Valletta market traders discover that you can’t trust Labour

Chris Cardona and his chief of staff Mario Azzopardi now have to start buying back licences from Valletta market traders

Valletta market traders have discovered rather too late in their lives that you can’t trust the Labour Party (or rather, its politicians).

Back before the general election, when people – aided and abetted by the Labour media machine and its army of elves and trolls on social media – were pouring scorn on the ‘cheese-grater’ and the ‘roofless theatre’, the Labour Party had no difficulty in promising the market traders a new position between that cheese-grater and roofless theatre.

Once more, they had fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda that the buildings were horrible and so why not put a market right there.

But now Parliament House and its surroundings are ready and complete (bar the garden in the city ditch, for which the government says it has no money despite increasing its payroll bill to the tune of 37 million euros a year) and they think it’s fantastic and are using it, they’ve changed their minds.

They’ve also changed their minds because of public outrage at having a market right there – because people in general have also revised their earlier propaganda-driven opinion about cheese-graters and roofless theatres.

So meeting the promise to the market traders, which they should never have made, is out of the question – though it’s bad enough that they’re going to stuff as many of them as they can into the other side of Ordnance Street.

To do this, they are going to have to pay 35 traders to give up their licences, so that the others will fit nicely into the street, and the traders are asking for something like 100,000 euros each. That’s another 3.5 million euros down the drain.

“We have been deceived. The government has gambled with our vote,” Julian Buhagiar of the association of Valletta market traders told Times of Malta. Other traders spoke to the newspaper of their “disbelief, shock and anger”.

“We have been thrown from the frying-pan into the fire and have been conned,” one of them said. “As a lifelong Labour supporter I never expected such treatment from this government.”

I didn’t quite understand that last bit. Did he expect special treatment from the Labour government because he is a lifelong Labour supporter, or does he mean that his fond belief in the virtues of the Labour Party prevented him from seeing that they are capable of doing something like this?