The Labour campaign trail is all glitzy and full of slickness, so if parties were to be measured by glitz, Labour would win by a landslide. But anyone taken in by all the Joseph Muscat adulation stands to be disappointed. Life is hardly all glitz and when the time to turn that glitz into proper work and proper running of the country comes along, Labour can offer nothing but hollowness.

Joseph Muscat goes around with a team of smiling, chirpy chums – all of whom love the adulation and the resounding “support”. It’s so obvious that this is all stage-managed and, like all stage-managed things, where all one cares about is the façade, once that mask is taken off, the horror will be too immense to accept.

Am I sounding biased? Maybe I am biased – but I keep trying to see what Joseph Muscat & Co. have promised us and what they have proposed. Unfortunately, I keep reaching the same conclusion I started off with: that Labour has no clue. It has plenty of money and plenty of consultants who have taught all its supporters to look as pretty and smiley as possible, but it also seems to have been told not to worry if the substance is missing because people are dumb and will be taken in. But I beg to differ.

The way Labour has been inconsistent and ready to prove some points is worrying. It accuses the PN of being negative and full of innuendo and smear campaigns when it has done that and more. It has tried hard to be seen as a new party – never in the history of Maltese politics has a party ditched all its symbols so conveniently and so brutally. Even its most fervent core support – the working-class – has been sidelined. In fact, its other big supporter, the GWU, which has for so long been a slave to the Labour Party’s ideology and whims, does not even call for workers’ rights. It just sits there like a sleeping giant that will rise up when the election is over to call the shots and start asking for favours for its employer friends.

Old Labour is gone, it tries to say, which is why it has thrown away all the old flags and all references to its socialist past. But New Labour is not new at all – it discarded Mintoff’s buckles but still finds it convenient to kiss his coffin. That is New Labour under Joseph Muscat – doing anything that is convenient as long as it attracts more voters. The MLP used to be bad for Malta but at least we knew where we stood with Mintoff and his friends. Anti-democratic, red through and through and fighting, it claimed, for the working-class. But its supporters never wore the suits of convenience like Labour does today and its hobnobbing with the big employers is something more than worrying. And as far as workers rights are concerned, I still think the PN in government protected workers’ rights more than any other party or union or movement.

Labour and Joseph Muscat have no idea about governing and about true issues. Once in power – if it does win – it will drag us down and, slowly but surely, everything we have built will be lost. We cannot trust the glitz or the smiles – they will all be removed and we will face more trouble than we deserve.

The PN is a party that believes in truth and in deliverables, not in fancy words and fancier slogans. Labour is out to get your vote and, once it is in power, there is one thing it will deliver for sure: a hollowness that follows the glitz built on nothing.

I have full trust in the Maltese elector. Even if, at the moment, the electors sound as if they are falling for Labour’s baseless propaganda and monstrous smear-fest, I believe that, come the day of reckoning, the Maltese electors will realise that they cannot risk all they have for the sake of an attractive but deceitful smile.