Nobody in their right mind can deny that the great economic and financial meltdown is far more severe than the Great Depression which erupted in 1929 and continued battering the Western World until it almost wrecked completely in the Second World War. It took six years of fratricidal warfare to reverse the effects of the Great Depression and it was only during the mid-1950s that the rays of a new economic boom began to warm the smitten nations of the West.

Malta is being hit, and hit where it really hurts, that is in the export market and tourism. Hundreds of jobs have been lost and hundreds more endangered by the recession. Our exports have plummeted and the tourist industry is reeling.

The government is not to blame for the recession coming inwards from distant shores, but it is to blame for the economic crunch it is creating by its myopic policy of hefty increases in the services sector. While all the governments of our EU partners have made it a cardinal point of their economic policy to keep prices down, especially in the services sector, our government has gone into reverse gear and opted to hike prices of essential services sky-high.

The major EU economies, realising that every cloud has its silver lining, have taken the opportunity to benefit from at least one positive factor caused by the recession. The slump in the demand for manufactured goods has slashed oil prices drastically and the EU governments have decided to pass on these reduced prices in oil, petrol, gas, electricity and water to the consumer.

Good economic planning was behind the major EU countries’ decision to pass on these price reductions. They realised that if they lowered their citizens’ spending power, their economies would stagnate all the more. If the stricken economies were to avoid a fatal meltdown, the consumers were to continue to buy. If industry was to recuperate it had to make full use of the reduced price of oil in the international market. The disaster can only be avoided if the Governments help their consumers to buy and the industrialists encouraged to stay the course by mitigating their energy bills.

Hefty energy bills strike fear in the consumers’ hearts and as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to warn his countrymen during the Great Depression ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Yet the Nationalist Government has thrown FDR’s warning to the wind and by its own irresponsible actions is making doubly sure that our consumers will remain hostages to fear. They are simply afraid to spend, always waiting to see if they’ll have enough cash to pay the dreaded energy and water bills.

Silvio Parnis is the Labour Party spokesman for consumer affairs

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