Unbelievable! Here are two of Joseph Muscat's starving protestors
Kurt Sansone of The Times (who else) took the trouble to quiz some of the people at Labour’s protest rally yesterday, which he describes as having been attended by thousands.
It looked more like several hundreds to me, but then I might not be that good at reckoning, unlike Kurt.
Here is one of the starving protestors he quotes:
Stacy Bartolo, 21
“Today’s wage is not enough to cope with the high cost of living. Young people, who are relatively new to the labour market, do not earn good wages. I work in Valletta and apart from the rising cost of diesel I will soon have to pay for the park-and-ride service. Diesel has been rising every month for almost a year but we only got a wage rise of just €1.16 per week.”
That’s right. She’s 21 years old, has a car and a job, and was at the protest because the price of diesel has gone up and now she has to pay for the ‘park and ride’ scheme. Take the bus, Stacy! Everyone else does, at your age, everywhere else in the world unless they’re starring in Beverly Hills 90210.
Incredible.
And here’s another one.
Tereża Briffa, 58
“I might not be as badly hit as others but I feel I have to voice my concern. On television they advertise a healthy lifestyle and tell you to eat five fruits and vegetables every day but with the price of food shooting up it is impossible for people to do so. We have European prices but our wages are not at the same level. I shudder to think how people with children can cope. If the government listens to our grievances it should do something to alleviate the burden.”
What does this woman imagine – that the government is responsible for the prices of fruit and vegetables? That Joseph Muscat will order greengrocers to sell at a loss, or increase taxation so that he can give free fruit and vegetables to whiners?
No, Tereza Briffa, it is not impossible to buy the five pieces of fruit and veg that you need to eat every day. Fruit and vegetables in season are some of the cheapest foods on the market. You don’t have to buy out-of-season imported peaches.
The trouble is that some people think that fruit is a luxury but mobile-phone cards and bottled water are not.
I was recently most irritated by a woman with four children, who can barely make ends meet, who complained because she can’t keep up with buying bottled water for a family of six. ‘Tell them to drink water out of the tap,’ I felt like saying in irritation, but didn’t.
If that was good enough for me while I was growing up (and the water tasted of salt) and good enough for my children during the frequent periods when money was really tight while they were growing up, then it’s certainly good enough for you and yours. But of course, I said nothing, because you can’t.
God, was I fuming – especially when I found out that her husband smokes two packets a day and has a scratch-card habit, but apparently that’s OK and not part of l-gholi tal-hajja or anything you can whine about.
And why is that? Because then she’d have to face up to the fact that he’s part of the problem, but she doesn’t want to do that and risk confrontation and conflagration, so it’s much easier to project her resentment outwards.
‘We have European prices but our wages are not at the same level’ – Ms Briffa, we have neither European prices nor European wages.
We don’t have European wages precisely because we don’t have European prices. And what do you mean by European, anyway – Bucharest or central London? I don’t think you’ll like the European wages in Romania, or the fact that they can’t buy you much because of the European prices in the shops. And you might like the European wages in Stockholm, but the European prices would give you a heart attack.
This Ms Briffa needs to get out more and notice that nowhere that I have seen but Malta do people buy their fruit and veg by the abundant basketful, off a pick-up piled high with stuff that sells so fast nobody bothers to stack it in neat and attractive pyramids.
Fruit is sold by the piece ‘in Europe’ more often than it is sold by the kilo, and people buy by the piece. Try and buy one banana off a truck here and see what sort of reaction you get. Everywhere else, it’s normal – and that’s why tourists try to do it here, and not because they’re qammelin. It’s because they expect fruit to be as expensive here as it is back home.
The trouble is not that people can’t afford to buy food but that they don’t know what to buy or how to cook it. You can eat well in Malta really cheaply – but then you do need to know how to cook properly. Sadly, the sort of people who were at that protest are still cooking what their grandmothers did and widening their repertoire with ready-meals bought frozen. There’s life beyond minestra and mqarrun fil-forn, would that they but knew it.
44 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
They do not know that they have it so good.
In my case I was between jobs back in 1998 at the time following the demise of the Sant government. In two years, with his opposition to EU membership, jobs in finance were hard to come by.
With a degree in banking and two years as an investment advisor I still couldn’t find a decent job. I had to settle for a data input clerk for a period of 6 months after which I just dropped out and started my own business.
Notwithstanding the difficult circumstances we are living in, the private sector has continued to grow unabated. There are still plenty of jobs for everyone and wages have grown too.
Investors are quite confident, so much so that even prominent Labour politicians are investing in their own businesses, like Marlene Mizzi and Marlene Pullicino.
Stacy doesn’t seem aware that in Spain 40% of people her age are unemployed. She has a job, owns a car… but wants cheaper diesel.
Fsied.
You just don’t believe this “her husband smokes two packets of cigarettes and then his wife whines about living expenses and that she can’t cope with rising prices”.
[Daphne – The problem is that they see smoking as a fixed cost, not as a self-inflicted problem and expense that can be eliminated with will-power and commitment.
You would be surprised at what sorts of things have become fixed costs for those on low incomes: cars and diesel, for one. Gel nails, for another. Twenty-two years ago already, I had a conversation with somebody in a similar situation who listed her fixed outgoings for her family of four children. One of them was a daily tube of hair-gel. I could barely afford to buy the daily basic groceries at the time, and remember thinking – what? Hair gel? You buy hair gel, and every day?
But what I’ve noticed over the years is exactly this, that those who are really middle class (and by that I mean factors that have nothing to do with income) are more able to identify what’s strictly unnecessary and dispense with it in times of financial trouble, because they have no embarrassment about doing so. They are secure in their social identity and they know that not buying bottled water will not have them defined as the underclass.
But people who are or were raised working-class or underclass equate ‘doing without’ with the poverty they have so recently escaped, and so turn non-essentials into fixed costs (essential because they shore up their new identity and status), fighting any suggestion that they might give them up until matters improve.]
Well at least it is not she who has the habit of smoking. I know housewives or better still, domestic engineers, who sit at home and don’t get a job because they still think li l-mara toqghod id-dar halli x’hin jigi r-ragel isib il-platt fuq il-mejda, u barra minhekk x’hin tidhol il-paga jaghtijilha kollha ghax missierha hekk kien jaghmel m’ommha.
You know what, I get frustrated with the fact that this person tells me everyday, oh how expensive life has become; I can’t cope with these expenses. She smokes two packets of cigarettes a day, lives off our taxes because she is a single mother, her partner comes and goes and gives her his wage (ghax missierha hekk kien jaghmel m’ommha, issa dan mhux zewgha), and then she whines that she can’t make ends meet.
Ma, x’injoranza ta’ nies. Instead of moving her ass out of that sordid government apartment and going to work she spends the whole day on her balcony discussing the cost of living. Imma ma nohorgux nahdmu ta, ghax il-mara mhux ghalhekk mahluqa. Il-mara mahluqa biex toqghod id-dar. Jien ma rridx immur cleaner.
She wants to choose what she does for a living, too, after sixteen years of free schooling that got her nowhere. She does not want to clean other people’s houses. Well, nifhima, because it is not worth earning a minimum wage when the postman brings your social benefits to your door.
Our Prime Minister should not support abusive systems which escalated along the years.
So the more children you bring into the world when you can’t afford to raise them, the more benefits you get if you are a single parent or just unemployed.
I have to agree, Daphne. I grew up in the UK, at the time of just three TV stations that then wonderously became four with the advent of Channel 4. Around the same time or slightly after, satellite TV came into play, but due to the limited choice (I think it was Sky, then BSB, which then became BSkyB) it really wasn’t cheap.
However – you could guarantee that the dole-wallers, all routinely ‘signing on’ week in, week out and picking up their benefit cheques, buying their 20/40 Embassy or Regal fags daily, spending every evening in the pub (I worked in one, I know), and constantly whingeing about not being able to bum enough off the state in order for their family to live in the lap of luxury, ALL – WITH BARELY ANY EXCEPTION, had a dish affixed to the facade of their COUNCIL house.
A similar thing is painfully evident in Malta today, although the luxuries and commodoties availed of have changed somewhat. What a shame.
Not to mention the best cars and the most expensive 4x4s bang in the middle of the council housing estates.
The clever ones who paid a pittance for their home under the buy-your-council-home scheme from the Thatcher years have sold up and made a killing, multiplying the value 6 or 7 times. Not a bad investment out of public funds.
[Daphne – 4 x 4s in the middle of council estates: nobody has yet sought to try and estimate the multiplier effect of illegal drug dealing. We have the highest per capita number of heroin addicts in the EU, alongside Italy and Austria, cocaine dealing is rife, and yet nobody bothers to find out where the money is going.]
I especially agree with the gel nails comment. Why do half the women here have to walk around sporting 10-inch talons (which are exorbitantly expensive and have to be maintained every few weeks) and then complain about the price of milk going up? By my reckoning, if you can afford nails, milk shouldn’t be a problem.
No, we don’t have European wages, but then if I expect European wages, I’ll also understand that I have to pay for what goes with them.
Stacy, I was working at 18 and I didn’t have a car. I used to hitch a ride into Valletta every day on some cart or fishmonger’s van, and that’s if they bothered to stop and pick me up.
Nahseb li jekk taghlqu hallqkom taghmlu iktar figura.
There isn’t even any need to drink tap water – local bottled water is ridiculously cheap and given away left right and centre at most supermarkets to all those customers who somehow still seem to have trolleys loaded to capacity, almost invariably with ready burgers, bun and all – and always seem to pay in cash.
I often feel all eyes on me as I often only need a hand basket, and when I do use a trolley it seems miserably empty compared to others.
Then there is what I call the meat mentality – many people can’t believe we don’t eat meat every day, or even every other day and this through choice. I wonder how many people at that protest believe no meal is complete without meat?
Finally, if you really want to know how much cheaper life is in the rest of Europe, ask other Europeans living here. I have several friends from countries like Belgium, France and The Netherlands living here.
Eventually the question always comes up – I ask them out of interest whether it really is more expensive here – the invariable answer is how much CHEAPER it is, true electricity is more expensive here, and wages higher on paper there, when you compare income tax (no tax free bands there) and other taxes, and the cost of food for one, rent for another (few people own their own homes there) and getting to work often involves at least an hour’s travel each way, and no ‘5 star hotels’ for government hospitals – their words not mine they are without exception amazed at our public health care – they find the lower wages found here still mean they have a far easier life.
Do you know what is really expensive in Malta and should not be? Fresh fish. For that matter even frozen local fish is way too expensive.
I really see no reason why fish, kilo for kilo, costs several times what meat costs.
[Daphne – I know. It’s horrendous. That’s because of demand and supply: high demand, relatively low supply. The restaurants and hotels take most of it on standing order, and we get to fight over the rest at high prices. But then again, you have to know how to buy. Sardines are dirt cheap and really good, but nobody buys them, for instance.]
From this week’s brochure of Netto Supermarket in Germany, which imports most of its fruits and vegetables from the Netherlands, Spain, Egypt, South Africa etc:
broccoli 1.38€/ kilo
zucchini 1.99€/ kilo
Brussel sprouts 1.79€/ kilo
strawberries 1.19€/ 250g
kiwi 0.11€ each
When it comes to German vegetables that are in season:
potatoes 4.99€/ 25 kilos
apples 1.99€/ 5 kilos
onions 1.99€/ 10 kilos
Your comment about Maltese vegetable vendors made me smile. When I buy produce from the woman who comes with her truck just outside my door I often just want a bit of everything – but in very small amounts because I cannot bear seeing fruit and vegetables rotting away in my house.
Moreover she is there twice a week and it is so convenient to have really fresh stuff and not have to put anything (except her gbejniet) in the fridge. I never need a kilo of anything but very often 200g of this and that and I see that she finds this irritating and sometimes she does not even bother to weigh when I pick up one aubergine, two green peppers, a few marrows, a few apples and a handful of spring onions.
She just quotes a price which is always about what a smoker would pay for a packet of 20. What on earth do the people who buy kilos of everything do with the stuff? Maybe they do so because it is so inexpensive.
[Daphne – Read Taste magazine, out on 6 February with The Malta Independent on Sunday, and you’ll have more than enough ideas.]
Oh, BTW I see that you must be typing and posting fast because I’ve spotted a few mistakes / typos which is not typical of you :-)
[Daphne – Yes, too much to do.]
Almost 25 years of successive PN governments have produced a nation of spoilt brats.
It is high time we had a five-year wage freeze, substantial levels of unemployment and shortages across the board. It is much easier to make ends meet if there is hardly anything to buy.
I firmly believe that if the electricity and water supplies are turned off one day in five the relevant bills will drop by twenty percent overnight.
Also, all mobile telephones should be made illegal thus reducing our fixed costs substantially. Anyone who feels he is entitled to a mobile will have to apply (enclosing a backhander) for a ministerial licence.
No one should be allowed to travel abroad with more than fifty euros spending money. Anything more than that is a drain on the economy. I could go on and on with suggestions.
We have had all of this in the not so distant past but people have a short memory. We urgently need to revisit that state of affairs.
It seems to me that we have had too much of a good thing.
Yes, and we should put those bastards (import agents) in jail and go back to bulk buying.
That’s when the government decides for you what to buy, when, how much and at what price.
And if you bitch about it, a good thorough beating will set you straight.
You’re quite right. Today I had to sit at the hair-dresser’s listening to a young woman complaining of a myriad of short-comings at the university and lack of parking places for the students.
Well, my dear girl, I would gladly have traded a lack of parking place with a lack of courses and gladly have welcomed ‘only’ 11 hours of library time instead of threats, beatings and tear-gas. These kids have no idea how good they have it.
[Daphne – And the money to pay to get your hair done….how many students outside Malta do that?]
I agree 100% with Anthony.
Those born after 1975 have absolutely no idea what it means to live under Labour.
We have a situation where the leader of the opposition himself was too young in the 80s to experience the best of Mintoff/KMB in the workplace and other social spheres. By the time he was a teenager at San Alwigi in the late 80s and 90s Eddie Fenech Adami was in power so he proceeded comfortably to uni.
So he’s glorifying an era of which his only experience is hearsay from his Mintoffian nanna! He’s touching a deep chord with most Laboursupporters though, especially those younger than he is, who know nothing but luxuries and are spoilt brats (only thanks to Fenech Adami and Gonzi) but who believe that all they have is thanks to Mintoff because that’s what their parents believe.
They can’t wait to have “their” party back in power so that all their problems may be solved. Manna from Burmarrad!
Does anyone know which school the offspring go to? Mhux tal-Gvern zgur because that’s not posh enough.
[Daphne – San Anton School in Mselliet, where my children were. They tried the lottery for the Convent of the Sacred Heart, but weren’t successful (imagine that, trying to get a free private education when you can pay for it). He gives up his salary increase as a show of solidarity with the starving worker, says that ministers are insensitive because they accepted a salary increase, and then doesn’t bother to tell the starving worker that he pays around Eur6,000 in private school fees instead of sending his children to the local state school like they do. Rest assured that Soleil and Etoile are never going to be seen before the cameras in their school uniform.]
Anyone else watched Xarabank yesterday? A woman was complaining about how 1 wage is not able to sustain a family of 8. Yes, 8. Two of the children are above 20 years old. The only thing I could think as I heard her was, “WTF?”. Go out and work, and get the older kids to help out as well.
All my friends abroad used to have part-time jobs stacking supermarket shelves while doing their degrees.
A packet of condoms a few years ago would have been an amazing investment for this family.
You’re being unfair. With 8 children, unless you want to abandon your children to daycare, a mother cannot work. Yes, times are very hard with 8 children and one salary. Condemning this family shows how you value children and the educating and caring role of a stay-at-home-mother.
[Daphne – Katrin, people who don’t have money shouldn’t have eight children. I know that in some northern European states, people with eight children live comfortably off benefits. In fact, I know one German man – a friend from long ago – who has eight children and neither he nor his spouse work because their benefits are so generous. But that means that everyone else has to pay a punitive amount of tax to keep the system afloat.]
Sure. Ideally you budget how many children you can afford. That is why middle class families with high expectations and standards have the lowest amount of children, if any. How do you weigh or outweigh?
By the way – our “punitive amount of tax” is 5% lower than what we would pay in Malta for the same salary.
I’m sorry but the more children you have, the more you need to work and much more money is needed. I think this is just common sense. In my opinion a mother of 8 should work more than the rest of us.
She’s quoting her great leader verbatim. Here he is, in The Times a few days ago:
“The Maltese were paying European prices when they were not being paid European wages, Labour leader Joseph Muscat said this morning.”
Well, we’ve always known that if the party didn’t put thoughts into their heads they wouldn’t have any.
“and not paying European taxes”, he may well have added, but didn’t because we’re all supposed to be on holiday and everything is free and he (the government) should pay for it all.
Oh dear, oh dear … what a sad sight on Xarabank yesterday. The PM resorting to unconvincing rheotoric and brandishing some sort of medical equipment smugly at the camera to support his arguments… I couldn’t help wonder what happened to the brilliant orator who swayed masses just a few months ago?
Let me elucidate. I am not going to set Joseph Muscat as the benchmark to gauge the Prime Minister’s strategy and vision. The latter is streets ahead and the gulf in political stature will never be bridged (even if history has shown us repeatedly that this is not necessarily a winning card).
The benchmark which should be set is the Prime Minister in 2008. Today’s Prime Minister is a pale imitation of his 2008 self – painfully and perenially defensive, stuttering and gripping at straws and exhibiting convulted statistics and newspaper snippets to back his policies. At one point, I half expected him to conjure up some white rabbit from a breast pocket.
Most notably, the Prime Minister, yesterday, dismally failed to explain why, (despite the repurcussions of the global recession which, by his own admission are still ongoing) it is prudent to renege on the electoral promise on lowering the income tax brackets, but still OK for Ministers to get a payrise.
This smacks of incoherence to me – but I remain open to perusaion on the contrary.
[Daphne – Simple (but you can always check with Tony Zarb): once a pay rise is agreed upon and has begun to be paid out, it can’t be taken away. I’m with you on the fact that the increase comes across as insensitive, but then I’m cursed with the kind of reasoning that tells me having the ministers earn less is not going to help me earn more or give me cheaper bills.]
These are difficult times for many people in the world and Malta has a prime minister who is working diligently to steer us from trouble that other countries are experiencing.
Maltese people are so unappreciative. I think ignorant is a more fitting adjective. What would people say if they are told ‘No TVs, no computers, no internet, no mobile phones, no running water in the house, and no money to buy a car, no money to travel with Norman Hamilton and Korpi careers as the future for young people’? Under MLP we experienced these hardships.
May the good Lord illuminate the Maltese people.
It’s true that governments can’t solve everyone’s problems. But our governments, whether Labour or Nationalists, keep on harping that they have all the solutions.
They protect us from the cradle to the grave. So they have themselves to blame for marketing themselves as mini ‘gods’. We have the best hospitals, the best schools, the lowest inflation rate, the lowest unemployment rate and so on….. the reality is that governments are weak and as Europe ages it will be harder to make a living here. The future lies in the orient and developing nations. Times are changing.
European wages? Just yesterday I was watching RAI and they were interviewing FIAT workers in Poland. There is a factory there employing around 6000 on 8-hrly shifts. These were just stating (not complaining) that their salary was around 500 Euros per month – the minimum wage in Malta as of July 2010 was of 660 Euros.
But they felt happy (and lucky) to have a job, a bus to take them to work and a small (4 roomed) rented house!
And here we complain when no one really earns just the minimum wage as they either have decent subsidies or work part-time (and maybe earn more than most of us).
Starving, aye, but for that power house that is Castille.
It seems that we’ve never had it this good.
Am I the only one who gets stuck in the traffic in the evenings especially at the weekends in winter and practically every evening in the summer?
[Daphne – No, you’re not. I have a bird’s eye view of the traffic jammed solid along the Burmarrad road to Bugibba, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening in winter and every evening in summer.]
And am I also the only who finds difficulty in booking a meal at various restaurants all over the island?
Daphne, I have to ask you this: what’s wrong with minestra and imqarrun il-forn?
[Daphne – Nothing at all. I can’t stand minestra, which is the truly awful result of mismatched veg thrown into a pot and boiled to extinction – even when made well it is horrid. I like mqarrun fil-forn, though. But that wasn’t my point. It was that Maltese housewives had a limited repertoire of dishes and that there is no longer need for that because we have more ingredients available, can afford them, and also can use them in more effective ways. Yet still minestra is a thrice-weekly (bleugh) staple. Why? Why not just make pumpkin soup one day and courgette soup the next, for heaven’s sake? Why that pungent, stinking mess? But anyway….]
The thought of the stench of traditional minestra, or even worse, kawlata, makes me gag. I was sometimes forced to eat the brown mush.
LOVE minestra and most food, except certain fish and horsemeat.
But, to get back to cost of living here, it’s only cars that are ludicrously more expensive than almost anywhere else in the world. Only in Denmark do they cost (slightly) more (and you’d have a job persuading me Danish salaries are remotely comparable with ours).
Sopra i corni, we have the worst roads and the worst driving and the most traffic to enjoy our ultra-expensive vehicles with.
I would love to know how on earth a girl with low wages manages to buy and run a car in the first place.
The first time I went to a hairdresser for a setting was when I got engaged, the second when I got married. We only used to go for a hair cut normally.
No child would have their hair cut professionaly. Nail technicians didn’t exist and I had never even heard of the words beautician and make up artist.
Most of our clothes were made by a local dressmaker or some relation who thought she knew how to sew.
And our kitchens by a carpenter in a little work shop.
No one would even dream of going to an interior designer (if they existed) or plan lighting systems. We just had central lighting. Maybe one paraffin heater and one fan.
Restaurants were for celebrations. By the age of 21 I had been to a restaurant maybe five times. Evenings out were spent at Ghar-id-dud, the cinema , Bonello’s Kiosk, Golden Harvest.
Never heard of bottled water, central heating, a/c, more than one telephone or TV per household, convenience food, boutiques, articles/clothes tal-ditta, changing things simply because a new model comes out.
If the youngsters in their twenties lived the way we lived they wouldn’t have any money problems.
Sorry – rant over.
I don’t imagine anyone would think it’d make sense to go back to the old ways, but I have often wondered how so many nail technicians, beauty salons, spas, and hairdressing salons can survive in an island of fewer than half a million, half of whom have never heard of grooming.
@ Daphne
In a previous post, I made it clear that the current salary earned by Ministers is laughable and I have, in principle, no qualms in an increase to a more respectabe and equitable threshold. I stand by my words. It is the TIMING of the increase that is irksome.
That – and the fact that whilst an electoral promise on an income tax decrease can be brushed aside swiftly (and rightly so) due to unprecedented economic recession, somehow the Prime Minister feels its fine to press on relentlessly for a salary increase for Ministers.
And sorry, but saying that the increase had been resolved in 2008 and that the Labour Party was privy to it.is irrelevant. So what? If we are not through the woods yet, then reconsider. A re-think was done for income tax, so why not for a Ministerial salary?
At one point on Xarabank, the Prime Minister even had the affrontary to label the adjustment in salaries a “cost-saving measure” since the number of Ministers had been decreased! This is the sort of “reasoning” I tend to associate with say.. Anglu Farrugia.
Sure, Ministers earning less won’t help me pay my bills – but a decrease in my income tax, certainly will.
It all depends how much each measure costs. By how much do you think your income tax would decrease if the parliamentarians were to trade their collective raise to a reduction in our (and their) income tax contribution. I suspect it would not be more than a handful of euro annually. So all this hullabaloo is just a storm in an otherwise very calm teacup.
dery wrote that fish here is very expensive. I was in Corsica last summer, and the prices of fish there are very, very, very expensive. Bream was 25 euro a kilo. All kinds of fish there were three times more than in Malta. I took photos of the prices to show them to my friends. In Australia too fish is very expensive – nothing less than 17 dollars a kilo.
Well, and I’ve just been to Venice and the fresh fish (I mean seafood too) in the markets was much cheaper and abundant than in Malta. The prices of fish in the restaurants were what I’d pay in a good restaurant in Malta.
I have photos with the prices to prove it too.
And your point is? Some things will be cheaper, some things will be more expensive. That’s life. No one artificially keeps prices high unless they have a monopoly.
If fish is expensive in Malta, it’s because getting it to the customer is expensive. If it was cheaper, you’d probably have cheaper fish.
BTW, I mentioned Venice because it is reputed to be one of the expensive regions in Italy.
Lampuki (Lampughi in Italian) were more than 9 euros per kilo in Catania in November whilst in Malta they were only 2 euros.
Just go to my local butcher (when I am home) and see the poverty…… I go spastic having to wait because of the queue of people buying meat. It does my head in and I leave a list to pick up later.
That is very typical of the Maltese butchers. Always with a queue of people waiting to be served.
Do you know that Michelle and Joseph straight after protesting about l-gholi tall-hajja and families not coping went to have a lovely feast with a big group of people at Rubino in Valletta…very socialist of them.
[Daphne – Well, they chose one of my favourite restaurants. I find it fascinating how, when the Labour Party feels it is approaching power or has gained power, its leading lights begin to feel socially secure enough to start going to what they think are the tal-pepe haunts. I noticed this in 1996. We used to go to Peppino’s in St Julian’s in the evenings back then. Suddenly, one night after the general election, a crowd from Super One pushed through the doors and settled around the bar. It was like ‘Now we can come here’. But they could have gone there before; nobody would have bothered.]
Tajba din – mela din Stacy Bartolo marret wkoll tintaqa u teqred mal-reporter tal-KULLHADD, ohrog l-ghageb semmiet affarajiet ohra minn dawk li qalet lil Kurt.
Jaqaw il-Belt go demostrazzjoni ikunu qed jithallsu min jigi intervistat.
Kemm teqred din Stacy, mur giba kienet tghix 30 sena ilu xkienet taghmel l-anqas bicca cikkulata ma kont issib. Eqred eqred, Maltese gemmgemm.
Why do so many people still think that compared to the rest of Europe, Maltese wages are low, and cost of living is high? It’s the hidden costs that nobody sees.
Council tax, parking, health costs etc etc. For example, someone living in the south-east of England may have a decent wage, but deduct a season train ticket (which can easily hit £1500 a year), parking (sometimes you have to take your car to the station and park it before catching the train (easily another £800).
Then you’re at work, you have to eat right? Well that’s not cheap either. Oh and at home you have to pay for central heating, electricity (it’s not just expensive in Malta), council tax and so on. What you are left with is not that much. Try catching a bus anywhere else in Europe for 47c for example (is that the price now?).
In Italy plenty of children are being turned away by the state kindergartens as they are full. So several parents are sending their kids to private schools for this simple reason and not because they are rich or they want to seem posh.
At least in Malta this problem doesn’t exist yet, and the state schools are accommodating everyone. People like Tereza think that ‘abroad’ there is someone working miracles for the citizens or that everybody in other EU countries is earning millions.