My last blog, and yes sorry I do not write them regularly, was basically an appeal to the Government to learn the lessons of history and do all that it could like the USA did during the New Deal Years to cope with the Great Depression.

I was not the only person giving the Government this advice. Practically all of Malta’s leading economists like Carm Farrugia, Lino Spiteri and Prof Edward Scicluna were urging the Government not to take any more money from people’s pockets but to leave more money in the economy.

As one revisits the Budget presented at the beginning of this month the lasting impression that has remained is that the Government has not heeded this advice. The eco-friendly measures seem to have been turned into an excuse for raising taxes by other means. If this were not the case then why would leading car importers point out that the price of hybrid cars, the cars of the future which are seen as the motor industry’s response to the need to go green, has indeed gone up after the Budget?

Within all this, however, there is a more disconcerting fact. Not only has the Nationalist Government not come up with the proper economic strategy to face up to the collapse of the financial markets around the world and the ensuing economic recession but it also wants to stamp out all voices of criticism and dissent about its lack of economic vision.

In my view it is no coincidence that we learnt during the course of the Budget debate in the country that the General Secretary of the Nationalist Party, the party in government, has asked the Nationalist ministries to pass on the details of any person who approaches them with a complaint or a request. The Nationalist Party has not satisfactorily explained why it wants this information or why it is requesting it in a manner which breaches the Data Protection Act. And this is happening against the backdrop of the hacking of 20,000 passwords of clients of MITTS, the Government’s ICT agency. It is clear from these events that this is a Government which is keeping its citizens under constant surveillance.

This, however, is not the end of the story. The Nationalist Government’s attempts to stamp out dissent even include less sophisticated tools. Allow me to end by recounting an incident which occurred on the morning of Tuesday, November 4, 2008 – the day after the Budget was read out – in Haz-Zebbug where I now live.

Two friends of mine, both senior citizens were sitting on a bench in Sciortino Street discussing the Budget. At one point they were rudely interrupted by a woman their age who told them to stop criticising the Government because they did not understand anything and nor did they know what the country needs or how to run it.

I don’t know if such incidents have happened in other places but it is true that Nationalist supporters have been aggressively itchy and on the defensive since the Budget was read out. It eerily seems that they have taken it on themselves to behave like Orwell’s thought police in our midst.

This, of course, will not change the fact that the Budget has not addressed the economic challenges facing the country, especially also in view of the hefty increases in the water and utility tariffs announced unilaterally and without any socio-economic impact assessment by the Nationalist Government before the Budget.

This is why it is welcome news that the Prime Minister has this week met with the social partners in an attempt to at least mitigate the effects of these tariffs. This is better and more welcome than behaving like big brother.