There has been a collective amnesia or lack of appreciation of the clear statistics regarding the spread of poverty in Malta.

Swept by the spin that everything was hunky-dory in the State of Malta and that Malta had escaped the ravages of the international crisis and that it faced a glorious future, we failed to listen to the facts and figures as they emerged from survey after survey of the population.

If now we are decrying why was it that the people voted to change things, the blame can only be ascribed to us, in a large part. We heard but we did not listen, we saw but perceived nothing.

Statistics, as we all know, can reveal but can also hide a multitude of facts. Each figure in a statistic is made up of individuals, each with a life, with a story to tell, with a situation to face up to.

Statistics can be used also to hide facts, to hide the faces of individuals, to skim over the harsh reality of facts.

But overall, there was an unconscious clear reluctance to be told the truth. It is not just the statistics on the number of persons under the poverty level, but the grim reality faced by so many of our countrymen.

Later on, when the candidates began going to people’s homes, they were many times rendered aghast at what they were seeing. By then it was too late, far too late.

Whatever else people now propose as the reasons for the electoral result, this is one prime reason: many people were so down in the poverty stakes they could not manage to make ends meet. Along with them, the people just above this level felt or perceived they were being sucked down into the same kind of hell. Hence the fear that gripped many and the determination that somehow things could not remain like that.

Thus the most important cohort of Maltese society, what we normally call the lower middle class, acted to defend its interest, as it saw it.

One can compare the feelings of this most important segment of the Maltese population to that of its counterpart elsewhere in Europe even though unemployment in Malta stayed on a very low level whereas theirs skyrocketed. There was increased pain as the standard of living faced more and more problems and as what used to be norm suddenly became a luxury. And, despite the reassurances, people were afraid the future would treat them harshly.

The reassuring pointed at restaurants crowded with people, at the number of cars (mostly second hand to be precise) that were imported. These provided the sheen, the illusion, of affluence.

Deep down, in the side roads and at the backs of buildings, the ‘others’ lived, and we all looked the other way so as not to see. Like in so many other countries, the affluence only lasted as long as one did not look closely into the side-roads or at the back.

The truth was, is, this was a sham affluence, based on consumer goods but unsupported by an increased productivity, or more value-added work. It was for this reason that Malta has not really inched up the GDP per person stakes as it should have, and as we all thought would come with EU membership. The truth was, is, that Malta neglected to improve its competitiveness, or else took a long time about it. The truth was Malta should have clawed its way up much more aggressively than it did.

What maybe kept the situation from becoming clear was the high-end, the online gaming and financial services sectors, which raised the centre of gravity well beyond the average.

That and perhaps the traditional Maltese habit of saving and not using the credit card to the maximum.