The most, or perhaps the only significant element in all these endless polls about who is or who is not going to win the next election is the extraordinary and growing number of people who are still saying they won't vote or are undecided. In the Xarabank survey last Friday night, a cool 30.5 per cent said they wouldn't vote or were not yet sure who to vote for. With a year or less to go before the next polls this is by all accounts an extraordinarily large number of people.

Of course a not insignificant number of these have no intention of simply telling telephone pollsters who ring them up out of the blue how they are or are not planning to vote. I don't honestly think I would answer either, if anyone just phoned me and claimed to be calling from a TV programme, or a newspaper survey or whatever. Only the diehards of each party are being open and honest about their voting intentions, and these polls are therefore increasingly becoming a measure only of the diehards within each party, as well as a measure of our national way of doing politics, which is just turning more and more people off.

The enormous response to the smiling new Archbishop was not in my view about a resurgence of religious sentiment; it was about an emptiness many of us feel, a need to fill the void that political parties (and increased materialism, which is not the fault of political parties) are leaving us because of the way they treat each other, publicly I hasten to add, because privately it is entirely different? And there are no angels or demons in this local political game. It is just politics and people have cottoned on and are switching off, rather than switching their allegiances.

Labour would win if an election were held today according to one newspaper headline, a conclusion I would agree with without any need for polls to tell us so. Labour, according to this Xarabank survey, has the most diehards with 37.9 per cent, the Nationalist Party has 29.9 per cent and Alternattiva Demokratika has a paltry 1.7 per cent, which clearly shows they are not yet being thought of as an alternative, although this could change very rapidly with a change of policy or leadership or whatever turns out to appeal to an increasingly volatile electorate.

The fact that people have not really gone to AD does not in any sense mean they are not desperate for change. Many of these 30 per cent sitting on the fence undoubtedly are, but they want to use their vote to maximum effect and for the most personal and national benefit. At this stage very few are convinced the party which claims to be liberal and whose leader strangely (and no doubt for political expediency and survival) signed the pro-life amendment in the Constitution really represents a new way of doing things.

Remember, this amendment effectively means we have no faith in democratic rule in the future because by needing a two-thirds majority to change something, in Malta's case you are saying something cannot be changed, which is terribly undemocratic towards future generations, a conclusion also reached by Father Peter in an interview, which more of us should read.

Interesting too that both parties appear to have a pretty similar number of people who will change their votes from last time - 3.3 per cent of Nationalists say they will vote Labour next time and 2.9 per cent of Labourites would vote for the PN.

These are perhaps Malta's floaters. Whole articles have been written about them but what about this mass, this swathe of non-voters? Even if this 30 per cent is cut back to 15 or 10 or 5 per cent by the time of the next election, it will mark an incredible turning point, and perhaps a maturity in the electorates voting patterns.

Among those who claim to be Nationalists, 13 per cent are saying they won't vote, and among those who claim to be Labourites around 11 per cent are claiming the same. So the level of disillusion is roughly equal, which means we will need to see far more joint working to get the electorate interested again.

I thought both main leaders were very straightforward during the programme. The PM listed all the things that are going well, not least the 800 or so million euros which are going to come into Malta. Dr Alfred Sant was too even with the hunters representative who appeared to be trying to exert pressure on both vote-wise. He essentially said we now have to follow EU rules on this one, and I for one and the majority who are not at all happy with the hunting situation breathed a sigh of relief.

If only such consensus could be found on the need to introduce divorce, the need to have a country less dependent on building, the need to reform the rent laws, the need to have a justice system we can all believe in and not witness paedophiles being let off with a warning time and time again.

These kinds of sentences unfortunately create a lot of doubt in our system of justice and when a system of justice is not trusted in a country, the trust and warmth we are likely to feel towards all authority, be it politicians, policeman, journalists or civil servants is bound to be hugely undermined.

Dr Gonzi was essentially saying there is a lot of money swishing around and he is right. Alfred Sant was saying people are feeling the pinch and he is right too. What is happening here is happening all over Europe and was recently succinctly explained in a leading article in The Economist magazine.

Essentially money is not trickling down to the masses anymore, or it is slower in doing so than it used to. The gap between the rich and those who society labels as middle class is enormous and is growing. Too few people are getting a slice of the cake and there are no new political visions, solutions, ideals or systems coming up to address this.

Straightforward rightwing policies don't achieve equitable redistribution of wealth. Socialism doesn't either, with the exception perhaps of the Nordic models.

So people are with drawing into their families, their local groups, their football teams because they don't see a future, they don't see ideals, they don’t see solutions which are meaningful to them? They are sitting on the fence until a real alternative policy evolves, and they are showing this by not voting, not participating, not belonging. The usual scare mongering buttons or bringing Church issues up does not work anymore with our electorate.

The question really is: What will bring the non-voters out in a year’s time?

[email protected]