Now is the time

Now is the time when you are supposed to be contemplating matters of greater import than your navel. Yes, I know I shouldn't be flippant about an exercise as serious as voting but it is one of my less grevious faults to inject some levity into even the least appropriate situations. I suppose I'll not fry in hell for it.

So contemplate away, then, why don't you? Do try to ignore the flurries of conspiracy theories and the allegations of dirty tricks and all the other manifestations of the science-fiction mentality that seem to have afflicted certain people of late. Let these people enjoy themselves creating an alternative reality and blaming everyone but themselves for what the real world does to them. Make up your mind for yourself, in fact. Truth be told, I'm pretty sure most people have made up their minds for themselves and the wild accusations and rumours flying around are unlikely to convince anyone much.

The ones who have certainly made up their minds are the ones who have decided to eschew the right to grumble about what the government will do to them in the future. These are the people who, being entitled to vote, have burnt their bridges and disenfranchised themselves by not collecting their voting document. They have up to midnight on Thursday to think again, but somehow I doubt they will. To these, all I can say is, don't moan if Gonzi or Sant annoy you, you don't have the right.

I, too, have made up my mind and it would be ingenuous of me to pretend that you don't have a good idea (read: are not completely certain) into which set of boxes I'll be writing my "1 et seq". That's as may be, but you shouldn't stand on the order of my writing, to mangle Shakespeare, because there's no guarantee that every PN candidate will benefit from the nourishment of my vote. I intend to exercise the right to choose to show my appreciation of the way the people who run my life, on the local and national level, have performed. There may have been an elected office holder who has performed well, another who has performed merely adequately and yet another whose performance has left me cold and my voting preferences will show this. There may be candidates who promise much and will be duly recognised as such and, on the other hand, the opposite might come about.

But the fact remains that when it comes to expressing a choice as to who should be PM, my mind is made up. Admitting, in response to comments made to my previous blog, that my opinion is only as valid as anyone else's (except that I've been asked to publish it while others only ride on it) I intend to share some thoughts as to why my mindset is what it is.

Hardwired into my DNA, if you like, is my aversion to the Malta Labour Party's legacy. I know that many of the people who participated in the rape of democracy that was committed in Malta in the Seventies and early Eighties are no longer at the helm of the MLP but too many of the ones who were, at best, passive and acquiescent are still around. The spectre of armed men, uniformed or otherwise, "policing" public gatherings, whether at Tal-Qroqq or Tal-Barrani (at which latter I was not present, incidentally) and the memory of the reflex lowering of one's voice to talk politics, are still too vivid to be ignored, for all that I'm accused, by people whose memory is perhaps more selectively accommodating than mine, that I live in the past.

Leaving my DNA aside, though, there are still plenty of reasons why my preference is what it is.

I am European and the MLP, in its former incarnations, never respected this. In its current incarnation, it has only come to respect this recently and, quite frankly, grudgingly. Even when the country expressed its wishes clearly and unequivocally, Sant persisted in denying the facts and even now, he still uses expressions that demonstrate his almost overwhelming urge to turn the clock back and drag us with him. In the back of my mind, then, there's every reason not to feel comfortable with him representing me in Europe.

Perhaps to my personal cost, I still cling to the idea that there is decency inherent in most people, even though I sometimes pretend to a cynicism that does not come naturally to me. The MLP's campaign only served to try to turn me into a real cynic, and I don't like it. According to the MLP, everyone is corrupt some of the time and its opponents are corrupt all the time. This is a depressing enough world-view in itself but when you combine it with the unashamed opportunism with which the MLP snatches at every available vote, whether it is by pretending to accomodate the so-called hunting lobby, or by throwing mud by the skip-load or by promising all things to all men and all women, to say nothing of children and animals, you perceive a party machine that will say anything and promise anything if it gets them a sniff of power.

You will have noticed, I think, a significant hole in the rhetoric employed by the MLP. We haven't heard too much about how the MLP in government will be a government for all Maltese. They can't really push this line too much, because many of their spokespeople have been going about promising their supporters that "it's their turn now". You might want to think about the implications of this.

Looking forward, I don't see much to entice me to vote for Sant as my Prime Minister. He's written to me a couple of times now, to tell me that he's not going to charge me VAT on school-uniforms or computers used for educational purposes. That's nice, but I haven't worn a uniform for quite a few years and my son doesn't either, for all that AzzNazz seem to think he's a cop. And I'm not really interested in that "grant" spelt "commercial loan" he's been spinning at me for so long, either. I'll advise anyone who asks to borrow the money from the bank, it might be cleaner. Oh, and that surcharge reduction would have been quite an attraction, weren't it for the fact that I know that a) the real world does impact on Malta and b) Sant is going to get the money from somewhere and I suspect I know where that "somewhere" is - my and your tax-bill.

Since I don't get paid for overtime (at time-and-a-half or double-time or straight-time or otherwise) I don't see much of an attraction in the prospect of not being taxed on overtime earnings, for all that I can't even quite see what he's getting at. Perhaps the idea is akin to removing VAT: remember that joke? I'd rather not have someone at the helm whose idea of governance is akin to playing a computer simulation, with the ESC button being the solution when the experiments don't work.

One of the reasons to vote against PN that is being flogged, very much like a dead horse, is that it's time for a change. A reasonable response to this is "why"? Gonzi is a much fresher product than Sant, who has lost every election since 1998 that he's contested himself. Gonzi's record in government is extremely positive, for all the moaning and groaning by the chattering classes. Mistakes have been made, only people who do nothing don't make mistakes, and some things could have been done better, but if you read Gonzi's words carefully you will see a will to change and make amends. Do you see the same theme in Sant's words? I don't think so.

A dispassionate look around the country will reveal a country that has taken its place squarely within Europe. We're not exactly Switzerland, in the Mediterranean or otherwise, but we're not the arm-pit of Europe, either. There's plenty left to be done and plenty of storms to be weathered, if you'll forgive me for making a statement of the bleedin' obvious and I know full well that the past is not a guarantee of the future, but Gonzi's record is enough to convince me, for one, that he's a safe pair of hands.

When it comes to it, I'll be voting PN for all of the above reasons. Only you know who you'll be voting for and why you'll be making the choices you make.