Even if you were to apply the broadest definition of what usually characterises a Labour or left-leaning government, you would usually find the working class at its heart. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and everyone else who wanted to also had the choice to join a trade union and that union would take your grievances to the people in power.

The right, on the other hand, was always cynically and unfairly portrayed as the party that didn’t care about what the farmer had to say about his crop of potatoes or ruined fields. It’s funny how in this country we have managed to subvert even the basics of what constitutes commonly held ideologies.

Last week, yet more troubling construction-related news surfaced with the proposed development of yet another roundabout on over 20 tumoli of land in Burmarrad; a young farmer spoke of how this development would destroy a hand-dug reservoir structure that was over 500 years old and take with it the livelihood of three farming families. Going ahead with the roundabout would mean that Cane Vella and the other families who make use of the reservoir would not be able to grow crops in the summer months.

The irony of it all? Infrastructure Malta has still failed to explain why this roundabout is so vital to begin with. I suppose this is yet another part of the Progress Plan that we always hear so much about. It’s almost as if we hate our agricultural roots so much that not only are we not willing to safeguard them, but we are intent on entombing them completely in concrete.

I am reminded of what one particular Maltese teacher Mr Vella said to tell us when we were around 16. He looked at our faces and told us that there was no beauty in hanging up a plough on the wall of our restored farmhouses when we had never used it. He said the very fact that it was hanging there meant that we didn’t understand its value. He said that the bitter divorce that we were undergoing from our roots would give us a superficial, nostalgic, and empty grasp of our history and ourselves and that it would lead to us glorifying things we shouldn’t.

You cannot be a party for the worker and work against the worker’s needs- Anna Marie Galea

I think of this again as yet another politician puts up a photo of ġbejna on a piece of bread near one of the only trees he hasn’t cut down. The virtue signalling of those who want us to believe that they are one of us while doing something that directly goes against our needs is breath-taking. I know that bread has been the cause of more than one riot in Malta, but it’s really not going to convince anyone who understands what the true meaning of progress is that you are anything less than vastly furnished with ignorance and no real grasp of what you or your party should stand for.

There is no more time to waste. There is not much we can do except continue to sign petitions, attend protests, and try very hard to vote for people for the right reasons. But all those things do matter. Farmers have the right to their land, and you have the right not to be choked by yet more supermarkets, roundabouts, flyovers, and God knows what else they will come up with to justify their unabated greed.

You cannot be a party for the worker and work against the worker’s needs. That would be like saying that you are a functioning democracy and then allowing the murder of a journalist. Oh, wait.