Budget boredom to talk about

I’ll confess to have esch­ewed the pleasure of listening to the young gent telling us how he’s going to divest us of our hard-earned spondulicks with one hand while giving them back to us in spades with the other. Since those deliciously dark days of the 1970s and 1980s, when ministers of finance appertaining to the party that defends the workers (as long as the workers give undying fealty to the party, of course) would bore Malta and tell us by how much the price of a can of tuna would be reduced (always assuming you could find a can of the stuff that wasn’t bulk-bought) I haven’t really been able to recapture the thrill, so instead of watching Tonio Fenech, I strolled off to Fra Giuseppe with the missus for a glass of something that cheers.

But this does not mean that everyone followed my lead and didn’t bother. No sooner had Minister Fenech sat himself down after delivering himself of the Budget speech than the comments started.

As always, the great and good had their say to say, with the spokes-bloke for the General Workers’ Union slagging off Mr Fenech’s effort and his counterpart with t’other union saying that it wasn’t that bad.

Which probably means it wasn’t that bad, really, because when the Union Ħaddiema Magħqudin need to slag off the government, they do so, while the other lot do it as a matter of course, thereby devaluing the slagging off no end. You know, crying wolf and all that.

The representatives of the capitalist pigs were, as always, not particularly pleased with anything that is going to cost them (for “them”, read “us”, the consumer) money while being mightily pleased at the same time by anything that is going to give them money, money which, of course, is not going to be reflected in any sort of price reduction to us, the consumer.

Perhaps that was what Vince Farrugia meant when he called the Budget two-faced, as it evoked in him the sensation that those Greek masks evoke, when twirled on the little stick the actors use to hold them up in front of their faces. My grasp of the classics being what it is, I might have the little stick bit a bit skewed, but you get what I mean.

The chaps over at Labour’s headquarters have discovered the internetty thingy, you know. Not only did they set up a website called therealbudget.com (or something of that ilk), they also had someone on Twitter shooting tweets out into the ether. For the uninitiated, tweets are sort of smsesses (Is that the plural of text messages?) with a limit of 140 characters, meant to broadcast your feelings and thoughts, for all the world as if anyone were interested.

It’s actually quite fun once you get into it, especially when you link it to your Facebook page, as you can amuse all your virtual friends and enemies, though you can block the latter, with erudite thoughts about the way the soccer match is going.

Or the election.

Or the Budget speech.

The thing is, if you don’t have a pretty good grasp of the medium, to say nothing of the English language, you might end up with a few helpings of albumen on your face, such as when PL-Malta said that Gonzi’s threatened people’s lives with the Budget, leading me to wonder whether it wasn’t about time for Anġlu Farrugia to make another complaint to the Commissioner of Police, this time about the Prime Minister going about with hard-bound copies of the Budget speech, threatening to knock people’s blocks off.

One thing that the Labour Party has twigged is that tweets are pretty ephemeral and that no one will hold you to them.

Why else would they think they can get away with a tweet saying (I suspect not in approving way) that the UĦM president was saying the wage increase was justified while at the same time (well, a few minutes later) saying the unions had dissed the Budget?

Or with saying that the Budget was a savage attack on 40,000 jobs in the tourism industry, though, perhaps, someone was listening to that traffic song when he came up with the figure. Come on, you rockers out there, you know what I mean.

There was much more of the same, you would not be surprised to know, such as quoting anyone they could get their hands on, worthy or not. You can check them out for yourselves and see what I mean.

One of the other comments I enjoyed, on Facebook though, was by one of those ladies who sneerger (to remind you, they sneer and snigger at the same time) who virtually issued a challenge to anyone to dare to think (and to express the thought) that the Budget was not all that bad.

If you dared do that, according to the lady concerned, you were an angry, bored, sycophantic Nationalist, so there. I suppose she imagines I get four out of four.

The amusing thing was that the responses led the dear lady to express the later thought that the Budget debate that was going to ensue would be as boring as the divorce debate. This would not have been an entirely unreasonable thought, except for the fact that said dear lady had just a few days earlier contributed quite a few column inches to the divorce debate, which she apparently didn’t find boring at the time.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/blogs