It’s a funny country we live in. Anyone would think that a coup d’état, if successfully carried out, would be given its fair share of press importance locally. And yet, this is exactly what happened here this very week: the Maltese Parliament took full control of the entire country for the foreseeable future, finally driving the last nail into the coffin of that long-standing national joke of ours, proportional representation… and not only did the local media fail utterly to take in the significance of the event, but some parts of it announced the news as if it were some kind of triumph of democracy.
Which only goes to show how much truth there is in the old saying: “a nation gets precisely the political bullies it deserves”.

So now that Malta is officially a two-party State, let us pause to admire the many marvellous achievements registered by those brave boys and girls – mostly boys – who have since 1964 regularly parked their backsides on the 65 seats of our House of “Representatives”: so named because its member are there to represent the interests of their own respective party, and no one else.
Henceforth I shall refer to these fine Maltese gentlemen (and ladies) as “The Magnificent 65”, in honour of that classic 1960 John Sturges movie about a bunch of lawless cowboys who literally get away with murder… over and over again.

1) They legislated to give themselves full pensions.
And rightly so, I hasten to add. After all, being an MP is tough work. Consider all those extra hours put in by industrious Ministers to make sure their canvassers are given all the top jobs in any authority that matters. Watch and be amazed, as Ministers go that extra mile to handsomely compensate themselves for strips of land which would be considered practically worthless, had they belonged to lesser mortals such as you or I.
Did you seriously think that kind of commitment to one’s own personal well-being, over and above all other interests – the nation’s included – should not be recognised and rewarded by the State? Using taxpayers’ money, just to add insult to outrageous egoism?
Of course it should. So, in recognition of their undying commitment to making life as comfortable as possible for themselves at the expense of all the rest of us, the Magnificent 65 went ahead and unanimously – unanimously, please note – incremented all their pensions, without any questions asked.

Of course, the rest of us will not benefit from this cosy little inter-party arrangement. Those of us hitting retirement age now will only get two thirds of their salary in the form of a pension. And they should consider themselves lucky. The overwhelming likelihood is that – unless we all suddenly metamorphose into unstoppable sex machines, producing children at a rate of approximately 10,000 a year – people my age and younger will not get any pension at all.
In fact, we’ve already been told as much by giant billboards advertising the services of a certain institution called “HSBC”… which I think stands for “Havin’ Such a Blast Countin’ (your Cash)”, but I might be wrong. Anyway, these billboards urge passers-by to “think of the future” by availing themselves of any of a number of private pension schemes generously offered by our “friend for life”. Which I must say I find strange: for when I think of the future, I also think (apart from impending midlife crisis, and all that) about the past: in particular, about the 10 per cent of my salary that I have been regularly paying specifically for the purpose of securing my pension when I finally join Louis Galea and Alfred Sant in the grand “kartanzjan” club.
But we now know that, failing the above-mentioned quantum leap forward in national libido, this 10 per cent will not go towards our pension at all. Does this mean we get to stop paying National Insurance? Or for that matter, that we will get a refund from the government for all the money we have flushed down the drain?

Don’t be daft. If we stopped paying our National Insurance, where would the Magnificent 65 get the money for their own full pensions? And if we are given a refund on our NI contributions, how much money will be left in the nation’s coffers for the Magnificent 65 to claim as compensation for land expropriated by government in 2,600BC?
No, indeed. You and I will carry on paying our National Insurance even though we have already been informed that it is only for our politicians’ benefit, and not for our own. And guess what? We will be so grateful for having been thus royally shafted by our elected “representatives”, that we will continue turning up for their mass meetings in our thousands: chanting, waving flags, shooting our revolvers in the air and praising the Glorious Mexxej in terms usually reserved for the Rais of some godforsaken third world dictatorship. I believe the technical term for all this is: “Renewing our success together”…

2. They legislated to exempt themselves from the Data Protection Act.
Ah, this one is little short of genius. But then, what more can you expect from the great legal brains that characterise the Magnificent 65?
Never mind that banks, schools, casinos, lotto offices, legal practices, accountancy firms, newspapers, philharmonic orchestras, flower arrangement societies, ju-jitsu instructors, charity organisations and car insurance salesman are all bound by strict legislation when it comes to the storage and use of their clients’ personal information. The Magnificent 65, under the expert guidance of a certain Sheriff Eddie Fenech Adami, cooked up the legislation in such a way that they themselves – or at least, the political parties whose interests they represent – can maintain entire databases chock-full of intensely personal information about you, me, your mother and your nanna, and they can even pass them on to third parties at will, because… well, what do you know? The law simply does not apply to them.
And why, pray tell, does the law discriminate so blatantly between political parties and… um… everybody else (except, of course, the Church, which tends to be perceived as a token “non-party” beneficiary of all these decisions, thereby providing the exception which makes the rule)?
Well, apart from the obvious – i.e., because the Magnificent 65 do not only draft the law: they ARE the law – the alternative would be to dismantle the espionage mechanisms in the bowels of their party HQs… thereby losing out on a vital advantage in the eternal scramble to occupy the top of the political dung-heap for the next five to 10 years.

And again: so grateful are we for being spied upon and treated like so many moveable commodities in a supermarket store-room, that some of us even volunteer to do a little extra unpaid spying on the party’s behalf. These obsequious little nobodies are usually referred to as “street leaders” – a popular euphemism for “nosey little neighbourhood bullies”– and are found in many civilised parts of the world: Maoist China, present-day Myanmar, Airstrip One in 1984, and many more beside. Very soon they will no doubt come knocking on your door, to make sure that when election day comes rolling along, you do your duty to the party at the precise time pencilled in on their little clipboards: not a minute before, not a minute after.
(Subject of which, I feel I ought to warn the “street leaders” of my own particular locality: any attempt to poke your noses into the ifs, whens and for whoms I intend to vote, and I swear to God I’ll set the cat on you, and to hell with the consequences. Miaow!)

Anyway. The above are just a couple of random examples in an endless litany of woes. There are others that illustrate the same principle equally well. For instance: some people (I am one of them) would like to see Valletta’s Theatre Royal rebuilt. It would be kind of nice, these people reason, to walk into the capital city and be greeted by the sight of Barry’s Opera House. If nothing else, it will cover up the glaring white eyesore that is the Bank of Valletta HQ at the corner of Zachary Street… a stark and inelegant building that would never have been exposed to view at all, were it not for the generosity of a certain Luftwaffe pilot way back in April 1942.
But as we all know, any investment of public money approved by the House of “Representatives” must somehow be for the benefit of the only two parties to be represented therein. So instead of building an Opera House for the cultural enrichment of one and all, what do our MPs (Maltese Philistines) want to build? A new House of Parliament, of course. So they can carry on gorging themselves on all this country’s assets from the comfort and luxury of a brand new building. So that the Prime Minister’s vision for 2015, whereby every last square inch of this country will be the Magnificent 65’s unique preserve, can finally begin in earnest.

So all things told, news of this week’s coup should really have come as no surprise, even though it is clear as daylight that the overwhelming majority in this country still has no idea of the enormity of what has just taken place under their noses.
I won’t bother explaining it myself. Suffice it to say that the two parties have between them just legislated to make it all but impossible for anybody but themselves to actually get into parliament, thereby perpetuating the Magnificent 65’s stranglehold on pretty much everything you care to name in this country. And… wa-hey-hey-hey! With the exception of the only two remaining political parties – both of whom made surprisingly weak remonstrations against this state of affairs – as well as the occasional maverick political commentator ensconced within the English language press, nobody even noticed.
Now what was I saying earlier about people getting the sort of government they deserve...?