The government would be committing a mistake if in order to pare down the budget deficit and conform to European rules, it relies on a reduction of investment. Over the years, frequently when budgetary economies must be identified the custom has become that of axeing investments for which there will be no contribution from EU funds.
To be clear, practically all EU member states have turned to this stratagem. It is a dangerous one. For political reasons, financial restraints are much less popular when applied to recurrent expenditures. They bring with them greater controls and less easy ways, among other features. People who are benefitting from them will complain.
By contrast, there are few or no complaints if investments remain pending. Except that complaints do arise when eventually with the passage of time, it emerges that because new investments were delayed, a whole range of social needs has not been and cannot be addressed.
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AWAY FROM THEIR COUNTRY
In their great majority, foreign workers in this country do not come here on a whim. They arrived because like our great grandparents and grandparents, they left home to find work that could provide them with a livelihood for their families.
As far as we are concerned we let them come – or rather, we wanted them to come – in order to service requirements that Maltese citizens are not keen to take up or do not know how to.
Cut off as they are from their country, it is certain that foreign workers in our midst must feel excluded from all that is familiar and cherished in their home situation. (Our grandparents and great grandparents who emigrated in the past must have felt likewise.) When they meet each other, they can commemorate the life they left behind through the common memories they share.
I had to reflect about this on a recent Sunday as I crossed a public garden where a group of foreign workers had gathered for a picnic together. I was reminded of the stories I was told in Australia about the get-togethers of Maltese migrants during which they would enjoy a traditional meal of rabbit
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IN FRANCE
The Olympic Games are keeping the spotlight off the dire trouble in French political situation. The Fifth Republic has never experienced such a deep institutional crisis as today’s. The chances of a government being formed which could maintain a longterm majority in the national parliament are minimal. President Macron seems to have lost all the political capital he started with and has ended up as probably the weakest French President ever. Even the parliamentary group which backs him seems no longer ready to trust him with eyes closed or even open.
Perhaps after all Macron’s mistake was to have carried to its non-viable extreme the cardinal concept underlying the Fifth Republic as laid out by General de Gaulle, precisely to ensure that what is happening now would not happen. This was the idea that the President should be the hinge around which national politics turned. Macron attempted to go further and convert the President into a “Jupiter” by undermining first the “traditional” left and then the right. He then wanted to get general backing and confront the extreme right by himself alone. Truly he has ended up by himself but with no one’s backing and with all against him.