In his article Presuppose Intelligence (September 20) Alfred Sant alleges that opinion writers who favour the Nationalist Party are "all programmed to sing from the same hymn sheet". This is an insult to those of us who have never ever been approached by anyone in the Nationalist Party to influence us in any way. Is it inconceivable for Dr Sant to imagine that an ordinary citizen who has observed the political scene day in day out for the last 50 years is not capable of reaching the conclusion that, with all its defects, the PN continues to be the best option for the Maltese electorate to choose?
Was it not the PN that has delivered this country from a colony to a sovereign state, put it on the road to economic prosperity, restored it to democracy after the shameful years of Socialist governments, restored fiscal sanity after Dr Sant's own unintelligent concoction of taxes and placed Malta in the European Union?
The PN has proved to be the party that has by far understood and fulfilled the expectations of the Maltese people.
Dr Sant does a great disservice to opinion writers who happen to choose the Labour Party as their favourite political home as he leaves the readers with the impression that such writers too "are programmed to sing from the same hymn sheet". It is legitimate to speculate, given Dr Sant's certainty of what happens within the PN arena, whether he is assuming that what goes on in the MLP must also go on elsewhere.
Dr Sant's pre-supposition throws light on what the deputy general secretary of the General Workers' Union wrote recently that "the attacks against the leadership of the GWU emanate from those people who have not been allowed to use the media of the GWU to attack the leadership of the Labour Party". Readers can reach their own conclusions!
Dr Sant argued in his article that by choosing SmartMalta as a slogan for this year's independence anniversary celebrations, the PN wanted "to impress people that Malta is making it in the field of information and communications technology worldwide". How puerile can one be? Here we have a leader of a political party that has just published a document on information technology which suggested that a Labour administration should build on the good things that have happened so far (no new beginning here!) reducing these real and internationally-recognised achievements as a simple "impression".
But Dr Sant went further. He even denigrated the "agreements with the high tech names which deliver little more than free publicity for the minister concerned". Are we to ignore the benefits gained by so many institutions and individuals as a result of these agreements? Obviously, all things being equal, he or his IT minister wouldn't have judged these agreements as beneficial to so many of our teachers and students.
Dr Sant didn't stop there. He denigrated also the "retailing arrangements that presumably provide better market penetration for the high tech name concerned".
Most Socialists always somehow manage to show their innate and latent envy of successful enterprises. Socialist parties everywhere have found it rather difficult to renounce once and for all the politics of envy. The MLP is no exception.
The latest crazy and not so subtle campaign aimed at sowing doubts about the SmartCity project is neither smart nor intelligent.
If it is true that only 19 per cent of the footprint of the project would actually be dedicated to IT firms, you don't need to be an IT specialist to understand that, given the nature of the project, the footprint is hardly of any relevance.
It is what is produced, the value added component and the generation of primary and secondary jobs that will count. A laptop hardly occupies any space in our houses, but the volume of work it is capable of producing on its own and through networking is beyond belief.
Dr Sant advocates the cultivation of intelligence rather than smartness. And he proclaims that Labour stands for promoting an intelligent Malta. We only have Labour's and Dr Sant's own past to reflect upon and then reach our own conclusions about their contribution to "intelligent" Malta. The VAT fiasco, the feud with Dom Mintoff, the campaign against Malta's membership of the EU, the constant cosying up to the GWU, these are just a few pointers telling us that Labour so far has neither been smart nor intelligent.