You will have heard it said, accompanied by wagging fingers, that the PN’s 2017 election campaign was distracted into philosophical debates about the ethics of public service. The PN was told it had lost sight of “bread-and-butter issues”, an expression to represent ‘the things that truly matter’. The message in that is that people only care about how much more money they’ll be making by electing one political party to government rather than the other.
Political parties campaign here to reduce their policies to net figures: more money for having children; more money for taking out a mortgage; less tax; more cash rebates on tax paid; free laptops; free gender reassignment; and so on.
There are two tests political parties want to pass. First, the success of the assumptions they make that the economic growth they hope to generate, if elected, would justify the promises of unbounded governmental generosity and an ever-shrinking tax bill. The second test is credibility: whether the public would believe their promises.
Political parties likely doubt the content of their electoral promises would make much difference to most of their voters, convinced choristers before the music even starts. But they must think they need to outbid each other in this rather old-fashioned market cry of ‘vote for us and get more for less’. Because they do it.
Both parties must have prepared their promises well ahead of the start of the campaign. Their workings will have been based on forecasts of economic growth projected from the reality of the world as they knew it then. It is better to believe that than to think they are making promises blindly, without knowing what it would cost to keep them.
Political parties cannot be blamed for the fact that two days after they started rolling out their promises, war broke out in Europe and the basic premises of their financial workings were consumed by the first rockets over Kyiv.
On top of the bonanza they planned, political parties needed to add new promises they did not plan for. They promise energy prices, food prices and transport costs will be unaffected by war in Europe because either (as Robert Abela rather naively seemed to believe) we’re too far from the war for it to matter or because the government would dig in to absorb the cost of any increased prices.
There can be no doubt some very basic necessities will be impacted substantially by the war, even if it stays within the borders of Ukraine. The shock of war did not just have an impact on the spot prices of commodities. Future markets are spinning upwards as well. Wheat is already more expensive two years from now, which means traders expect the cost of war to last.
We think we still have the luxury to debate tax cuts for businesses, loopholes for property transfers and free medical care for pets- Manuel Delia
The impact here gives a very literal meaning to “bread-and- butter” issues. Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat and the country was invaded right before harvest. A prolonged war will reduce yield, stifling supply. It’s not just about wheat. Belarus, a strategic Russian bridge in this war, supplies Europe with potash, which is used in fertiliser. Its scarcity has an impact on agriculture in a wider sense: that’s your dinner, imported or home-grown.
Quite apart from any impact on petrol pump fuel (which Enemed will not be able to postpone for much beyond the next general election), this is an inflationary monster that will eat first out of the plate of people who are never quite sure where their next lunch is coming from. The poorest who have nothing will have the most taken from them.
It will be an imperative duty of this community to make sure the poor, the homeless, the people sleeping in cars and toilet-less garages, the migrants still finding their feet are sheltered from this eminently foreseeable shockwave ahead. They are a nudge away from homelessness and malnourishment and to hunger and want.
The electoral campaign remains remarkably focused on middle-class issues, First-World problems. We think we still have the luxury to debate tax cuts for businesses, loopholes for property transfers and free medical care for pets.
Given what’s coming, we should be talking about higher taxes for wealthier people; that’s not just some oil sheik but you with enough time on your hands to read this. You would not flinch if the price of bread trebles overnight. Given what’s coming, you must pay for the cost of feeding people who depend on bread merely to subsist.
Here’s another thing you will not hear in the election campaign. It’s not just us who are not far enough to be immune from the economic consequences of war in Europe. The inflationary impact and the scarcity of essentials will have a greater impact on poorer countries that depend on imports, even as exporters lock down to take care of their own people first.
The last major inflationary spikes caused the Arab revolts right in our neighbourhood, including civil war in Libya, which never truly ended.
It is not just for the poorest people living in our country that we must make sure we provide. We must work with our partners to support poorer neighbouring countries. Some of our extra wealth needs to go to them to prevent extreme depravations.
We will have some real bread-and-butter issues to contend with in the coming years, starting with the affordability of bread and the availability of butter. You know this to be true. And, yet, the election campaign seems to think you’d rather pay less tax and not hear more about it.