In 2013, an incoming prime minister promised the evolution of a new middle class. It was strange talk coming from a leader of a party which once fought and won battles in the name of the working man.

One could only presume that this was going to be Labour’s renaissance, an egalitarian age where you were judged on merit and not on crony networking and old boy connections.

Then we saw everything travel in the opposite direction. Ten years passed and we saw the creation of new classes of citizens.

The first in line was the one composed of elected and non-elected representatives, their family members, their circles of friends, supporters and hangers on who all shared the same common goal, that of living and enjoying free access to the public purse.

The frequency of these parasitic arrangements is so intense that the new daily discoveries simply blot out the previous ones.

Here are a few examples taken only from Gozo to show you how it’s done.

1. The Gozo minister creates a new undefined division which he proudly names the ‘Legal Services Directorate’. The first director salary as head goes to the lawyer wife of the minister’s cousin who himself receives regularly thousands in media direct orders from the same ministry, a ministry which also, mind you, issues over 250 vote buying direct orders worth nearly €5 million per year.

2. Keep in mind Gozo is an island of some 30,000 votes. The Gozo ministry employs 800 persons as cleaners and maintenance workers who, in one year alone, receive a total of €1 million in unexplained phantom overtime and allowances. That easily translates into a further 2,000 votes in favour of the sitting Labour majority.

3. Yes, still in Gozo. The Gozo Channel chairperson signs a 10-year lease of an abandoned shop starting at €62,400 per year, which remains unused for three years. Meanwhile, the chair allocates a further €500,000 in conversions and refurbishment. The shop owners benefiting from this largesse are private clients of the long-serving accountant chairperson.

You see, by now they have made us even forget what Tillgate, Hearnville and Egrant was about or that they were about to secretly rob us of €4 million a year on our energy bills.

In real terms, the construction industry now owns the country outright- Eddie Aquilina

But, even within this class, there is a hierarchy. One can move up from earning €1 million in a few years from part time government consultancies to one day becoming a prime minister. And, on the other hand, one may slip down and get demoted just for being too obviously corrupt to the point of giving the game away – for example, by giving the new boyfriend a fake consultancy of €5,000 per month.

The second new class is not really new at all. The construction industry has been around forever. What’s new is that, in 2013, it bought the incoming Labour administration and took control of all the relevant institutions and regulatory bodies. 

In real terms, it now owns the country outright. Farmers now till land which was once guaranteed to remain ODZ and provide them with a stable occupation. But now developers can become farmers and build two-storey, six-bedroom with en-suite villas for their non-existent flock of sheep. Village cores now house up to 10-storey apartment blocks.

The third new class that has emerged is the one composed of the homeless, the cheap labour workers, the ordinary pensioners and all those who, in our modern economic paradise, cannot afford the soaring cost of housing, of food and of most of life’s basic essentials.

The government claims to have solved this new poverty by giving out occasional handouts and free entertainment events.

Charity is always commendable but the cost of this generosity does not come out of the pockets of its new millionaires but is money borrowed from future generations of ordinary people who will be born to have to deal with it.