Prosy Prat

Has anyone ever really paid attention to any of Alfred Sant's foolish novelty column past the third or fourth paragraph? If as I think, most have not, then what does it say for the fate of Malta that it might be soon taken over by a person that the majority of the population would prefer not to listen to, let alone read. Where some politicians, probably not Maltese, might stir the reader with some rousing prose about their vision of a bright future, Sant ploddingly trots out, week after week, verbatim comments that the dull could easily look up themselves on the parliament website, were they of a boring enough disposition. Resolving to trawl through this week's prosy prattlings, I soon came acropper on the distinctly un-Horation paragraphs 3 to 5:

In his budget speech for 2006, delivered on October 31, 2005, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi spoke as follows: "It is clear that the results being obtained in the labour market provide another positive indicator regarding the state of the economy. Up to end September of this year, the number of persons in full-time gainful employment had reached 137,813, an increase of 0.2 per cent on the previous year...

"It is relevant to mention that our economy also managed to generate a substantial number of part-time jobs. In fact, the number of persons with part-time employment as their principal source of work reached 23,138, an increase of 2,190, or 10.5 per cent.

"The number of persons registering for work under the two parts of the unemployment register stood at 7,210. Therefore, the rate of those seeking work stood at five per cent. This amounts to a decrease of 930 persons, or of 11.4 per cent, on the previous year.

This man is so godawfully bad at formulating his arguments that he laboriously sets the stage with all the flair of a health and safety executive. It is almost embarassing to witness the seams of the hastily-cobbled-together patchwork of contrarian mundanities.
"Ok," he thinks to himself, "first write what he said, then write what you think, but make sure you don't agree with him. That'll get him, I know it will."
Somehow, I imagine him writing this rubbish hunched over a vintage Remington to the light of reconstituted candle pedantically transcribing Gonzi's remarks in Dickensian bitterness. Only such niggardly sparseness could account for the aridity of his ceaseless and pointless whinging.
There is so little gristle on Sant's weedy laments that it is hardly surprising that the reader's appetite is ruined by paragraph 3. Indeed, this is an ominous harbinger of the type of government that we can expect from Sant's Labour Party; miserable, aimless, and hopeless in every sense of the word.