English as she is spoke

This is not a Labour Party EP election advert; it's an Australian traffic sign

I love the Labour Party’s campaign adverts in the English-language newspapers. You can see the copywriter struggling to pick up the idiom of his or her target audience, and missing by a mile.

Those adverts are always so amusing.

My favourite in the general election campaign of last year was the one which showed the Regional Road bridge. I remember thinking: make Sant prime minister because of a bridge? I don’t think so, honey.

Now we have ‘vote for Labour candidates because your electricity bill is XOKKing’. Eh? I don’t think Glenn and Marlene can do much about those bills in the European Parliament. Oh, I see! The message is: vote for our people not because they’re any good, but because it’s a useful way of telling the government that you don’t like what it’s doing.

This is like a woman standing around at a party and telling a man: I know I’m not exactly attractive, but given that you’ve just had a fight with your girlfriend, why not get your own back on her by shagging me?

So today’s advert is the traffic sign shown here, which I Googled up from Australia, in colours and design that make it look exactly like a promotion for an automobile breakdown service.

He promised a strong pair of hands….But we’re used to his promises, his rhetoric, and his self-praise (and here the computer malfunctioned and left out the full-stop).

The ad bangs on about an increase in the number of people without jobs, when statistics published just a few days ago show that there are more people in employment now than there were this time last year. Typically of the Labour Party, it places Malta in a vacuum, split off from the rest of the world. Unfortunately for the Labour Party, it is mainly its die-hard supporters who do the same thing.

The rest of us watch the international news and can see that compared to what’s happening in neighbouring countries and across the Atlantic, we are in clover.

Malta, the Labour advert tells us, has the highest inflation rate in the Eurozone. What it doesn’t say is that this inflationary pressure is caused by ……demand. Inflation has dropped in the rest of the Eurozone because millions of people are now out of work, the rest are on reduced income or fear for their jobs, and so there has been a dramatic fall in…..demand.

Speaking for myself, I’d rather have inflation and work than no inflation and no work, but then I don’t have a Labour brain, nor do I have a cunning plan to con the insufficiently educated into thinking that it is possible to have full employment and low or no inflation.

And it’s kind of odd of the Labour Party to remind electors that we’re in the Eurozone, because this was the government’s single greatest economic achievement. But then if it’s targeting people who can’t make the link between high employment and inflation, I expect the party is also targeting people who think that joining the Eurozone is like getting into Axis on a Saturday night.

This is my favourite bit:

He promises so much….He lost his count….but you pay for his failures

‘He lost his count’ – what is that supposed to mean? I tried translating it literally into Maltese, and it still didn’t make sense. ‘You pay for his failures’ – I think these people need reminding, as they sit at their swish desks wearing expensive but ugly clothes and typing semi-literate copy on their laptops to email to advertising agencies, as they battle for seats in the European Parliament, that they owe the whole damned shebang to the cat’s father’s successes.

And sorry, folks – but the strapline ‘Gonzi is out of control’ just doesn’t work. Even a drunk in a public-house at 2am can see that Gonzi is a master of self-control. Certainly, the same cannot be said for other members of his team, but we’re speaking about the prime minister here, so the message is unconvincing.

Such A-holes. It’s unbelievable.