The strands that make up Malta are twisted this way and that especially in mid-summer.
There is, as Italian television never stops reminding us, the migrants' crisis with Italian coastguard ship Diciotti still in Catania's harbour with over 150 migrants with scabies on board and unable to let them disembark, stopped by a blunt order from deputy premier Matteo Salvini. Italy, we learned yesterday, did not take, as it had promised, its share of migrants who had come with a previous ship and who consequently are still in Malta.
Italy is hardening its opposition to Brussels and Brussels, in turn, is hardening its stance regarding Italy as was shown by a blunt statement this week. Salvini is becoming an ogre in the EU and matters will worsen when he meets Hungary's Orban this coming week.
Where does Malta come in? It does come in especially if more migrants leave Libyan shores and all the hardship they face there. The template has now been set and it is unlikely Salvini will change his mind. He will try to push all migrants Malta's way, whether there are legal grounds for this or not. We have already taken in more, far more, than in previous years. I will be listening carefully this morning to the Prime Minister, expecting to hear him tell us what steps he has taken to send back the migrants who came here from Salvini's Italy and who cannot work here. And, possibly, tell us how he intends to stop them coming here as well.
The migrants' issue is only one of the issues that are worrying the Maltese these days, although the issue gets to the top of what people worry about especially in those towns with a high presence of migrants.
Next to it and related to it are the problems faced by communities with a high presence of non-Maltese, especially those from EU countries, who, fleeing the unemployment in their own countries of origin, come here and accept to work at wages inferior to those paid to Maltese.
These people live in rented accommodation and share the rent. They manage on their meagre wages by cramming as many people as possible into the accommodation they find. They are happy and the owners are happy too. It is the Maltese couples that are not happy because they cannot match the rent and do not want to cram four or six people in an apartment.
So the migrant problem ends up affecting almost everyone. The pluralistic and multinational society, so praised just a few months back, is becoming a terrible reality which ends up with the Maltese again getting the short end of the stick.
To an average Maltese, life is tolerably pleasant unless he looks too closely. The average wages are low, kept low by the foreign workers. There is full employment but at almost rock-bottom wages. Employment is further skewed by the number of people employed by the government or in one of its many agencies, all depending on patronage. This has been the situation for decades but it is not getting any better.
The country is in a mess, with construction everywhere and cranes dominating the skyline and with the countryside getting smaller and smaller. The construction sector has taken over and it is now a race to the bottom.
We have recently refurbished bays which had to be curtained off for fear of collapse and a key bay in Gozo that has been declared off limits to bathers after it was flooded by rainwater and street rubbish.
This concentration of people on such a small island increases stress levels and maybe too health dangers.
We are not living in a pleasant world - what with an American president intent on sparking trade wars and on the eve of being impeached himself, a Britain nearing Brexit with no idea what is going to happen after March, a Europe divided between populists and federalists and terrorism raising its ugly head in so many places.
Who is the person who will take up Malta's real interests and does so not for political gain but purely out of love for the country?
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