We live in a time of contrasting numbers. On the one hand the coming European Parliament election will offer a snapshot of sorts of our country.
On the other hand we have been offered the latest upgrade of the very important EU statistic about poverty in our country and in the other member states – the SILC statistic about living conditions.
It says a lot about our country that only one media outlet saw fit to give SILC some coverage, and this without any comparison with other member states.
It also says a lot about our government that it focused on the minuscule improvement in general living conditions without considering the thousands who are still below the poverty line, who cannot afford one week holiday a year, who cannot cope with arrears of debt or a sudden expenditure of, say, €700.
In such a small country as Malta the numbers end up being very similar. Thus while a SILC conclusion puts a certain category of people in poverty around 20,000, an averaging out of the main opinion polls of the past weeks depending on what each poll estimates as possible turnout, puts Labour as surpassing the Nationalists by around the same figure, 20,000.
Undoubtedly, in the coming weeks we will hear all sorts of interpretation of these and related figures to suit all shades of opinion. Such is the growing power of misinformation.
Equally, such is the huge, enormous, opportunity for the honest sectors of the media to sift the true from the false.
There are, as I said, different categories of the poor, the materially deprived, in SILC, depending on those, for instance, who are categorized as deprived as against those who are said to be severely deprived.
In each case, we must remember, these are people just as we are, who perhaps not through any personal fault now find themselves in poverty.
We speak, for instance, about the pension system and whether this is adequate or not given the rate of inflation. And we also speak about wages as being adequate or not adequate, as having risen as against not having risen enough.
But the people we are speaking about today may be people on pension or not, people with wages or not. But they are finding the living conditions as too steep for them and unless something happens, they are destined to slow down and not keep up with the rest of the population.
This is the category that must be targeted by the opinion leaders and by those who have the well-being of our people at heart, as against those who seek to gain power just to improve their personal standing.
I note the emergence in the last days of new political groupings to contest the EP election. We will see where that leads. As we will reflect on the impact on the two main parties.
Somehow, however, the two categories, the poor and the political groupings, must somehow meet and reach an accommodation of sorts for the general well-being of our people
If no accommodation of sorts is reached, that will only mean trouble later on.
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