In the beginning was the word and the word came from Joseph. Our first full calendar year under Labour, after a sad, long absence, is truly worth celebrating. It tells a lot about a country’s survival skills, though not so much about its electoral choices.

Labour started the year with a stumble. Fresh into power, their first great plan was to sell European passports like they were coffee mugs of Dear Joseph on the monti. It didn’t go down well and, after some juggling and haggling, the European Commission gave in. We’re selling their passports.

No one emerged any much the wiser from the debacle. The government’s deal with Henley & Partners on the passport sales is still a secret, like the two other deals signed with that great democracy, Azerbaijan, in addition to deals with Shanghai Electric and Electrogas and a communist China deal on a monorail.

Quite a list of Rumsfeld-style known unknowns are emerging from a government elected on a promise of transparency; not that many are bothered.

The water and energy bills have been miraculously cut without the need to build a new power plant. Joseph Muscat managed to pull a Cana marriage trick, except it wasn’t wine that came pouring out but votes by the bucket full at that resounding Labour victory at the EP elections in March. Electoral choices are clearly not this country’s strongest point.

These past 52 weeks have been a true helter-skelter, Labour style, knowing not what to expect the next day because clearly neither does the government.

It is government by impulse that uses secrecy to create a sense of intrigue and the impression that it knows what it is doing and that it would reveal all when the time is right. Dom Mintoff worked very much the same secret way, except his approach was one of disdain towards the electorate. He knew what he was doing.

The faces out on the street tell you that people still hope that this government too knows what it is doing because the alternative would be too much to bear and too high a price to pay.

Theirs is a desperate hope because any faith in this government should have been dashed for good when the power station project turned out to be one extended bluff.

If Labour cannot deliver on its most basic promise, it cannot deliver much of anything else.

The government has not recovered from that blow, nor will it ever. The Mallia meltdown that followed exposed the sheer weakness of the façade that has been built.

Our Prime Minister is a great salesman but nothing much else.

Nevertheless, it was a positive year for some.

Nationalist turncoat Cyrus Engerer is happily away in Brussels, having done his part in pulling the gay horde to Labour.

Willie Mangion is probably still looking for garages and Lou Bondì will continue to organise national events to entertain the crowds, just like the Caesars of old organised the games in the coliseum to alienate the people.

It was also a year where we saw a prime minister’s wife bloom into a true first lady. She’s all over the place now, literally, beaming charm and compassion for the needy. She is a unique woman, protocol wise.

And if that wasn’t enough of a bonanza, we got all sorts of new families too this year, thanks to a Civil Liberties Minister who doesn’t own farmhouses, only companies.

Her Civil Unions Bill turned out to be the legalisation of gay marriage, with adoption rights thrown in.

Labour does not look like it will ease in any way. As for fading, there seems little hope of that just now

It is not the law that makes marriage but love, our Prime Minister told us, in a naïve flashback to that 1960s dream.

No wonder he was so keen to go to San Francisco the last time he was in US.

Except that Muscat’s Labour is not after flower power but just power, achieved through populist policies that verge on the irresponsible.

At the top of the government’s agenda for the next year is the legalisation of marijuana in the guise of wanting to avoid sending our innocent youths to jail over weed possession.

In Labour’s San Francisco, anyone who gets caught with marijuana will just pay a fine and all is forgotten. Compassionate Labour won’t be sending drug abusers to jail but on the road to hell. There is a lot to expect in the New Year, much of it with dread.

Muscat will continue to learn from his mistakes. He has been learning quite a bit on the job and, hopefully, so has the electorate.

He keeps promising to do better but better is not enough when the bar is already so low.

Instead of delivery, next year there will be recycled promises of monorails, bridges, tunnels, breakwaters, land reclamations and high-rise buildings, Dubai style.

Building scheme boundaries will be tweaked to undo the injustices made by those nasty Nats, which really translates into turning green areas into building zones for Labourites.

But who can afford not to be a Labourite nowadays? We shall be rewriting the planning authority’s Jungle Book next year.

Our Economy Minister, Chris Cardona, has promised us the first ‘Islamic investment’ in 2015, whatever that means. His casino project got off on a bad start but it has been raining investment projects since he took the helm, or so he says.

Compared to the arrogant Nationalists, he’s poles apart, speaking of which our Justice Minister plans to regulate gentlemen’s clubs and their pole dancers next year. First rule for gentlemen’s clubs: no photos of policemen, or else.

There’s more to keep us excited, like the Equalities Minister’s Sexual Identity Bill that will enable us all to change our sex and experiment as often as we like through a mere notarial deed. We are all so liberal now, the envy of Europe.

For law-breakers, there will more amnesties, of course. We’ve already had electricity thieves walking off scot-free after tampering with smart meters.

Then those Armier squatters got their get-out-of-jail-free card, so there is no reason why our government would not continue to show mercy and benevolence next year.

First in line are hunters in possession of stuffed birds that should not have been shot.

It is not an amnesty, our inappropriately titled Animal Rights Parliamentary Secretary has assured us. Of course, it isn’t.

There’s one thing we won’t be getting next year and that’s whistleblowers, not after those leaks from the police control room that shattered the government and made it lose its nerve.

People want to put their minds at rest that their private data is protected, our government says. That’s Labour speak for you: it means the noose will tighten.

Fear follows next and two people from the Labour camp have admitted it’s already here.

Writing on Facebook, the chief editor of the General Workers’ Union newspapers gave vent to his frustrations at the way the government was handling Malliagate.

Sandro Mangion wasn’t complimentary towards the government his employer blindly supports and he got many reactions.

Some, he said, preferred to contact him privately and told him they wanted to put a ‘like’ on his post but were afraid. Really?

Pseudo-rebel and Labour backbencher Marlene Farrugia wrote in a similar vein in her weekly column on The Malta Independent.

She acknowledges the “insults” she gets on the social media but then refers to the “thousands of others (who communicate with me privately for fear of persecution!!!)”.

She didn’t really have to use so many exclamation marks. Anyone who lived under Labour knows what fear is.

Personally, the New Year will start on a sour note as I shall be quitting smoking, again. I know the urge will eventually ease and then fade out.

That, however, will not make life any better.

Labour does not look like it will ease in any way and, as for fading, there seems little hope of that just now.