The edition of Bondiplus, which discussed the promises made by Alfred Sant in his reply to the Budget speech, clearly shows how seriously one should take Alfred Sant’s promises.

The discussion centred entirely on Labour’s proposals regarding overtime and public holidays that fall on the weekend. Lou Bondi’s guests were Labour deputy leader Charles Mangion, who is also shadow minister of finance, and Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech. In the course of the programme we also heard the comments of the constituted bodies to Labour’s proposals, the majority of which were against both policies.

Lou Bondi asked Charles Mangion twice whether the Labour Party had consulted with someone before announcing these proposals, and twice Charles Mangion did not reply.

This shows that when Labour was faced with positive reactions to the Budget, Alfred Sant had to invent something quickly.

Even worse, the Labour Party did not seen to have done any calculations of how much these promises would cost the country financially.

From the estimates shown during the programme, produced by Lou Bondi on information provided by the government and confirmed also with economists, Labour promises would cost the country Lm115 million a year.

If Charles Mangion did not agree with those figures, one would have expected him to contest them and prepared enough by showing the figures on which they had calculated their promises. But surprisingly, Charles Mangion did not have any figures at all.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Charles Mangion forgot to take the figures or estimates with him. I would expect the Labour Party, which issues a press release on everything, to issue a press release with the estimates they projected. But neither this happened. This means that if Bondiplus had not produced this programme to discuss these proposals, the Labour Party had not bothered at all to work out how much these promises would cost the country, because for Labour the most important are the votes and nothing else.

This has to be taken seriously, because it clearly shows that Alfred Sant, apart from not consulting with anybody, did not verify if the country could really afford these promises.

All this reminded me what Lino Spiteri wrote in his book Jien u ghaddej fil-politika when Alfred Sant, before the 1996 election, declared that he would remove VAT when in government. Lino Spiteri, at that time an MP, wrote that Alfred Sant never consulted neither the Parliamentary Group nor him in his capacity as shadow minister of finance. Lino Spiteri said he heard that VAT would be removed from a friend, who had heard it on the news reporting Alfred Sant as saying that VAT would be removed if Labour were elected.

This convinces me more than ever that Labour has not changed. What is happening now, and the experience of Alfred Sant as Prime Minister between 1996-1998, should teach us how much weight we should give to promises made by Labour.

In a recent interview, MLP deputy leader Michael Falzon (Times, 7 November) acknowledged that some people feel they cannot trust Labour enough.

After seeing all this, I ask: can you blame them?

Jurgen Cassar

MARSASCALA