When addressing his first, poorly attended, 'mini-meeting', Dr Adrian Delia, the new PN leader started his political career as party leader on the wrong foot. While Delia had based his leadership contest campaign on the slogan 'A New Way', the relatively small crowd that attended the mini-meeting, were only regaled with a much 'Older Way' than we had from his predecessor, Simon Busuttil, and that is saying something.
I will not dwell on the number of silly arguments Delia made during his speech, such as "I am not afraid of Muscat", or "the rebuilding of all Malta's roads will create more traffic, "or when he asked "where is the surplus?" and so on. However, I cannot keep myself from commenting about what I consider to have been his top howler-argument, when he referred to education under this PL government. Delia had the cheek to say, as quoted by The Times of Malta, that "Labour had no interest in improving education, as it was easier to buy votes and manipulate people's minds".
It seems that Delia is not even aware which party had introduced compulsory education. It was not his PN but Labour. Neither does he know that free education up to tertiary/university level had also been introduced not by the PN but by the PL. The same PN leader had obviously only been following Net News and reading In-Nazzjon in all the years he was just a spectator, as otherwise he would have known that Labour still holds the record for building new schools when Dom Mintoff came to power in 1955. This is continuing under the present PL government with Evarist Bartolo, one of the most popular ministers. The enormous reforms implemented by Minister Bartolo in education since 2013 prove how cut off Adrian Delia has been from what has been happening in education, as well as in many other sectors, such as the economy, healthcare, social services, pensions, and so on.
No wonder there were a good number of glum faces behind him who gave the impression that they were solely out of loyalty to the party, but not to Adrian Delia.
Eddy Privitera
Mosta