If you can’t be fagged to listen to a recording of Joseph Muscat’s speeches on Sunday mornings, I’ve found that the best way to get the true gist of what he said (and, more specifically, what he meant) is by reading the reports on his home-base website, Maltastar.

This is because, like all other newspapers and sites, when paraphrasing a speech into a report, Maltastar focuses on what it believes to be the most important bits. And the most important bits for the Labour Party’s website are the most important bits for the Labour Party.

So here we go, with last Sunday’s sermon in Cospicua.

“Joseph Muscat said a new government would cut red tape so that investment can flow and grow. Government managed to dismantle Sea Malta and the Drydocks but did not manage to dismantle the pumping station to enable the SmartCity project to be on schedule and create thousands of jobs.”

“We will not let projects lag behind as we do not want to deprive our young people of the opportunities for them to get good jobs. We want an economy that is also based on manufacturing and not just services.”

“We want more factories to open in our islands. I was shocked to hear three CEOs of top companies in Malta say they want to invest more but that they could not because of government induced costs. Trelleborg said its electricity bills in Malta are higher than in the other 17 countries where it has factories. Government is making the situation worse by increasing the service charge they have to pay for the land leased to them for their factories.”

It is 2011. We are in the European Union. The world has changed a hundred times over. Manufacturing is not what it used to be. Internet and information technology have given rise to a whole raft of service industries which we couldn’t have dreamed possible. Factories have moved to the Far East, to Turkey and to North Africa. The world has undergone a massive financial crisis triggering the worst global recession since the 1930s. The Cold War ended 22 years ago, changing the face of Europe. Education in Malta has grown and spread (though the problem remains that you can take people to the water but you can’t make them drink) and illiteracy, despite the evidence to the contrary on Facebook, has been slashed.

Yet progressive and liberal Joseph Muscat is still talking about the economic policies of his party forefathers. “They closed down the Drydocks” he said, implying that this was a bad thing and that he would have done otherwise, and retained the monster which swallowed up so many gadzillions in public funds, crippling the country and eating up money that could have been invested in education and the infrastructure.

Joseph Muscat complains that money is being spent on a new parliament building. He complains because Cabinet ministers are now also collecting their salary as Members of Parliament. But then funnelling tens of millions every year into the gullet of Sammy Meilaq and the likes of him was fine with Joseph. Cabinet ministers are not allowed to pick up an MP’s salary, but Sammy Meilaq and his thousands of parasitical cronies could leech the state coffers practically dry because everyone else owed them a living as the aristocracy of the workers.

And opening up factories, in 2011, in Malta? Roll out the red carpet for any factory which sets up here, by all means − because every little makes more, as they say − but I wouldn’t pursue manufacturing as a policy on employment and increasing our GDP, not unless Labour wants to keep wages really low or drive them down even lower than they are already. Factory owners complain about costs here because their basis for comparison is not Germany, or Spain, or Italy, or France, or Britain or any other EU member state. It is North Africa and the Far East. By reasoning as they do, Joseph Muscat defeats the purpose of our having joined the European Union in the first place, but then he never wanted us to join, did he, even though it was the making of him and without EU membership he would still be a glorified clerk in Alfred Mifsud’s office.

Trelleborg might well have grumbled to Joseph Muscat about the cost of electricity and said that it is higher here than at any other of the 17 locations where it has factories. Perhaps Trelleborg might care to tell Joseph – seeing that he didn’t have the wit to ask − how wages paid to its Maltese employees compare to wages paid to, say, employees at its home base in Sweden.

I always hated the way the Maltese so-called Socialists did what they could to keep wages as low as possible so that they could then boast about the number of factories setting up to milk our poverty.

Somebody sent me a link to a YouTube video about the Tal-Barrani incidents 25 years ago. Believe me when I tell you that I was so preoccupied with looking at the people, their clothes and the cars, that I didn’t register a single word of the voice-over. It was like looking at something filmed in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. The people are so drab, their clothes so shabby, cheap and dull, the cars a line-up of ancient Skodas, VW Beetles and Austin Hillmans. Everybody looks poor and deprived and miserable. And this was 1986, when Michael Douglas was making Wall Street and Gordon Gecko spoke the legendary line that greed is good.

And here we were, in something only marginally better than Enver Hoxha’s Albania.

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