As I write, the voting in this year’s European Parliament election has not yet closed but by the time the paper is printed we would have got at least an idea about the turnout and later on about the respective results obtained by the parties and their candidates.

There will be ample time to discuss and analyse these results in the coming days and weeks.

But even so, without trying to jump the gun and come up with an analysis that may then be proved completely wrong by the figures, one may be permitted to analyse some key aspects of the past campaign and also what is happening in the country as a whole.

While in some countries, such as the UK and Spain, this EP election is a foretaste of next year’s general election, in Malta’s case it is exactly the opposite – a re-run of last year’s general election.

We have seen, on the part of the Labour Party, a great attempt to repeat last year’s coming together of the Labour core and the Moviment, jelled together and reinforcing each other with an emphasis that what was promised last year has been implemented.

On the part of the Nationalist Party, the new leadership has tried hard to bridge the chasm that downed the party last year both by trying harder to respond to people’s needs but also by increasing the anti-Joe Muscat component of its rhetoric (if that were at all possible after last year).

A year and two months is a long time in politics and this EP election is called upon to see if the 37,000 vote majority obtained by Labour last year is in any way repeatable or whether it was just a momentary coming together of different strands in the particular circumstances of last year.

One must also see what electoral support has been obtained by the rest of the field, even though the fringe parties have turned the election and the campaign into a sort of freak show which the rules of the game or the Broadcasting Authority’s rigidity seem to have turned it into one.

But all that, as I said, is for later.

I am rather concerned about the way the Labour majority is going about its task of governing the country. Others may speak of iced buns and what have you. I am more concerned about people being brought back from retirement into active duty as if the present country cannot offer any better.

A case in point is, of course, the recent reinstatement of police officers back into the corps. To that one must add the incredible amount of promotions that have turned the top level of the corps into the most top heavy corps in Europe, beating if I remember correctly even the Metropolitan Police in Assistant Commissioners et al. It must be hard on the young in the corps to find they have been overtaken by people who had left in other years.

This is more general than one may think. I observe that after the election the police have sort of grabbed back their role in traffic direction and control from the hands of local wardens. Traffic seems to be smoother these days and police control is more effective than wardens looking for who they were going to fine next. Like many others, I was scathing in the past about the whole warden system, especially when it turned out that the local councils were getting only a fraction of the fines and the bulk was going into subsidising private companies.

That seems to be the leitmotif of the whole administration. The experiments of the PN government, whatever the intentions behind them, backfired and/or did not quite work but the present administration’s remedy has been to go back to the old 1980s template - including bringing in the people from the old days who obviously know best how to run the system.

But the 1980s was before computers, before IT, before modern methods which are used everywhere now. Going back into the past is no solution for today’s problems.

The same template is being applied elsewhere. Take Malta Enterprise, for instance, which not only has gone back to the past but actually has the persons who led it in the past running the show, together with an emphasis on manufacturing when the reality today is far different.

Take Air Malta too which not only retro-fitted a plane with the 1974 colours but also and actually got back at least two old-timers to rescue the airline. The two are, I am sure, valid persons (although I am not sure if people who had taken early retirement can come back just like that).

In this case, however, such have been the mistakes of the foreign team brought in by the previous administration that perhaps a return to old-timers is warranted. Take the much heralded rebranding of the company, which must have cost a packet. The company jettisoned and destroyed all that remained of the old colours when the whole cost of rebranding could and should have gone to, for instance, replacing the heavy plane seats with modern, more spacious and durable seats which would have made a plane-load some 500kg lighter every flight thus saving on fuel. No wonder Air Malta today is just a virtual airline.

Take innovation, a vital area if Malta is to regain its competitiveness. I do not want to personalise this, and I am on record saying this even under the PN, who did it for very wrong reasons. The Malta Council of Science and Technology was in a bad state before JPO was chosen to lead it but it is still as bad, or worse, now. The Financial Times last week had a supplement on innovation. Read it and weep. Countries like Estonia are far higher in the innovation scale than we can hope to be for years and years. And that’s before considering cities such as Barcelona or Eindhoven.

It is useless to appoint people for partisan merits to posts which require competence and hard decisions. On the contrary, it seems that the present administration shies away from hard decisions that may cost it popular support.

I am not speaking specifically here about the government service which the PN never really reformed and in which the higher echelons always resemble a game of musical chairs especially when the service as a whole resisted and brought down the timid attempts to bring in people from the outside. Then, when Austin Gatt defended the choice of, as he termed them, ‘political appointments’ we had the sorry spectacle of seeing people who being appointed because they were relatives of this or that - with the consequences we have all seen.

It seems to me this is an area where the PN need to have a long and hard think, given that it is unlikely the present government will waver from its present template. To get anywhere it must begin with an honest appraisal that the attempts to break down the pre-1987 mould have failed and in many cases ended in ignominy (think of Arriva, at least before Joe Mizzi’s next move) and that short of replacing the present incumbents with PN-minded incumbents in case of an election change, there must be a better, a fairer and more effective way of doing things.

The present government’s way is, in short, back to the future, with a 1980s template which ultimately will keep us all back. There must be a better way to do things. And that is what the country is waiting for the alternative government to offer, when it stops being negative and anti-Joseph Muscat.

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