We are living in the year 2034 and the Labour Party has just announced a pre-election gift to voters in the form of a €1,000 cheque. Prime Minister Clayton Bartolo announced this at a “multi-million private-public investment” press conference held at the Blue Lagoon Bar & Restaurant.

In the upcoming election, the majority of Maltese residents are migratory and transient and, thus, have no vote. So, they get no cheque. Most of them are single men coming from far outside the European Union and working in construction, hospitality or food delivery, earning a basic wage and struggling with ever higher rental and food costs.

But the economy, Bartolo says, is still doing great. A cheap labour force makes up more than half our working population; they work in the private sector while most Maltese-born residents work for the government. There are also close to 100 billionaires who made their money turning Malta into another Dubai with their carpet-bombing unsustainable greed.

There are hotels everywhere. Some were actually built with EU funds given to Labour ministers’ wives and children. However, many hotels are now serving as homes for the aged as the tourism industry has, over the past years, well, shot itself in the foot. All those government funded rave parties and circuses have dried up and Malta is internationally and officially just a dump, boasting ever uglier buildings, massage parlours on every corner and a booming hard-drug import-export.

The birth rate has been falling to 0.8, reaching the bottom of the international classification except for war zones. The number of young people leaving for a better life overseas has also grown exponentially. We have now surpassed Labour’s original target of a population of 800,000.

Back in 2023, Labour had projected reaching an 800,000 population in 2040 but the latest population figures were out a few weeks ago and we now know that, in December 2033, there were 802,051 living on these islands. Of these, only around 350,000 can claim to have been born in Malta and only 300,000 can claim that their parents were also born in Malta.

Bartolo has stuck to the economic plan that was laid down way back, 21 years ago, in 2013 on the Fourth Floor of Labour HQ when the then Labour Party came to an ‘agreement’ with four or five businessmen to turn the Planning Authority into an automat for building and storey permits. This pact was properly honoured by successive great leaders like Robert Abela and Aaron Farrugia.

Twenty-one years later, a drive from Marsa to Mellieħa now takes four hours. In order to tackle the traffic congestion, the government recently introduced a scheme whereby you earn two euros for every time you board public transport capped at a maximum of two trips per day.

On the first anniversary of the scheme, Minister for Transport Rosianne Cutajar stated that the Irkibni Għal Ġiex Ewro public transport scheme proved to be a huge success with the type of tourists now visiting Malta and jobless migrants. Since very few Maltese speakers use it, it will now be marketed in its English version, Ride Me for Two Euros, with translations into the languages most spoken in Malta nowadays, Urdu and Hindi.

Labour cannot change because it is bought and sold- Eddie Aquilina

With the national debt now standing at €40 billion, inflation is running at a high. Soup kitchens and food banks are set up in every village. Project Green now grows vegetables in its pocket gardens to help them out with supplies. 

St Luke’s Hospital was, in 2030, sold to a group of developers who turned it into a ‘private-public social housing’ multi-apartment complex. It makes a licensed profit, sleeping 40 to an apartment.

Yet, the number of homeless sleeping out is in the thousands and they are not all foreigners. Social housing fell off the radar long ago; Labour does not compete with its financial ‘backers’. Public land has been decimated through the practice of selling it off at daylight-robbery prices to contractors who all back their choice of minister.

This week, a statue of Joseph Muscat was unveiled in Castille Place next to that of previous prime ministers. Muscat lives abroad in Baku working as an international consultant to parrots and casinos but Bartolo says that the country owes a huge debt to the man who had to “pay the highest political price” and that his name should not be forgotten – unlike those of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

But let’s stop here. It’s still 2023. This parody was built upon the prognosis given by Clyde Caruana that Labour’s economic policies were, ultimately, going to destroy the country and the quality of life for future Maltese generations. A fleeting moment of truth spoken by a Labour minister, rare as a two-horned unicorn, I could not ignore.

As expected, both Abela and his arrogant minister for the economy rushed to tweak down Caruana’s statement lest their developer ‘backers’ rebel. They did it within hours of each other and the panic in their faces showed. Then we had the population figures showing that, last year, we had a record increase of 22,000, almost all of whom were imported from outside the European Union.

Labour now knows that people are starting to realise that corruption was Labour’s sole currency and people are starting to feel the effects of corruption in a much worse quality of life: ugly buildings everywhere, some of which collapse on people, road projects that make traffic worse, foreigners from outside the European Union used as modern slaves in cheap-labour-land and a heartless Labour voting down public inquiries into the death of people who paid the ultimate price of corruption.

Labour cannot change because it is bought and sold. Unless it is voted out and shown the door, Malta is doomed to show even worse effects of corruption and will become more of a dump than Labour has already made it.