The Prime Minister could not have found a better word to define Adrian Delia’s reaction to the Budget speech by Edward Scicluna: “a Halloween speech.”

Those who followed both speeches could so easily see the enormous difference between the Prime Minister and the supposed leader of the Opposition.

Muscat’s arguments were reasoned and backed by statistics. Delia’s were based on hearsay and totally wrong numbers.

In fact, what I considered as the highlight of Muscat’s demolition of Delia’s arguments was when he quoted from the Nationalist Party’s own document about the number of foreigners who came to Malta in 2017. While Delia had said that 15,000 foreigners had come to Malta to work, 11,000 of whom from outside the EU, the PN’s own document says that 8,826 foreigners arrived, including 3,904 from non-EU states.

I do not believe Delia did not know the true figures but preferred to inflate the figures, especially about workers from non-EU countries, to justify his almost racist, scaremongering speech.

Just as the Prime Minister demolished Delia’s argument about foreign workers, he continued to blow to smithereens every argument Delia had made the previous day: on “intelligent immigration”, the national debt, wealth creation and distribution, the number of government workers, the growth of the economy, the cost-of-living increase, the infrastructure etc.

As to the fight to eradicate poverty, the Prime Minister quipped: “The only poverty we cannot get rid of is the poverty of the Opposition’s ideas.”

The glum look on the faces of Opposition MPs was enough to prove they knew that what the Prime Minister was saying had completely rubbished all that their supposed leader had said the previous day.