My knowledge of economics, as I have admitted on more than one occasion, is perhaps equivalent to someone as thick as two short planks, as my economics teacher in Sixth Form back some forty-five years was wont to remark.

This does not mean that I am not able to predict what "peanuts" Scicluna will be coming up with tonight.

We're going to have a decrease in utility rates, that's a given, and not only because he can (should have already) do this, given the crash in oil prices and the coming on-stream of the interconnector put in place by the preceding government.

He has to do this, and would have had to even if the price of oil had gone the other way, to justify his Lord and Master's gasping need to justify lumbering the country with a completely unneeded new generation plant and its hideous concomitant, that hulking great hefalump of a floating gas-cylinder that is bobbing around Marsaxlokk and environs.

Needs must where the interests of the occult drive, after all, whatever the realities of the situation.

At the same time, something just south of a couple of euro will be given as a cost-of-living-award, because - and this will be kicker - the cost of living hasn't gone up all that much, we're in the top division of economic performance and all that.

What would cause the unions, led by the GWU, to have jumped up and down and scream blue murder in PN government days will be seen as a great triumph today, for reasons that are obvious.

After all, while the boys and girls whose efforts in the interests of Tagħna Kollha have to be rewarded, the ones in real need will be getting the equivalent of a couple of pastizzi a month in help, so great is the shape of the economy.

There will also be a multitude of little fillips to the economic efforts of the ones who matter in this country, the development-mavens, the entrepreneurs whose fortunes are so closely linked to those who matter in the government and such-like, all because this is a 'business-friendly Labour Government', oxymoronic though this phrase may be.

We might even be made privy to the Air Malta Plan B, now that Plan A seems to have developed wings of lead.

One has to wonder whether the Arts Fund, so neatly depleted by Owen Bonnici's investment in a non-Preti Mattia Preti, will be getting a re-injection of dosh in order to assuage the feelings of the community.

One has to wonder whether the Arts Fund, so neatly depleted by Owen Bonnici's investment in a non-Preti Mattia Preti, will be getting a re-injection of dosh in order to assuage the feelings of the community.

What price Owen Bonnici's reputation as a safe pair of hands now, ay, after that little debacle? The Dean of the Faculty of Law has been pouring scorn on his hapless bonce for months and now the learned gentlemen of the Arts have also exposed him as being inept at what he allows to be done in the name of his area of responsibility.

Oh well, he's in good company, being a member of the same Cabinet as Joe Mizzi and all those others who have been covering themselves in glory.

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