The leader of the Opposition was out on the hustings on Labour Day, rallying support for what he repeatedly called his ‘mettokrazija’.

He explained it to the crowd of people who stood at his feet. A mettocracy, he said, is a country in which anyone can get ahead regardless of who their parents are, what their surname is, and how much money they have. A mettocracy is a society in which work is not just for the privileged few but available to all. In a mettocracy anyone can get an education no matter where they’re coming from or who they are, and use that education to better themselves.

I found that speech pretty scary, actually – scary because it served to remind me just how easy it is to manipulate the emotions of a mass of people while feeding them absolute tripe. Muscat’s speech was written for another time and place, a time and place in which the doors of universities and colleges are closed to all but the select few, where there is mass unemployment, where young people are desperate for work and can’t find any, where graduates are waiting tables in fast-food restaurants and stacking shelves in supermarkets. His speech was not written for Malta in 2012 and I find it difficult to understand how it could have struck a chord with anyone but the utterly brainwashed or the totally idiotic.

I am certain that even keen Labour supporters, who can’t wait until Muscat is prime minister, would have listened to him and said to themselves: “Jobs and work? Education? Why pick on those things to complain about when they’re the Nationalist Party’s greatest successes?” If I were the leader of the Opposition and wanted to get my claws into this government for its shortcomings, I wouldn’t pick jobs, work and education for my weapons.

When people are polled on what they think this government’s greatest strengths are, education and work invariably come out on top. Yes, there are lots of people who are cut off from the real world and who think that Malta is in dire straits, but in their vast majority they vote Labour already (the same qualities that have them show no interest in anything beyond their noses also inform their opinion as to which party is best suited to run the country). So Muscat really missed the mark with this one, no matter how his party media and fellow-travellers like Malta Today try to play it up.

There’s more, too. I know that Muscat is going straight for those people who will be voting for the first time – that’s how the Nationalist Party won the last general election – but he shouldn’t ignore the rest of us. A large chunk of his new support comes from my contemporaries – you know, those people who are going through a major mid-life crisis of one sort or another and project it outwards so that they don’t have to admit to themselves that they’ve created their own problems. And Labour is linked firmly in our minds with no work, no jobs and no education. We think back on Labour’s track record in those very sectors and we shudder. The last people we would trust to create jobs and improve schools, colleges and the university are those in the Labour Party. No, not even the new ones, because they are far too influenced by the old ones, the ones we remember.

I’ve been reading a lot of what Mrs Bland has written and said, and when I heard Joseph Muscat speak on Labour Day, it occurred to me that she must have inspired those views. That speech had just the kind of detachment from reality that Yana Mintoff has: when she talks, it is as though she is talking about a different Malta, one full of deprived people who have no access to work or education. And that is exactly what Muscat sounded like too.

There was worse to come. In my mettocracy, Muscat said, everybody will be able to find good jobs and build a better life for themselves – even people who leave school at 16. Oh good grief, I thought to myself: there he goes, undermining the unstinting efforts of all but the worst sort of parents to convince their children that they have to take A-levels and they have to go into training or to university after that, or face a lifetime of struggle with work that is unsatisfying and badly paid. There are cleaning-women who hound their daughters to do their homework, go to sixth form college, get into university, so that they don’t have to do the sort of work their mothers do. And here comes the leader of the Opposition, undoing their arguments by telling their sons and daughters that it’s OK to leave school at 16, because if they elect Labour, Labour will miraculously create a society in which those who enter the job market at 16 will find work that pays them as much as those who stay in education until they are 21 or 24, and by the time they are in their late 20s they will have a house, a nice car, holidays every year and possibly also a dependent wife and baby.

How irresponsible can Joseph Muscat get? He knows that when teenagers turn 16, they’re dying for freedom and money and the last thing they want to do is spend another five or six years studying. He knows that when 18-year-olds have just slogged through their A-levels, they want to take a gap year that becomes, possibly, a gap life, and they can’t stand the idea of going to university or college. But a responsible party leader would back up parents in telling them ‘work, train, do your best and don’t let yourself down’. Instead, Muscat has calculatedly gone for their vote by telling them that it’s quite all right if they want to drop out of education at 16, because he’ll find them work. All they have to do is vote for him. I am sure there are parents who think well of this. They are the sort of bad parents who don’t care if their children end up as they did, living on the edge and scrubbing around for benefits.

The bottom line is this: would Joseph and Michelle wish their own children to drop out of school at 16? Not from what I can gather about them. So they shouldn’t think it’s all right for other people’s children. Muscat spoke a great deal about social mobility and how his Malta will be one which makes this possible. I almost laughed when I heard that. The past 20 years have seen nothing if not a huge explosion in social mobility. The people with the greatest sense of entitlement and superiority complexes today would have been hauling sacks about and living 10 to a room had they been born in their parents’ generation. The flashiest, pushiest Maltese citizens today have illiterate parents who grew up sleeping five to a bed and had grandparents who slept on straw on the ground.

And it wasn’t thanks to Labour, either. All this change happened in the last two decades. Let’s face it, Joseph and Michelle themselves are the perfect illustration of that.