Joseph Muscat’s Labour seems to have taken more than one leaf out of Charles Dickens’s many works. If we are to believe their 2017 electoral slogan, we are supposedly living in what they call L-Aqwa Żmien – the best of times.
I remember having to read the classic A Tale of Two Cities many years ago, and the opening sentence goes, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”. This is a sentiment so true in our case as well!
To gauge the definition of “best” in our case, we can consider the significant affluence and easy pickings made available for the select few, and the presence of more money floating around for most people. Given this, then we are possibly living in good times.
But money, while making the world go round, has also been described as the root of all evil, thus risking the very quick transformation of the ‘best’ into the ‘worst’.
This flow of easy money did not come about through normal economic growth or as a result of the development of new economic sectors. This apparent wealth has been generated by the gates of hell being opened to the ills of our present construction regulations.
All standards have been thrown out of the window and the issuance of permits has become a mere formality as we are building up, down, left, right and centre. The golden goose is being wrung for its eggs with no thought for the consequences.
The “best” is illustrated by the high levels of noise, the huge fleets of concrete mixers, the dust invading our lungs and the blotting out of the sky for all except for the top floors.
Disrespect for the rule of law has filtered downwards and that we now see it all around us
Quality of life is not about a few people making a lot of money and only passing on the crumbs. The “best” should be enjoyed by all of us in the form of clean air, unencumbered spaces and the peace of mind that is not currently encouraged by the recent domino effect of residential housing collapsing due to adjacent excavation works.
Since we are talking about peace of mind, we must also see whether the “best” also applies to the rule of law.
Much has been said and written about the very serious breaches of law that have become the hallmark of Labour’s Malta in the past years. These breaches reached their zenith, or perhaps more appropriately their nadir, with the brutal assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the subsequent (mis)behaviour of the government.
It comes as no surprise then that this disrespect for the rule of law has filtered downwards and that we now see it all around us.
It was also Dickens who had one of his characters spout that “the law is an ass” and, once again, Joseph Muscat’s Labour is living the fiction.
Pavements are taken up by tables and chairs with no attempt at regulation, and we very often see mothers pushing prams and pushchairs having to step off the pavement onto thorough-fares, risking their own and their baby’s lives and limbs due to the impassability of the sidewalk.
Those who would have us believe that we are living in the best of times might very easily try to brush off such examples as minor, but the reality is that there are so many such irritants that they are fast merging into one big string of irritation.
It is very frustrating to have no recourse to authorities that have no partisan affiliation, and which therefore are free to function in the interests of ordinary, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens like us. It seems that the first thing that authorities check when faced with complaints is how “connected” the alleged wrongdoer is. The slightest whiff of a “mutual friend” in high places, and everybody looks the other way.
We can, however, only build so much, and even that silver lining will soon lose its lustre and its lucre to be replaced by the remaining bleak houses and towers as monuments to greed.
Those of us who are not so young anymore remember well what happened in Buġibba in the early 1980s, when buildings mushroomed to cater for the booming bloom of cheap tourists who invaded our islands to avoid the ETA bombings in Spain. When things settled down to normal levels, we were left with a ghost town that has now developed into the modern ghetto that the stretch between Buġibba Square and Qawra Point has become.
It seems that the Maltese people, having ignored the lessons of history, are doomed to relive it, and will shortly be faced once again with “hard times”.
I am sure that readers will have their own list of examples and grievances that punch hole after hole in the big lie that we are living in the “best of times” and will realise, rather, that these are in fact the “worst of times”.
In the meantime, our Prime Minister, oft equated with the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, is living up to the name – dodging and twisting any accusation of wrongdoing, however founded and real it may be, expecting us to trust his blanket denials. Well, some of us might, but most of us don’t.