I’m writing this before having any real indication how the Local Council elections panned out, except that it was obvious even to the most optimistic Nationalist that the PN bunch would get a creaming.  I seem to have seen vague ether-bites that this or that Council has been lost, but this was so clearly going to happen that it’s hardly noteworthy, but the fact is that this blog is, partly, a political one, so a bit of note has to be taken.

A government heading towards the end of its mandate is always going to get whupped in a non-national poll, and this is what this was, for all Labour’s Great White Sharks going on about how fifty per cent of the population has spoken and whatever.  This does not mean that there is nothing to be read in the tea-leaves on a national level, and I’m pretty sure that all the usual pundits will be rounded up to deliver themselves of an erudite pronouncement on the significance of why Bubaqra voted the way it did and why Wied il-Buggri cast its preferences as cast, but at the end of the day, it is so simple not to bother or to vote against your normal inclinations, when all that is on the line is who decides when the rubbish is collected or which street should suddenly become one-way, that not all that much should be read into the result, really.

Of course, Labour will have a great big smile on their collective mush, and so should they, this was a good show for them.  Equally, the people who run the PN (and here a distinction should be made from the people who run the country, for obvious reasons) should have the grace to blush, more than slightly, and take stock of where they stand in the popularity stakes.  Hint: it’s not at the top, by not a little.

Local Council elections reflect a clear trend, at which the PN should take a good long look.   In the privacy of one’s heart, when deciding whether to bother voting at all, or if so, against which names to put pencil to paper, personal issues have an increasing influence.  I, for instance, live at the edge of our locality, an area where the only discernible effect of having a Local Council is that every so often, a warden putters along and distributes reverse-largesse, in the form of parking tickets on residents’ cars that are obstructing nothing and are simply parked within a reasonable distance of their owners’ homes.   Other than that, we see no evidence of having a Local Council.  Why, come the day, would I bother voting, really?  In fact, I have, so far, but it’s debatable whether I would next time.

Does this mean that I would fail to cast my preference in a national election?  Not a hope in hell, because I have convictions that supersede the “grr, I got a ticket, no way am I going to vote to re-elect the Government” sentiments that permeate the psyche of so many ladies who lunch and their husbands.   Does everyone?