There’s a real risk that popular anger will spill over

Popular anger against the government is mounting, not before time and with more than enough reason. But it is popular anger at the corruption of politicians, at criminal and sordid business involvement with politicians, and at politicians who are clearly in it for themselves.

The ones who are in government are the obvious focus, because they’re the ones subverting institutions and public departments to their own personal ends and those of their cronies. But there is a very real risk that this mounting anger will spill over onto the Opposition if there is even the slightest perception that they are going to end up in bed with the likes of that coarse, corrupt and avaricious lout, Silvio Debono, or that other money-hungry bogan, Sandro Chetcuti, who speaks about “the building industry” and “how important” it is to Malta, as though quarrying stone, making concrete, piling it up into ugly shapes and selling them, destroying the environment, is somehow akin to developing the iPhone.

People have had it up to here, and for every avaricious individual who “has to eat” by selling citizenship or renting flats as fictitious addresses for passport applicants, for every corrupt bogan like Silvio Debono, there are many hundreds more who right now would like to see the lot of them shot at dawn or flushed down the lavatory of their own ghastly greed.

Simon Busuttil is nothing like that, but he has got to make it clear to those around him that they have got to toe the line or get out, that it is not about them and their personal political fiefdoms and desires or their need “to eat”, and that if building up their billing list and favour bank is more of a priority to them than pulling out all the stops to make sure Muscat and his criminals are not elected again next year, even if it means they have to go hungry instead of eating, then they had better leave now before they help plunge Malta into an even blacker hole in 2018 than it is in now.