This week, I’d like to start with a subject that is slightly out of the ordinary for me, even in my post-I. M. Beck incarnation. My eye was caught by a court report saying that a chap had been stung the (un)princely sum of €700 and had his licence suspended for two months after he had crunched a biker and caused him personal disability. Said eye was caught because, as I’ve had occasion to mention, I bike myself and any biker worth his salt looks on any other one as a brother or sister.

I think it will be taken as understandable, then, that when I took note of the paltry level of the fine and virtually token suspension of his driving licence I came to the conclusion that the guy found guilty, and therefore a convict, had got off lightly and then some.

Switching my intellect through my head rather than my heart, I have to point out that I was not in any way privy to the evidence that the magistrate took into consideration when arriving at the finding of guilt and establishment of punishment. For all I know, it may have been the case that the injured biker might, maybe, somehow also have been at fault, although the judgment, which I read in full, excludes this, and this may have been reflected in the punishment meted out.

It also has to be borne in mind that we’re only talking about the criminal court here; the convicted driver’s civil liability to make good the damages his crime caused remains unaltered. However, the extent to which folding money makes disability go away is, it need hardly be said, less than complete.

That said, my heart is winning over my head and strengthening my reaction, every time I drive – ultra-carefully – past some potential miscreant stuck in traffic in his/her four-wheeled pollution wagon, to look down on him/her as a potential bike (and biker) wrecker.

Sadly, punishments such as the one handed down to Peter Mamo, found guilty in the Magistrates’ Court of negligent driving and causing serious injury to John Pisani, go nowhere at all in reassuring me that car drivers will ever learn to give due care and attention to the fact that others use the road as well as them and without the benefit of iron and steel mobile cages, too.

Oh, well, by naming and shaming Mamo perhaps I’ve gone some way to shoving the lesson down their throats, which is far better than the gut-reaction many bikers get, which is to use their crash-helmets for other, less prophylactic, purposes.

For the sake of accuracy, Mamo still has the right to appeal, so he might be found not guilty after all.

You may have spotted me, in all my glory, on TVM last Tuesday, having a bit of a debate with Alfred Mifsud about the first year of Joseph Muscat’s Premiership. There were a couple of other blokes there; apparently they work for this estimable paper but the real stars were P’tit Moi and Alfred Mifsud, I’m sure you’ll agree.

It’s suddenly not a problem to have Johnny Foreigner at the table

It was, I’m told, a relatively civil discussion, though one of my fans congratulated me on my patience, which I take to mean that I was on occasion rendered perceptibly antsy by the contortions to which the government’s champions have to resort in deflecting the audience’s attention from the incontrovertible fact that Malta Tagħna Lkoll (Malta for all) has become, in 12 short months, the butt of many jokes.

My interlocutor, to be fair one of the best with whom I’ve had to joust, made many a valid point, not least of which was the one about how it wasn’t possible to judge the Government, and, thus, Muscat, on the basis of one-fifth of the legislature.

True, but when you remember that in the run-up to his stonking win, Muscat was promising heaven on earth, a myriad of nubile virgins and free beer to all and sundry, all nicely wrapped up in his slogan Malta Tagħna Lkoll (hollow laugh) it’s only fair that a measuring look is taken at his achievements, such as they are.

In the same way I was fair to him, I trust that Mifsud will nod in acknowledgment at one of my better cracks: when asked how I would rate the government’s energy-levels, I pointed out that they’re vastly energetic on telling us what they intend doing but more than slightly less so in actually getting it done. A bit like Arsenal, they don’t have strength in depth.

As newly-installed Cabinets do the world over, the reason why the pre-electoral chickens zooming in to roost are always shooed away is squarely dumped on the shoulders of the previous bunch.

The reciprocal of that little exercise, acknowledging that it was the efforts of the previous bunch that, for instance, ensured that the economy is not completely down the tubes and that tourism is still OK (perhaps because the minister wisely left things alone) is never, it need hardly be said, evident in the public pronouncements of Muscat and his ministers.

Asked how I rated Konrad Mizzi’s performance, with my tongue inhabiting my cheek, I said 10 out of 10, which I expected him to use in a press-release. What I meant was that he had lived up to his promise to reduce bills (or to tell us he’s reducing them, anyway). The viability of the exercise is so obscured in fond hopes and unbuilt power-stations, to say nothing of the effect of the hold that the Chinese now have on our sole source of energy, that my 10 out of 10 was obviously meant as a joke.

Mifsud’s closing sally, in our little debate, was such as to devalue his contributions up to then: he chose, although he was not there to represent anyone but himself (as was I), to reprise Labour’s tedious mantra about how everything revolves around the Nationalist Party.

He reminded us, with what I don’t think was a sheepish grin, that the PN is also celebrating an anniversary, it being a year since they went into Opposition and had they changed?

The obvious answer, from the end of the spectrum that Labour inhabits, is no, they haven’t, which may or may not be the case, and this is not my point. Is it possible that people of Mifsud’s intelligence, and there are many, don’t realise how tinny and empty this ditty sounds? Frankly, one fifth of the way into the legislature, who cares if the PN has changed, is changing, doesn’t see the need to change or whatever?

It is Labour, in government, that is more immediately relevant to us, the great in need of a shower.

It is Labour, in government, that is doing and saying things, on the micro and the macro levels, that had they been done or said during a PN administration would have had all hell breaking loose and all manner of imprecations raining down on us.

Remember the doom and gloom, for instance, when Mid Med Bank, one of a number of banks operating here, was sold? We’ve now sold a hefty chunk of our only energy provider (in many jurisdictions, that sort of shareholding is called “negative control”) and it’s suddenly not a problem to have Johnny Foreigner at the table.

Just a short one in closing, there was no story in Labour’s lawyer, my friend Pawlu Lia, not being present for a sitting in the vote counting case – these things happen to every busy lawyer at some point or other and only the uninitiated make anything of it.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20

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