The slogans chosen by the two political parties for their recent activities during the Independence Day week were in sharp contrast for various reasons.

For its Independence Day celebrations, the Nationalist Party chose a rather lengthy one, starting off with mychoice.pn and adding employment, health and education to it, while the Labour Party, for its congress, went for a short phrase – a future that unites us.

The PL slogan is catchier, but it lacks substance, while that of the PN is a rather poor attempt at including so many issues with the result being a stark lack of focus. The “dot” has become a trendy way of reaching out to the younger generations but it has transformed itself into a cliché.

Is mychoice.pn more important than health, education and employment? And, secondly, mychoice.pn is too similar to the gonziPN motto that characterised the run-up to the last election, a motto that the party wants to put behind it while Labour mentions it – with disdain – at every opportunity.

For the PN, perhaps it would have been better to stick to mentioning the three issues on which it wants to focus. If anything, it would have served as a reminder of the 1987 electoral slogan – “work, justice, freedom”: three words that meant so much in those days. Now that justice and freedom are no longer an issue, employment remains the focal point in a world economy that is in difficulty, while health and education are two other Nationalist Party strengths the PN wants to project.

A future that unites us – the Labour slogan – is too abstract. Through it, the PL wanted to incorporate all matters under one name, but the lack of focus could backfire. The PN has already picked on it, adding a few more words to say that Labour wants to “unite us with the past” – and this because in recent weeks, Labour has tried to glorify the Dom Mintoff years and added to this, it still has too many people who held important positions during the 1980s, a time of strife and violence for this country.

But slogans are just that – words that try to make an impact, and that are twisted by political adversaries to render a different meaning.

Both political parties would do well to be more than this. Words are easy to utter, and over the past week or two, we had rivers of them at the Granaries and at Ta’ Qali. It is substance that matters, and it is translating those words into action that is important.