we all may into believing our difficulties will eventually sort themselves out on their own now that we form part of the EU, the truth is this will simply not happen.
Given the tight-fisted manner in which government confides in us on when to expect better days - and the media's preference for playing politics instead of objectively reporting the truth - voters, looking at the state of the country, are left with no option but to complain and condemn.
Is this exclusively the fault of a lax, weak and inefficient nationalist government? Any answer you get is likely to provide only the short view.
The fault lies with a political class that has grown insouciant, fearful of looking beyond an atrophied way of running the country. Just as bad, if not worse, many of us no longer insist on the values by which we mark politicians down before we put them into power.
Tiresome as these arguments may sound, they bear repeating for the condition they reveal. Our politicians are failing to lead us out of our predicaments fast enough and it is now getting seriously late. It won't take China, India, Morocco and many other investment and holiday resorts long to catch up with us - much less time than it takes to catch up with the other richer, bigger EU states.
Malta's two main political parties possibly have a limited time frame in which to break out of the box and turn creative, innovative and bold with their politics.
Efficiency starts at home. Both parties have frontline politicians who are either in it for themselves or are not worth trusting with handling national tasks. Both should take a firm axe to that.
Both should provide smaller, truly efficient cabinets. In a country the small cabinets that outnumber the backbench don't necessarily make for greater efficiency.
Elsewhere in Europe people seem to be insisting that politicians take a harder look at their country's sovereignty to stop beginning to look like a Weimar Republic kowtowing to the will of Brussels at the expense of their culture, their national identity or their economy.
Politicians face that same task here - in addition to generating a brand new enthusiasm in our future. That calls for a display of skills at hammering out a pulsating vision that will carry us all with it - the type that makes everyone roll up their sleeves and commit to making miracles out of our meagre resources.
You don't have to be a dictator to do that. Ireland pulled itself out of its economic mess first by producing that same type of national plan, then by joining the EU.
The political party that convinces us it can dump the old order and come up with a brand new concept on how to govern the country to our best interests as an EU member state will come in with the better chance at the next election. It will be our hero.
I got a view of 15 Maltese heroes last Friday week at San Blas, men and women who, under the direction of that national treasure of ours, Mgr Victor Grech, fought a gruelling battle for two whole years to win themselves back from addiction.
Wouldn't it be tragic to give in to the sullen thought that 15 ordinary men and women can more successfully carry out the battle of change for themselves than politicians can manage for the rest of us?