On 21 November, this paper reported that with three days left to go for Budget Day, there was still a “rather substantial shortfall” in the government’s stated target, listed in the Convergence Report it submitted to the EU months before. Though unreported at the time, that shortfall was around Lm19 million.

On that Saturday, talks with the social partners fell through. No agreement was registered on the principal measures of the Budget and the government was left on its own.

Three days later, the government announced the Budget we now know.

It seems that in those fatal three days the government was taken over by the same nemesis that brought down Alfred Sant in 1998: the civil servants, aided and abetted by incompetence in the parastatal corporations and the government’s own lack of political nous lashed with more than a tinge of arrogance and superficiality.

The result is what we see around us today. Government has now pushed the Budget through Parliament but that is not the end of things. On the contrary, this is just the beginning.

It is very hard today to find anyone who is in favour of the Budget measures. It is hard for the government to gauge and understand the sheer amount of anger there is in the country. To which we must add an equal dose of despair, considering the huge mistake that was Alfred Sant’s talk on the devaluation of the lira, that has overwhelmed the country. All Dr Sant had to do was to keep mum and point out the government’s many mistakes. Instead, he just had to contribute his own not inconsiderable one. One very cogent reason for the widespread anger is precisely that there seems to be no alternative, or at least no alternative that is any better.

Even as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, the country seems on the verge of a huge wave of industrial unrest. The unions are on the warpath and actions instead of waiting till after the New Year, actually begin tomorrow with the GRTU’s directives to gas distributors. One may think that this or other actions are unrelated, but basically they are all related, all triggered by post-Budget stress.

Obviously, the major battles relate to the GWU’s insistence that the removal of the weekend festivities be reversed, that collective agreements should be respected in full, and that a sort of compensation is granted for the other Budget measures.

Government, being government, will undoubtedly soldier on, continuing to spin out its own arguments, mentally preparing itself for the coming industrial strife. It does not seem, nor would one expect, the government to capitulate or to go to a conciliatory meeting with the unions especially now that the Budget has been approved.

Even more does it seem unlikely that government understands the anger, let alone reverses the other measures which have had an impact on the whole of society, not just on the working class, such as the pernicious Lm10 departure tax on anybody leaving the island.

The worrying conclusion to which one must come is that this government has boobed, and badly. (One does not know who came up with the novel idea of having party bigwigs coming up with wads of money at last weekend’s fund raising binge at PN headquarters because that had precisely the opposite effect hoped for, especially among Nationalist supporters).

This is this government’s Christmas gift to the nation: a Budget no one agrees with, the prospects of civil and industrial strife, and also possibly, the dire prediction of having sectors fighting each other: such as Air Malta workers up in arms if government allows a low cost airline to come to Malta, while those who earn their living from tourism would welcome such an airline.

This government’s first attempt at drawing up a Budget has turned out to be a disaster, for all the keen expectations that doing things for the first time may have. This government has gone back to “il-politika tal-calculator” as Eddie Fenech Adami, never lost for a word, used to call Alfred Sant’s Budgets. While keeping the country’s economy to the straight and the narrow of the stated targets for the public deficit is in itself a good thing (if it succeeds in meeting its targets), the government just cannot ride roughshod over the people’s aspirations and real situations. Government has just not used all the tools it had at its disposal, and those it is using will bring it to a confrontation with the unions and with the workers in the country.

Even worse, however, in an open economy with exchange controls being relegated to the history books, all this talk about devaluation is already unleashing a wave of currency moves which is very dangerous at all times, let alone at this particular time. We now even have senior economic advisers giving such blatant advice in public, and in newspapers, with little or no reaction from those whose duty is to limit the damage, if they have any such power left today.

This is not to argue that government should have taken one side against the other, such as, for example, the employers’ side against the workers, as it has been unfairly accused of. We repeat what we said after the Budget: the government did not cut its expenditure enough (and it foolishly tries to make us believe that after two years of no cuts, the GDP will be cut by three per cent in each subsequent year, election or no election, after 2006!). Government repeats that it has cut as much it dared but we beg to differ: there is still a huge swath of expenditure that is the result of outsourcing when there are enough government employees to do anything. And there is a vast number of unneeded authorities filled with people trying to appear busy or else stopping the rest from going about their jobs. Had government been serious about cutting expenditure it should have started from there.

There is still the wide perception that anything that needs to be done will only be done at a higher cost. There is practically no government system that has started to look into delivering the same at a lower cost.

On the formal level, it may not be too late for the government to realise its mistake in this Budget. But on a less formal and more real level, there may be such a thing as it being too late to redress.