Mussolini was once quoted as saying that if one plucks a live chicken one feather at a time, it will not notice that it has become naked before it is too late.

Last week I described the fate of the Maltese labour force being plucked and reduced to being held in a chicken coop as a result of a low wage structure with the use of foreign low wage labour to serve as a constant threat should the natural requests for wage increases come about as a result of labour shortages.

The main protector of the Maltese labour force, the trade unions, were the first feathers to be plucked and are no longer there to protect workers from the clutches of greedy employers. There is no one to insist that wages should rise at the same speed as the cost of living, price of property and rents, or the price of boats in the marinas.

Had Maltese wages gone up, the first effect would have been to lower profits and return on investment. This would have led to a drive to increase productivity and reduce the labour force, freeing up more workers to fill the growing economy. This would in turn lead to even higher demands on wages as the pressure on the labour market increases, leading to higher productivity through training, waste management and robotisation.

Prices would also increase, hopefully eliminating the cheap mass tourism that is killing our towns and villages and overcrowding our beaches. Price them out and concentrate on better paying tourism that demands fewer but better tours, fewer but better restaurants, fewer but better hotels, fewer but better paid workers, thus reducing the need for so many foreign workers.

This is what normal countries do, where chickens have all their plumage and the normal checks and balances have not been plucked away.

But not in Malta. Here, a small cadre of contractors and company owners have pressured the government (pressure can take many forms, such as party contributions, importation of cheap labour and as many votes as possible) to simplify the control of labour importation, reduce workplace controls and allow the entry of dirty money, which is then laundered and recycled through the poorly controlled financial service industry.

When we realise how naked we all have become, there will be nothing left to do

Without functioning trade unions, the few at the top are allowed to rule the roost of plucked local labour and replacement foreign labour who do not have a vote.

The same happens in the sale of passports. Civil servants operating the scheme are featherless and there is little willingness to question, examine or control who buys a passport, the provenance of the applicants’ funds, their country of origin and the reasons they have left their country.

The plucking of the chicken goes on in the environment too, allowing petrol stations galore and high-rise buildings that break all norms of respect for the rest of us for the benefit of a few local and foreign speculators. Who cares about the featherless chickens? Give them a few thousand euros for the 100-year old townhouse with its glorious Victorian glass doors, lovely Maltese tiles, old wooden balconies and rooftop with balustrades and just pull them down to replace them with eight to 12-storey flatsijiet that look like chicken coops. Or worse still, build 25-40 floor monsters economically out of reach to the locals. Poor chickens, who cares?

What about the police and the army? They are there to act as outriders to ministerial carcades, to visiting dignitaries and to catch petty criminals. They are featherless chickens too. What used to be our proudest service one could rely on has become a tool in the hands of those few in control.

If the last bastions of hope in the chicken coop, the judges and the press, were to be plucked too – and the tendency is to do so feather by feather, exerting pressure, selecting only insiders, frightening or even killing those who dare protest – then the Mussolini theory would be proven right. The chickens would have all been plucked feather by feather.  And when we realise how naked we all have become, there will be nothing left to do.

History shows that even featherless chickens can have a say if they join up and act together against those doing the plucking. It has been done before. It will be done here in Malta too. With a little help from outside we might succeed to rid the hen coop of this plucking monster.

This essay will hopefully be read, translated into the languages of the resident diplomatic community here in Malta and sent home in a summary in the daily telegraphic e-mails that embassies send home to their foreign office.

If this does not happen then our resident foreign diplomats have become natives. This happens often in comfortable, cosy countries. Ambassadors who fail to be critical of the country of their posting are usually moved on to a hardship post. So, please colleagues, help us by informing your capitals of what is really happening here!

I know, since I was an ambassador too and did send home to Valletta daily information of what I was gleaning from Brussels, Luxembourg, Stockholm and Oslo, where I once represented my Maltese fellow citizens who were, in those days, still in full plumage without any risk of being plucked. They had not heard of the Mussolini theory and it did not apply to them.

It certainly does now.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador of Malta to the European Union.