Given his local parliamentary experience and now in his second term as a member of the European Parliament, John Attard Montalto’s last two paragraphs of From Sweden With Love And Taxes (September 10) deserve some attention for a number of reasons.

He, a Social Democratic or Socialist, wrote: “Social Democrats everywhere have to think hard about how to square their welfare commitments with the pressures of an economy trying to steer through a crisis.”

Presumably, he declined to add “in the eurozone” after “everywhere” for a very good reason. For he knows very well that a Social Democratic or Socialist government in power in a eurozone country, like or not, cannot deviate from the neoliberalism deftly practised by the EU. In other words, that government would have to stealthily ditch its principles

Why submit people unnecessarily to the rigours and hardships of austerity in a crisis rather than resort to deficit financing to alleviate the consequences of that crisis?

So, by writing “Social Demo­crats... after having rethought their policies to adapt to the new economy”, Dr Attard Montalto seems to have forgotten that people, particularly low-income earners, the poor and pensioners need government protection and not be left to the tender mercies of a state of nature (my emphasis).

The sentence, “The rethinking needs a new impetus now so that policies can adapt to economies in crisis” unfortunately betrays ignorance of Keynes’s proven recipe for “economies in crisis”. Pity that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not with us.