With all due respect to your respected newspaper, the demarcation line between a news item and a comment by the same journalist in the same issue is so faint that it is hardly noticeable, save for the page description at the top. I thought fact and objectivity should not intermingle with opinion and subjectivity so frivolously, especially when dealing with a person’s integrity.

This is more so when it is done deliberately. After not publishing a declaration I sent the media and the same reporter personally, in a letter on the same issue I stated unequivocally that “my decision not to vote for the Health Care Act was leaked” but nonetheless he still stated that: “Once it became clear that Dr Gonzi would not listen and would not succumb to threats or foot-stamping, they went public with declarations that were manna from heaven to the Opposition and the media that supports it”. Is he a reporter, or is he a writer? Or is he spinning like MaltaToday did when his colleague asked me to comment about the leaked email, my own language obviously not being sensational enough?

I assure your readers that the man in the street, Nationalist top politicians and supporters included, are acknow-ledging my long-standing and sincere effort that households even marginally above the “at risk of poverty line” of around €150 weekly income must be preferred in the way a Christian Democrat Party in government practices solidarity and distributive justice. The strictly equal one-off energy allowance per person, and the primary health proposals that surfaced 12 months ago, were two clear cases in point that I contested on grounds of principle on behalf of my constituents.

One need not think he is “God’s gift to Maltese politics” to persist as I have done repeatedly in Parliament about the vision of John Rawls, who proposes the following two principles of justice, the cornerstone of Christian Democracy the PN has upheld ever since I joined the Party in 1982:

“1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties,

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of

society.”

Way back, with all humility, I clearly recall a poster on the wall of the MZPN office: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people” – Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (1900-1986), inventor of the world’s first nuclear submarine.

Dr Jean-Pierre

Farrugia MD, MP

BLATA L-BAJDA