I got my hands on a rather pretty document issued by the Labour Party (I just can’t get my head around PL) in anticipation of the upcoming MEP Elections. The idea, of course, is to persuade the electorate to rally round these guys’ nominees, in the hope that they will get three out of five and be able to exercise bragging rights for the next four years or whatever it is.

Truth be told, at the moment this seems to be pretty much a foregone (forlorn, if you look at it from the PN point of view) conclusion – Labour win all the elections except the important one, and even if this wasn’t the case, at this stage of the national legislature and with the world going to hell in a cash-register, it would be surprising if the Government wasn’t given a black eye. Of course, if the future of the country depended on the poll, I rather suspect we’d all be thinking that we’d rather have the Nationalists in the driving seat, given that the alternative is a callow youth flanked by gentlemen whose grasp of the reins of government (as opposed to their grasp of the juicy sound-bite method of going about things) is tenuous at best.

But getting back to that document, to which I have given something of a cursory but penetrating look, just what is it that Labour are trying to do? Convince us that either a) they don’t have a grasp of the language or b) that they don’t have the common sense to do a bit of proof-reading before exposing their policies to the world.

You know and I know that the most controversial issue that blights the country at the moment is immigration. The sheer hate that is demonstrated by this country’s so-called Christians towards immigrants of a different colour and religion is well-documented and it is not this that I am concerned with at the moment, though it would be nice if all the MEP candidates were to get together (well, the ones that can, of course, the ones that pander directly to the racists can’t) and make an appeal for the country to step back from being bigoted and xenophobic.

So prominent is the issue of immigration that the Labour Party highlighted it in the first page of their manifesto, blaming the Government without, of course, proposing any solution. To this extent, Lowell is more constructive than they are, albeit in a more than slightly inhumane way. They do the same all over the place, in the manner of Oppositions everywhere: elect them and everything will be done exactly as everyone wants it, for free and perfectly, always.

Glancing through the policies that they are proposing, one sprang out at me: “the worker will have the right to work as much overtime as he likes without limitations”.

Nothing to do with immigration I know, but don’t you just love it when in one single line, a political party betrays its roots so elegantly? According to this lot, the Working Time Directive so loved by their compatriots on the Left in Europe will be chucked out along with the bath-water and, at the same time, employers will be given no choice in the matter: overtime will be worked when and as the workers want to work it and hang the costs.

I know the latter half of the previous sentence is not what they meant, but proof-reading, anyone?

Getting back to immigration, the document lambastes Gonzi for signing the Immigration Pact without negotiating for mandatory but not obligatory burden sharing.

Yes, you read that correctly, it’s not a misprint.

Not on my part, anyway.

According the Labour Party, the EU should have adopted a policy whereby burden-sharing, while not being mandatory, would be obligatory. Or was that the other way round, while being mandatory, it would not be obligatory? My brain is starting to hurt and my teeth itch.

Read my lips, you people who think you can run this country, for all the number of times the electorate has told you that you can’t, may not and will not: if something is mandatory, it is obligatory and, equally, if it is obligatory, it is mandatory. You either don’t have the most basic of grasps of the meaning of words (given that you’re politicians or wannabe politicians, this is not excluded) or you don’t have the administrative or organisational skills to put together a simple manifesto.

I’d go on and analyse the rest of the thing, but, frankly, when I got to the bit about Louis Grech having drawn up the EU’s Budget for 2007 apparently single-handedly, I was moved to press the delete button, because it’s clear that this document was prepared with only one aim in mind, an aim I’ll leave to you to divine.

But before pressing “delete”, another small piece of misleading information jumped out at me: Prof. Edward Scicluna was shown as having been chairman of that august body, the Malta Financial Services Authority, when in fact, he never was. He had been chairman of the Malta Financial Services Centre, of course, but not of the MFSA.

Picky, ain’t I?