The headline in The Times said “Muscat promises five years of tranquillity”, but the report on the Labour leader’s speech to his congress proved otherwise.

It has now become obvious that all that praise for and harking back to Dom Mintoff and his so-called Golden Years was not for nothing. It has all been a paving of the way towards a resurrection of the economic policies of the worst Prime Minister Malta ever had (yes, he beat even Alfred Sant and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici). With Karmenu Vella – known more widely as Il-Guy – as Joseph Muscat’s chief adviser and writer of Labour’s electoral programme, it was bound to happen. Il-Guy was one of Mintoff’s favourite men, one of his most privileged Cabinet ministers, a petted hanger-on who even went with him to China in 1972. Il-Guy adored Dom Mintoff and thought he could do no wrong. He is the one who coined the term ‘the Golden Years’ to describe that dreadful period in recent history when Mintoff was in power. Well, they were certainly golden for Karmenu Vella. They were not so golden for the rest of us, including those who continued to cheer while their human rights and civil liberties were stripped away from them.

“A Labour government will be diligent with people’s money,” Joseph Muscat told his let’s-have-a-show-of-hands congress meeting. All well and good, but then: “The new parliament building, for example, is not a priority. Even a child knows this, because it is not sustainable and does not attract any foreign investment, create long-term jobs, or provide some kind of return.” My heart sank. I am a child of the 1970s and 1980s, and this sounds so drearily familiar. It’s the utilitarian approach to things, the reason Mintoff destroyed the university and closed down the Faculty of Arts (“useless degrees”). It’s the reason why no import licences or import quotas were issued for anything other than strictly utilitarian goods like (and I quote verbatim) “short-sleeved shirts for women”, and why, when utilitarian goods were extended to include, on special occasions, things like lipstick in very limited quantities, those quantities were so limited that women jammed the counters to get hold of one before they all went.

Lovely. Really fabulous. When I hear that a future Labour government will not be spending money on things that don’t yield a return or create jobs, it brings back those nightmare years. But honestly, I really don’t know how all these pseudo-liberals, who claim that they will be voting Labour because Labour is so progressive and into the arts, can listen to Muscat say something like that and not understand what it means. It means that Muscat will not be spending any money on the arts because it doesn’t create jobs or yield a return. It means, dear Astrid and the FAA and camp followers, that Muscat will not be spending any money on giving you an opera house. It also means that Muscat, in line with the smallest minds on these islands (and that’s really saying something) sees a spirit-soaring landmark building by one of the greatest architects in history as a waste of money because it doesn’t make money.

Going by this attitude, it follows that he is one of those insufferable people who regard the reading of novels as a waste of time, because you learn nothing from them. For the first time ever, instead of walking past Westminster Palace without ever going in, last week I took a tour of the interior, with a friend. We looked at each other and had the same ironic thought: “X’hela ta’ flus.” (“What a waste of money.”)

Equally perturbing was Muscat’s statement, to the same congress, that “there is a bright future” for manufacturing in Malta, and that manufacturing “is the fastest and most sustainable way to attract foreign investment”. Here he has truly lost it. He is either thicker than we at first believed, or his buttons are being pushed, and his strings pulled, by Mintoff’s minister of industry, Karmenu Vella. Of course Karmenu Vella wishes to hark back to the Golden Years of Manufacturing. He’s stuck in another era, and he’s famously incompetent.

What are Muscat and il-Guy proposing here: that we somehow begin competing with Romania, North Africa, China and south-east Asia at the mass manufacture of clothing and consumer goods? Those days are long gone. Maybe this is their solution to their public offer to parents that Labour will make sure even school drop-outs get a job. They’re going to stick them in sweatshops for Chinese wages.

I can’t believe that Muscat can hurl out something like that without the press latching onto him and asking, manufacture what, exactly? And how do Maltese workers on the minimum wage compete with Chinese slave workers earning pennies? And why should we go down that road anyway, when we are capable of so much more, and better?

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