I know Arriva have many problems but they are a modern transport service which I have found as good as any in other countries including England and Italy. In fact the service is better than where I live in the UK. The price is reasonable too.

I hope you don’t end up with a worse service.

Then The Times came in with a campaign that targeted car-drivers, who are usually miffed at Arriva’s larger (and not only the bendy-) buses and who, in truly Maltese style, see no reason why they should park or drive in a way that allows buses carrying thirty people or so to have a decently smooth journey rather than keep stopping and waiting for only-in-Malta drivers blocking traffic.

You see, in Malta we have no respect for the collective – whatever it may be – in truly ‘JIEN hu Alla sidek’ fashion.

With its not-so-hidden agenda, The Times could never see that since July 2011:

1. we have public transport foreign visitors actually use;

2. that for the first time in our airport’s history we have direct and express public transport from the airport to Ċirkewwa, Rabat, St Julians/Sliema, Valletta, Vittoriosa, Marsascala and Birżebbuġa;

3. that disabled persons can now use public transport for the first time in Malta’s history;

4. that mothers carrying children in pushchairs can board public transport with ease and safety;

5. that the elderly can use as many buses as they like over a whole week for just €2.30 ie what was Lm1;

6. that for €1.50 (Lm0.65) a day you can go wherever in Malta on buses that are much more decent and comfortable than the cattle lorries we had before;

7. that for the first time ever we had a night bus system operating all over Malta on Friday and Saturday nights that has just been STOPPED by minister Mizzi on the morrow of the budget;

8. that we have a public transport system running till 11pm daily and not to 9pm as happened up to 2011 to most villages; and

9. that a public transport system cannot be without defect, especially when Arriva was targeted for vicious only-in-Malta sabotage, but that there’s a difference between genuine criticism and an agenda to destroy Austin Gatt for reasons well-known to The Times’s management.

Arriva has had enough of Malta and our petty agendas as well as the Labour Party’s very serious agenda to give public transport to people it has been in cahoots with long before the general election.

The withdrawal date being touted by people within Arriva and close to Joe Mizzi’s ministry is the 15th March.

I hope that lower-income people, mostly genuine Laburisti, who don’t just use but also depend on the public transport system, will come to see how corrupt the party they support actually is when it has been trying, for more than two years now, to destroy a public transport system that is now objectively better and cheaper than the old cattle transport system ever was in the last 40 years.

The Times tried to destroy Austin Gatt for reasons well known to The Times’s management. If the public transport reform had been in some other minister’s hands, The Times would have taken a different stance. But then, perhaps, public transport reform would never have happened.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20111128/local/Labour-leader-in-sales-pitch-for-businesses.395874

I agree with you. Yet, I believe that once the Arriva adventure in Malta is concluded, it would be Arriva which would have done more damage to The Times, rather than the other way round. I’m speaking in terms of credibility.

Interesting times ahead.

Not to mention the foul language in full face of the Verbum Dei Caro Factum Est.

What better alternatives are there in the Labour gene pool? Pretty homogenous in base mediocrity.

Touché, Daphne.