When I read the speech Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi made on the Floriana Granaries on 20 September and his reference to the “jeremiahs” among us, I immediately thought of J. G. Vassallo.

Week in week out in this newspaper and elsewhere, he continues to dish out melancholy, despair, gloom and doom. I recall a couple of readers in this and its sister paper writing and begging Mr Vassallo to change tack. They were ignored.

Last Sunday, Mr Vassallo started by trying to convince the readers that the present government led by Dr Gonzi is at the same stage that the Fenech Adami administration was in 1996. This is a ploy that is being hatched by the Labour Party in order to try and replicate what happened in the 1996 election. Mr Vassallo left out the details, or to be more precise, one important detail – the VAT debate that was raging then and which catapulted the Labour Party into power. There is no such debate now and therefore no similarity.

Mr Vassallo, true to form, wails about Malta’s loss of competitivity. Yet the World Economic Forum placed Malta in 39th position in the index of global competition from a list of 125 countries, and also declared that Malta is among the most competitive countries in the IT field. Also, Malta was placed in the 21st position among 125 countries in the index of IT preparedness – moving five places forward since the last survey.

Mr Vassallo wrongly predicts that the government is depending on spending e805 million to impress the electorate. How ridiculous can one get. No government is allowed to spend the whole allocation of EU money for the period 2007–2013 in just 18 months. Neither can any government absorb such investment in such a short space of time.

But one can sense the fear that is being felt among Labour exponents in the media that by embarking on the next EU sponsored/aided projects on day one of 2007, the electorate will be in a position to judge who has brought so much progress and prosperity to these islands – the Gonzi administration or the likes of Mr Vassallo who fought tooth and nail against joining the European Union.

Mr Vassallo’s nostalgic trip to 1996 made him revisit what he wrote back in 1997 in The Times, namely that the PN then needed much more than a cosmetic change. Quoting his own words that “its agenda was in danger of decay because the party was not regenerating itself”.

Now all this stands in condemnation of Mr Vassallo’s argument. Because as we all know that in 1998, the Nationalist Party with its decaying agenda and lack of regeneration won the general election handsomely, put Malta once again on the road to membership of the EU and once again introduced VAT.

But that was not all. Dr Fenech Adami who according to Mr Vassallo by then “had passed his prime” not only led successful negotiations with the EU but in 2003 won a victory in the referendum on Malta’s membership of the EU and in the following elections.

Mr Vassallo ends his article by concluding that as far as the PN is concerned, the world has stood still for the last five years or so. He is so entrenched in his position, looking at events through dark glasses that he has not noticed all the changes that have occurred, changes which indeed have been spearheaded by the “inertia” of a PN in government.

He has not noticed the restructuring programme that has been followed with due rigour starting with the Drydocks, which is no longer absorbing an infinite amount of our hard earned money.

He has not noticed the real achievements in Information and Communication technologies that culminated recently in the European Commission placing Malta in second place in the index of electronic government.

He failed to see the huge strides achieved in education with 70 per cent of our school leavers opting to stay in full time education. The incredible investment in education, which for this year alone amounts to Lm96 million. He ignored the runaway success of the MCAST, which has already received Lm23 million. The plethora of pharmaceutical companies and IT companies that are setting up here. The high-tech operations that are being carried out at St Luke’s on a daily basis. The call centres and on-line gaming companies. The success of our financial services. No, all these and much more have not fallen from the sky.

Mr Vassallo chose to join the jeremiahs of this world many years ago and is determined to carry on wallowing in his melancholic state of mind. He prefers to focus on the pot-holed roads without mentioning the pristine ones that please both the motorist and the rest of us. He prefers to concentrate on the amount of taxes we pay and not on the Lm227 million spent on social services this year.

He prefers to continue mocking with his tired and jaded “money no problem” articles but fails to hint at the investment that a PN government is making in our youngsters. He concentrates on what still needs to be done, (and why not?) but fails to notice the regeneration of so many of our heritage sites, the Maghtab transformation, the cleaner drinking water and the drainage systems that are being upgraded to give us a better quality of life.

Of course very little of this would have been achievable without EU membership. Mr Vassallo and the Labour Party would have deprived us of all this progress.

But back in 2003 an electorate very wisely looked at life through the prism of its own interests and sent Chief Jeremiah J.G. Vassallo and others like him packing. Unfortunately they have learnt nothing from that experience.

Salvu Felice Pace

GHASRI