Quality not quantity

Does an island of 400,000 odd people (excuse the pun) really need 65 full-time MPs?

Alfred Grixti seems to think so and wrote as such. How can he have misjudged the mood of the population so spectacularly? Will such an outlook confirm Labour's stay in opposition, unable to read the signs of the times?

It is extraordinary but true that today in Malta we want less government not more. Extraordinary because the legislative demands of EU membership actually do create a demand for the opposite. We already have 65 MPs - a huge amount for such a tiny population.

We have, I believe, 18 ministers (including the junior ones called parliamentary secretaries).

More than a smaller government we want a leaner expenditure, hence the row over the Brussels building which may well turn out to be a shrewder investment than most of the current anti-government spinners are prepared to admit. In this situation does Mr Grixti seriously think we would like to pay 65 of them a full-time wage hence doubling our bill for MPs? After all, the 18 who serve as ministers are already full-time or more and that is quite enough.

Not enough recognition is in fact given to the many MPs, ministers and others who give far more than a day's work but who are currently lambasted for practically existing. The spiteful letters lately about MPs are witness to the current mood not only against the government but against politics itself.

Any political party ignores letters to The Times and others at its own peril. Reading them before the last Euro elections made it pretty obvious what the outcome was going to be.

We have a large number of MPs. We have an even larger number of local councillors. And, yet, in so many areas across Malta, from the residents of Kappara, who get little or no local service, to residents everywhere else who endure no roads, no garden maintenance and all manner of poor service, popular anger abounds.

It is, of course, an anger that both the MLP and AD have enjoyed stoking over the years. The MLP, particularly, have been consistent in their total negativity to everything from the creation of local councils to VAT, from EU membership to Malta joining Europe's defence agency.

Nobody except those who would like to be paid full-time actually wants to pay for 65 full-time MPs. What people want is more visible cooperation so that both parties which represent almost all of us work genuinely together not only in Parliament but locally too where battles are the order of the day.

What we want is less tribalism not more pay for MPs.

What we want is more work across ministries rather than ministries being pitted against each other, so that reform can take place using the same resources.

Make no mistake. The middle classes in Malta are not just revolting against the PN. They are revolting against the whole way the government appears to do business and the way the opposition opposes so gratuitously. Hence, no MLP that tells people they can have everything the way it is with no additional pain or taxation is going to be believed by the middle classes and get its vote.

The middle classes know pensions must be reformed. The middle classes believe in the welfare state but not the system of pocket-money culture which is improving but where abuse is still rampant.

The middle classes will accept that waste management must be paid for but need to see more equity and incentives that would make them more eco-friendly.

Yes, Mr Grixti, MPs are busy. But then why do they waste the precious time of the staff of so many authorities and ministries asking not only the most banal of questions that require hours of work to answer (time which is taken away from serving the public by the way!) but also on behalf of people who they know are just scroungers but who they want to make heroes for a day?

If MPs want more respect they have to earn it and that includes using their parliamentary privileges more respectfully. Of course, this is not true of all opposition MPs and there are some, like the indefatigable Marie Louise Coleiro, who work very hard for the genuinely dispossessed and for all their constituents in general. The number of votes they win is consistent election after election.

But MPs cannot go on making saints of scroungers.

MPs cannot go on pretending there is an endless sum of money for every problem. Opposition MPs must stop encouraging their Labour core to believe they have an inalienable right to a job for life, a practically free-of-cost house for life, free schooling, free health and free waste disposal because others will pay it for them.

The middle classes and the taxpayers just can't take it anymore.

We don't need 65 full-time MPs. We need to use what we have much better. We need to work together for the common good and we all, collectively, need to take our fingers off the self-destruct button because we must all realise that we, including the opposition, are part of the problem.

Without some humility and fresh thinking all around there will be no solutions...