One of the most frightening aspects of the human race is not its propensity towards cruelty, but its seemingly limitless ability to reason with its nether regions. People go to school; they read books and newspapers and have enough intelligence to learn how to dress themselves, use a can-opener and drive a car, perhaps even to hold down a job. And then they are unable to reach sensible conclusions based on an accurate assessment of a situation. Yes, one of the most frightening aspects of the human race is that lots of people can’t think, and because of them, bad things happen.

Think of the 33,000 or so nether-regions-thinkers who were led by the nose, by an obsessive Pied Piper, into signing Gift of Life’s absolutely whacky petition. Think of the people who can’t understand why Michael Asciak shouldn’t be a member of Opus Dei and also chairman of the national bioethics committee. Step back 20 years, to when half the population thought that the Labour government was doing a splendid job and voted for another five years of it. And then, having been shown that life didn’t have to be all about chaos, corruption, bribes, violence, restrictions and shortages of everything from tea to tertiary education, right through to water and jobs, in 1992 they voted to bring KMB back as prime minister. They actually sat down, had a little think (with their nether regions, of course) and said: “Hmmm, I’m not quite sure about all this peace, quiet, freedom, stuff in the shops and jobs that you don’t have to bribe somebody to get. Eddie Fenech Adami is nowhere near as good at running the country as Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was. Karmenu was brilliant. I want him back.”

Yes, scary isn’t it? This is not a matter of deciding which political party you like best, because we’re not talking football teams here. It’s a matter of deciding which party is best to run the country, and to do that you have to think things through properly. Of course, there are lots of people who vote according to vested interests, and the country be hanged – but those don’t account for half the population, do they? Clearly, a lot of people aren’t thinking.

It’s a matter of personal perception, somebody told me the other day. Some people thought that Karmenu was perfect for the job and others thought that Eddie was. “Exactly,” I said. “That’s what gets me: the idea that this is a matter of opinion and not a matter of fact.” We are a little confused as to the difference between fact and opinion. You hear this phrase all the time: “Everybody is entitled to his opinion.” Well, thank you very much. You can’t stop people forming opinions. What you can do is stop them expressing them, as Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s and Dom Mintoff’s governments did with a little help from their friends. But it’s a great leap – a non sequitur, in fact – from “everybody’s entitled to his opinion” to “everybody’s opinion has equal value.” Some opinions are, quite frankly, a tub of pigswill. And other opinions are not opinions at all, but a correct and factual assessment of the situation.

When I say that Fenech Adami was incomparably better at the job of prime minister than Mifsud Bonnici was, this is not “Daphne’s opinion” but a statement of fact. Facts can be proved or disproved: in this case, by assessing both prime ministers on performance and on the results of their tenure – the sort of clinical assessment they would get if they worked for a corporation and were being assessed for promotion, a salary increase, or dismissal. Nor is it “Daphne’s opinion” that Malta is a far better place to live in 2007 than it was in 1987. Again, it’s a matter of fact. The improvements have not been the result of “natural progress”, as some would have it. An economy this tiny is made or broken by the government. When the whole of free Europe was booming in the early 1980s, we lived in pitiful deprivation. When the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer married in 1981, the German diplomats who lived next door to us put their diplomatic-exemption colour television as close to the front window as possible, so that half the street could crowd round to watch like excited 19th-century peasants being shown a camera for the first time. And this was in Sliema’s smartest neighbourhood.

Malta in the 1980s was light years behind Western Europe; it was deliberately kept so. People used to come here, pity us for our Soviet-era lifestyle, and go back to their booming markets and their streets lined with Porsches, while we sold our grandmothers to get a place on the waiting-list for a colour television that cost as much as we earned in three months. Is that a matter of Daphne’s opinion? No, it’s a matter of recorded fact. It is also a matter of recorded fact that we are now in the European Union, but had it been for Alfred Sant we would be alone on this rock while the rest of Europe merges without us.

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There was a fair amount of addled thinking on display in the newspapers these last few days. One example was a letter that was carried by The Malta Independent and The Times. “In the early months of 1987, prior to the then general election, I used to have frank talks with a learned doctor of law, a friend and at the time, a work colleague,” it read. “Although we held diverse political beliefs, we still had healthy discussions on the possible future of the country and what was best at the time. A phrase which my friend very frequently used to harp on, was that the Labour Party had been too long in power and “needs to lose”... This was a time when the Labour party had been administering to our country for nearly 16 years. Therefore, using this same argument, it’s about time that Malta is governed by a different political party, with different people, having different ideas. This is the reason why after nearly 20 years in power the Nationalist Party needs to lose. Malta has had a Nationalist government for double the ‘normal’ alternative period, and therefore, no doubt, this country needs a radical change.”

I’ll leave aside the Indian English, strange punctuation, clumsy construction and peculiar usage (you administer to the needs of a patient, a baby or a demanding mistress, but you don’t “administer to a country”, though perhaps this was a Freudian slip of an acknowledgement of how sick the country was). It’s the whole thinking behind the letter that has me foxed. First off, the learned “doctor of law” can’t have been that learned if his reasoning was that Labour needed to lose the 1987 election because it had been in power too long. The length of time that Labour was in power had nothing to do with it at all. It was what Labour did with that power that made it of paramount importance that it should lose the election. Whether Labour was in power for five, 10 or 16 years is completely irrelevant. Labour had to lose, and did so in 1981 and again in 1987, because it had brought the country to its knees and the Maltese were living Soviet lives in the midst of a free and wealthy Europe. It had to lose because corruption had become institutionalised and nothing happened without bribery. It had to lose because the police force had been reduced to a government weapon against the people. It had to lose because people were being threatened, beaten up and their rights violated as a matter of routine.

I don’t know who this Joe Cristina from Mosta is – the one who wrote the letter – but can he really have not understood at the time or forgotten now how very miserable life was then? Governments shouldn’t win or lose elections on the basis of how long they have been in power. They should be judged on their achievements and not their duration, and the same goes for the Opposition. You should vote for the Opposition on the basis of its capabilities and achievements, and not according to how long it’s been on the opposition benches (“Jahasra, it-tern taghhom issa”). It is extraordinary that the Labour Party, aided and abetted in this way of thinking by some very strange nether-regions-thinkers, expects the seat of government by right, purely on the grounds that The Other Party has governed for a long time and it’s their turn now. What is this, for heaven’s sake – a game of musical chairs or something much more serious?

In 1996, Alfred Sant was elected. Maybe there are those who have forgotten this. People tried him, and they didn’t like him. They couldn’t wait to spit him out. Because a government’s “need to lose” has nothing to do with the length of time it has governed, Alfred Sant the Prime Minister was voted out after just 22 months. So let’s see if I read all this nether-regions-thinking correctly: we kicked Prime Minister Sant out after less than two years because he made a complete hash of things, but now we’re saying that it’s his turn to govern because he has served his nine-year sentence in the galleys and that’s enough. Come back, Fred – all is forgiven. You can fess up as much as you like, bounce your funny policies around, and make every day an exciting excursion into the dark wilderness of uncertainty. But as long as we have change for the sake of change, we’re happy.

I’m having trouble following this line of reasoning. This is because I am a pragmatic person. If the people in Opposition are worse than the people in government, I don’t vote for them. If I know that not voting for the better party will give me the worse party as a government, by default, then I will vote for the better party. Ah, but your perception of which is the better or worse party is a matter of opinion, I hear some of you say. No, it isn’t. It’s a matter of fact. If there are standards by which dresses, jackets, magazines, cars, cakes, buildings, carpets and musical performances are judged, then there are also standards by which political parties and governments are judged. The standards of musical performances, cakes and jackets are not a matter of opinion. Only fools think that. The difference in quality between Vogue and the parish magazine is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact. Difference in quality is something that can be measured, but where political parties are concerned, we find it convenient to forget that.

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The mistake being made here is that people are speaking about “the Labour Party” when what they should be speaking about is the people in it – you know, the ones who will be the prime minister and his Cabinet of ministers. Who are these? Oh golly gosh, they’re the very same ones who we voted out in 1996, except that now we also have the very thrilling prospect of a New Face as justice minister – the former police superintendent who arrested me on trumped-up charges when I was 19, and who kept me in a stinking cell in the Floriana hellhole lock-up until I “confessed” and signed the statement he typed out for me in his own words. I’m really going to have a lot of respect for a justice minister like that. It will make me weep with nostalgia for the very annoying Tonio Borg, and even his love affair with Gift of Life will seem amusing when Anglu Farrugia, he of the hysterical and hyperbolic electoral mail-shots (as luck would have it, I live in ‘his’ district) is king of justice in this country. You can say what you like about Tonio Borg (and I do, all the time), but he never forced a 19-year-old girl to sign a statement full of lies that he had written, by telling her that he would not allow her to leave the lock-up until she did. What kind of a country are we living in when a one-time superintendent in Lorry Pullicino’s force stands to become minister for justice in three months’ time? It beats appointing a member of Opus Dei to the chairmanship of the bioethics committee. “I was just following orders.” Now, where have I heard that before?

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It is nether-regions thinking to argue that we should vote for a party because it has been in Opposition for nine years, rather than because it is worth voting for in itself. It is utter insanity to actually pick yourself up and hurl yourself from the frying pan into the fire, just for the hell of it. The Labour Party I see before me now is virtually identical to the Labour Party thrown off the stage with loud boos and hisses in 1998, minus the assets of Lino Spiteri and George Abela. It is completely identical to the Labour Party that was so forcefully rejected at the polls in 2003.

Let me see whether I have understood this reasoning correctly. Alfred Sant has been leader of the Labour Party for 16 years. He was a spectacularly hopeless prime minister who made the most absurd and amateurish mess of things, and so we voted him out after just 22 months. He lost the last two elections and his European policies were massively rejected in a referendum. He pretended to resign, his party pretended it didn’t want him to do so, and now here he is, expecting the seat of government by right because Lawrence Gonzi, who has been prime minister for three-and-a-half years, has been there too long. Which one of us is going mad?

Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one who’s nuts for thinking that all of this is weird. Then I remember what a lot we have in common with the former eastern bloc countries: lots of people there feel sentimental about Communism and want their old dictators back. In Russia, they’re even nostalgic for Stalinism. No wonder we adapted so quickly to a daily life of shortages, corruption, violence and state-sponsored terror. There’s a name for it: masochism. Catholic guilt is going to make us vote for Alfred Sant, so that every day spent in his purgatory will bring us one day closer to heaven. The next thing we know, we’ll be going into ecstatic trances like Theresa of Avila, while the Prime Minister rampages through our lives with his cunning tax plans and his cuckoo-clocks. Wake me up when it’s over.