http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20130117/local/air-malta-chairman-to-step-down-in-may.453529

How can you have old leftist economists? Economics is mainly built on the free market system. Basta titkellem minn ghajnek halli tkun wegibt and left your readers unanswered. The only leftist economics is Keynesian Economics and that relative to the Austrian school of economics. I suggest you read The General Theory of Interest, money and employment by Keynes- even though it’s too technical and you won’t understand it – and then the Road to Serfdom by Hayek (this you would understand it because it’s mainly philosophical). Both Keynes and Hayek were right in their theories. But still none of them is leftists.

As a social liberal person as you say you are, then you should embrace Keynes and not Hayek. For the benefit of the readers Austrian school mean less government intervention, while Keynesian school means more government intervention when the market is not functioning.
Now, I say Keynes formula has been adopted again, after nearly a century, having governments bail outing banks and injecting money in the economy. If it was for Hayek’s economics we would be in dire straits.

[Daphne – How can you have old leftist economists? Ask the Labour Party. They’ve cornered the market in them.]

I won’t put you right, but have you seen PN’s electoral manifesto? It’s Peter Serracino Inglott mixed with Dun Gorg.

I’m not PN-bashing here, but they seem to be struggling to articulate their technical rebuttals, and have had to resort to outsiders.

They should have had the whole of Malta’s engineering community on their side. So why are the engineers silent?

If politics is dialogue then maybe PN has been talking to the wrong people since 1987: the imsejknin, the ommijiet fuq ir-relief, the zaghzagh volontarji, the housewives, the pensioners, the sick and the needy, and also the self-employed, who used to be known as shopkeepers, which is a far better description.

[Daphne – I’ll tell you why the engineers are silent, H. P. It’s because all the polls are signalling a victory for Labour. Therefore, they are not going to stick their necks out for the PN and against Labour, which is how people tend to see things here in Malta. The idea of civic responsibility, of speaking as an independent professional, just doesn’t exist. The ‘esperti’ who are hovering around Labour – and let’s be clear that there are none, really, bar a retired old civil engineer whose children are even older than I am, and a fraudster like Andreas Gerdes – are probably giving their two cents’ worth because (and this is the flipside of fear) they hope for something in return. Have no doubt that there are a few key people in big business who are helping out in secret. This is not because they support the Labour project – if they did, they would support it publicly, as they did with EU membership in 2003 – but because they want to be first in with the victor, and share the spoils.]

I mean I can’t honestly say I’ve ever read anything by PN and thought “My god, they are talking to rationalists.” Joseph Muscat is promising flying cars and monorails, and maybe PN should have pitched their politics that way. You know, think of what Malta should look like in ten years’ time, and then work backwards from that.

I don’t know, I’m thinking aloud now.

That’s exactly the way Joseph Muscat has marketed the party. Just look at their electoral campaign. It’s all figures and charts and techno-babble.

Gone are the ideology and the emotional appeals to klassi tal-haddiema or even middle class. We are not being asked to vote for Labour but for a power station.

Back in 2003, we were not voting for PN but for Europe. A vastly more far-reaching thing, I grant you, but the focus was on the product rather than the party. In 2008 there was bugger all.

Joseph Muscat has beaten PN at their own game. It’s an incredibly cunning game they played. For who would refuse cheaper electricity? You see, there are no morals in the equation. We are not being asked to make a moral choice but a financial one.

Whereas PN is all about morals. They cannot fight techno-babble with laser-guided precision technical put-downs. They know no science. They are theologians, jurists, social workers.

[Daphne – I never have reason to put you right, H. P., but this time I do. The one technical expert in this mess IS in the Nationalist Party: Tonio Fenech. How did you miss that? His exasperation with Mizzi is precisely because Mizzi is not one, and he is unaccustomed, in his line of work, to dealing with people who won’t line-up the facts and look at them. That much is screamingly obvious to me, on my sofa. Nobody in the Labour Party is ‘technical’. They are doctors and lawyers – they now have more lawyers than the PN – architects, old leftist economists, a 65-year-old former Air Malta chairman who is battling cancer (funny how we never heard anything about that when Alfred Sant gave a press conference) mixed in with absurd people like Silvio Parnis and old Commies like Marie Louise Coleiro. They’ve created an image and you’ve eaten it up. I am impervious to marketing, because while watching, I’m busy deconstructing. Not like you at all.]

Faced with a wall of “esperti teknici” they have been reduced to a few timid squeaks, trying to match tariff with tariff.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Here’s what I would do: I would call RCC from wherever he is and present him as an election candidate. Then he can be the spokesman for the campaign. They may have the finest cavalry in the world, said Rod Steiger, but we will match them, with our lancers.

Imma kif tista taghtihom tort lil dawn in nies li jghidulu genju? Jekk gemel intelligenti aktar minnom.

That’s the tragedy of it. MLP shouldn’t be the rational choice. If anything, it’s the emotional choice, the Samson option, the ‘hu go fik PN li bqajt korrott u hloqt oligarkija ta’ inkompetenti’ choice.

But PN isn’t communicating with the rationalists. It is incapable of doing so.

Even during the EU referendum campaign, it only managed, just, to talk brain to brain through outsiders like Gordon Cordina and Simon Busuttil.

Now Simon Busuttil has been reduced to a younger copy of Lawrence Gonzi, complete with the platitudes and the bleeding heart. I don’t claim to speak for anyone, but this kind of PN turns my stomach.