Making a rod for their own backs

They say that in Malta they're buying cars, not living in them

The Labour Party has filed a judicial protest – not the same as a civil suit, dear readers – on behalf of 17,600 ‘consumers’ who are demanding the return of VAT paid on their car registration tax.

So now we are no longer cittadini. We have become konsumaturi.

On 1 May at that Valletta rally, the Labour leader told us that the economy is going bust and that people are starving in the streets. Then on 2 May he issued a press release to all media telling us that 17,600 have bought cars.

Hang on a minute.

Those are just the ones who flocked behind his flag – in other words, a fraction of the total number.

That doesn’t sound much like a population on its uppers to me. While in the United States people are living in their cars because they’ve lost their homes, in Malta they’re buying cars and queuing up behind l-avukati tal-partit, Toni Abela and Spettur Farrugia, to get some tax back.

You almost wish those people would be hit with a real economic crisis so that they might find out what it means, instead of living the Disney life they do. But then the trouble is that we would all go down with the rest of them.

You know, this might sound perverse but if the brilliant legal minds at Mile End have found a way to fight this, with their 17,600 documents and their 17,600 witnesses, then I hope they win it.

By that time, Joseph Muscat will be prime minister and Charles Mangion will be Chancellor of the Exchequer and they’re the ones who will have to find that €50 million plus interest.

But then again, the trouble is that they’ll have to wrench it off the rest of us, robbing Peter to pay Paul – because the government, as we know, doesn’t make money. It can only take it.

This is excerpted from my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.