The country may be forgiven for shaking its collective head in bemusement. What, pray, is precisely the matter with the tender for the new power station at Delimara?

The campaign, as waged by the Labour Party, has at least three separate and distinct strands.

The new power station will be using outmoded technology.

The company, BWSC, must have bribed someone to get that tender.

It’s not BWSC itself, it’s the Maltese contractor, who may be shady.

Anyone who knows anything in the public perception business knows that one basic and elementary rule has been broken here: Keep it simple. Coming up with all these variations on the theme seriously risks confusing people’s minds.

What, exactly, is wrong with the new power station according to Labour and its supporters? Is it because the technology is (claimed to be) old hat? Or is it because there is a whiff of something untoward in the way its choice was made?

Or is it, the public has every right to ask, because Labour is dead set against the new power station, pure and simple?

The public well remembers similar campaigns waged by an unreconstituted Labour in the past years, from the campaign claiming corruption in the ICT institute at MCAST to the bus ticketing corruption claim in the mid-1990s. In each and every case, it is now more and more clear that the claims had ‘election campaign’ written all over them. In each and every case, despite the tons of innuendoes that were made, nothing has been proved, no one was ever found guilty and once the issues served their election purposes, they were quietly discarded and forgotten. Except by the people whose lives had been ruined by the allegations, the innuendoes, and the popular umbrage.

The problem now with these three strands of claims is that the public at large does not quite know what it is to make out of all this. Is the power station that is being proposed wrong because it has the wrong technology? Or is it because there is a smell of corruption around the whole business? Or is it not, rather, that for some reason Labour is dead set against the entire project or, more probably, dead set against the winning bidder? For, you see, allegations and claims can go both backward and forward, right or left, as the public’s perceptions take them.

If Labour wanted to cast doubts on the technological aspect of the whole decision, it was, and is, of course, completely free to do so. So did, it would seem, part of the Nationalist Party’s backbench. So, too, may part of the country.

The government has promised one and all an inquiry by the Auditor General, after which there will be a discussion in Parliament. In a way it is acceptable that, in our country, the Auditor General is asked to conduct all sorts of inquiries, but, at least in our view, a better way would have been for the company’s claims in favour of its technology to be examined by a group of experts in the field, although there were also price considerations that were made, in the sense that even if the proposed plant be changed over to gas, it would still be cheaper than its alternatives. Which is where the Auditor General and the Public Accounts Committee would have the right to intervene.

This is surely more than enough to properly digest and absorb, discuss and come to a general opinion. The future of our energy needs and provisions has not been too clear in the past, nor are we convinced that Enemalta’s management structures are up to the mark, but at long last the way forward now seems to be coming into focus. There is an urgent need for a stopgap power supply until the real huge new development, a link with the continent, can be put in place. And until we have the proper structures for alternative energy and Enemalta gives itself the proper structure to be able to purchase energy from the people who would have produced it, for example by means of photovoltaic cells.

Meanwhile, Malta is under a big EU deadline to wind down the Marsa power station and all its degraded technology. Even so, as a stopgap, is the proposed technology acceptable by EU standards or do we risk falling foul once again after so much expense? And is this a proven technology that we will be using or is it still at an experimental stage?

Alternatively, since the electricity rates are a subject of public and political controversy in Malta (but not in other countries), and since Labour is always urging the government to reduce the price of water and electricity supplied to houses, and since the BWSC plant is claimed to produce electricity cheaper than its alternatives, it is really up to Labour to tell the country how it proposes to square the circle between cheaper but possibly outdated technology on the one hand, and dearer and newer technology on the other.

There could have been a useful and fruitful national discussion on this level. But now that enough never seems to be enough, and allegations or suspicions of corruption have been made at 360 degrees, the whole exercise has been undermined, turned upside down and rendered superfluous. There seems to be a penchant to suspect that there must be corruption somehow somewhere. This has become, at least over the past few years, a tried and tested propaganda tool: shower aspersions, inundate with innuendoes, claim backhanders, and leave the rest to the imagination and the frenzied writings of that part of the media that seems to thrive on such fare. Malta’s history is peppered with claims of corruption in high places and we all seem to believe there are Masonic lodges on every corner.

But any such claims must be substantiated, and by more than just exhibiting e-mail messages from the server of a failed bidder. We have all been here before: remember the bus ticketing claims that had all the fingerprints of a failed bidder? Besides, as has been the case in the JPO case, and now in the BWSC case, who exactly in the long list of people, committees and finely-balanced institutional levels, are we claiming to be corrupt? Or has corruption tainted all the levels of public service?

Again, one claim checks out the other: if the technology involved is outmoded, we did not need to have corruption allegations. If, on the other hand, there is the unmistakeable whiff of decay in the whole issue, it is no use checking to see if the technology is right or wrong.

The modern Labour under Joseph Muscat still seems to need to understand where it went wrong in its previous incarnations. It must raise itself up from the level of third level tabloid press if it really wants to be considered as an alternative government. The only way to do so is by stopping to act and think as the newsroom of a scandal-mongering paper.