Is it my imagination, or are the local councils more interested in grubbing around for money than they are in maintaining law and order in their tinpot demesnes? The local wardens project started off virtuously, with wardens fining us for leaving our cars parked on pavements, for going the wrong way down one-way streets, for driving past them while blatantly talking on a mobile phone, for not wearing a seat-belt or displaying a tax disc, or for running the red light at traffic junctions. Now it’s all gone pear-shaped, with wardens lying in wait behind trees and bushes, then pouncing on the unsuspecting and unwary, to dish out tickets in situations where traffic police would merely give us a ticking off, and an “on your way and make sure you don’t do it again”. It’s as though they are desperate for every last lira they can rake in, and it’s leading to some very odd behaviour.

For a start, many people have once again started to receive tickets through the post. Some time ago, after I and others had kicked up a fuss about the inordinate number of tickets we were receiving through the mail, for offences committed in places where we could not even remember being, the responsible authority issued instructions to wardens that tickets were to be handed directly to the person committing the offence, at the time the offence was committed. There were some exceptions, like with badly parked cars, when the ticket could be left under the windscreen wiper, or speeding, when the warden is unable to stop the car or catch up with it. Before these instructions were issued, the citizen was unprotected against potential abuse by wardens. There were no safeguards against wardens falling prey to the temptation, when short of their weekly or monthly ticket quota (they insist they don’t have one, but try being a warden who issues few or no tickets when the pressure is on to bring in the money), of issuing “false tickets”. It’s as easy as pie: you key in a car number at random, or choose the car number of somebody you don’t like, and then key in the offence: running a red light in Marsascala, say, or going the wrong way down a street in Bahrija. In the years when wardens were allowed to send tickets by post, I received countless numbers of these. I put it down to bad luck: when you’re on the road as often as I am, it’s the throw of the dice coupled with a tendency to make haste by ignoring some of the rules. I only cottoned on to the fact that something was not quite right when I received a ticket accusing me of a traffic misdemeanour committed in an Qormi side street at the (for me) unearthly hour of 7.45am, when I am never anywhere but in bed, still less in a side street in Qormi. It was then that I began to suspect abuse and to make a fuss.

The wardens were given their instructions and for rather a long while afterwards, I received no tickets through the mail. Other people I know experienced a similar decrease. Now, those tickets have started to come through the post again, in dribs and drabs. The most recent was particularly astonishing: a plain white envelope with my name and address scrawled on it – no sign of officialdom anywhere – containing two tickets. One accused me of driving while speaking on my telephone at 1744hrs in L-Iklin. The other accused me of driving while speaking on my telephone at 1748hrs in Birkirkara, on the same day. Let us assume that it is possible to reach Birkirkara from L-Iklin in four minutes in the rush-hour traffic on a working day, even with traffic jammed solid on the bypass roundabouts and at every junction. This still leaves some questions unanswered. Why were two tickets issued for the same offence in the space of four minutes? This is the equivalent of a warden standing next to a badly parked car and issuing a ticket every four minutes until the owner returns to remove it. If you park your car on a pavement at 3pm, you don’t return at 4pm to find 15 tickets tucked neatly beneath your wiper. You find just one. Maybe it’s because I crossed the border between two sovereign council states while on my telephone during those four minutes, allowing two different councils, each desperate for my fiver, to accuse me of committing an offence within their borders. If so, then I am rather curious to understand why both tickets arrived together in the same plain white envelope.

“Contest them,” my husband said to me. “They’re not supposed to issue two tickets for the same offence within the space of four minutes.” Yet this is where the system is so abusive. To contest them, I will have to take two mornings off work, because they are two separate tickets. I can’t afford to do that; even one morning is too much. Financially, and in terms of available time, I am better off paying the fine, even if the fine is abusive and erroneous, and possibly also corrupt – so I am held hostage. I can’t be the only one to have suffered this.

Many people I know pay fines for tickets issued in suspect circumstances because they simply cannot afford to take time off work to sit in the tribunal waiting-room for hours. The local councils know that this system works to their advantage, and so they have no interest in changing it to protect the civil rights of the citizen. It is up to the government that sits on top of the local councils to do something about this abusive situation – but I am not going to expect anything like this from a government that has turned the country’s port and airport into a giant toll-gate, slapping Lm20 departure tax on every Maltese

person who wants to get out.

There are other signs of desperation for money: wardens hiding around the corner from supermarkets, waiting for harassed shoppers to double-park while dashing in for the milk and bread, and then sneaking out to slap a ticket on the windscreen. If law and order were their primary concern, they would stand in clear view, right outside the supermarket, and stop any person who tries to leave a car double-parked with the hazard lights flashing, before they get out of the car and without issuing a ticket. This is how a warden would behave, whose main interest is in making sure that no cars are double-parked. If his main interest is money, on the other hand, he will allow the car to double-park and to obstruct traffic, and then he will issue a ticket. When the warden stands just out of view, watches while the person double-parks the car, waits until that person has entered the supermarket, and then emerges – to slap on a ticket and earn a fine for his employers – we have to ask ourselves what motivates these people. Going on the growing evidence, I would say that the answer is money, not order on our streets.

Some days ago, my son climbed up the steps from Ghajn Tuffieha beach, got into his car, put the key into the ignition, put the car into gear, and pressed the accelerator, all the while watched by a warden. He had not

driven more than a few metres when the same warden signalled at him to stop, asked him for his particulars and began jabbing at his machine to issue a ticket.

“X’ghamilt hazin?” asked my son, astonished. “Qieghed liebes indicenti,” the warden replied. My son looked down, thinking for a moment that he might have inadvertently taken off his jeans and boxer shorts while on his way up the steps from the beach. The warden explained that he was indecently dressed because he wasn’t wearing a top. His protestations that he is a man not a woman, that his T-shirt was wet, that he was concealed within his car, and that he was about to drive for three minutes through the back lanes to his home, a route on which he risked encountering no more than a few dogs and a couple of bird-shooters, went unheeded. The warden was clearly under instructions to collect as much money as possible. The morning brainstorming session must have come up with a wizard new wheeze: “Stand near the beaches, wait for men to drive off while naked from the waist up, then stop them and fine them for indecency. On no account stop them before they get into the car and tell them to put on a top, or we won’t be able to fine them and get the money.”

As though to prove the point that this was nothing more than yet another desperate measure for squeezing cash out of bewildered people, the warden’s machine did not even have the facility to issue tickets for “driving while indecently dressed”. He had to whip out his ball-point pen and scrawl the accusation on a “plain” ticket (spelling it badly). Not just that, but he didn’t even write down the amount of the fine, as is done with other offences, presumably because he didn’t know how much it was.

So now wardens are going to start ticketing us for going around dressed according to their definition of indecency. Perhaps this is an extension of the “hot-pants” law, under which women wearing “indecent clothes” in red-light districts can be arrested on the spot.

* * *

I am made more suspicious that the local councils are putting revenue collection before safety, law and order by their great excitement and delight at the huge amounts of money they are collecting through “speeding” fines and “speed” cameras. I use inverted commas because in no way can 47kph be defined as “speeding”, unless you are in an electric wheelchair race. Yet go through the St Julian’s tunnels at that “speed”, and two days later you will receive a notice telling you that you are being fined Lm30 by the St Julian’s local council. If the local councils had their priorities right, they would be concerned at the high revenue from fines, because this means that there is rather a lot of dangerous driving, which must reflect in a rather troublesome situation on our roads. If there is a safety reason for the imposition of the 45kph speed limit through the St Julian’s tunnels, then the authorities should be concerned that so many people have broken it, instead of clapping their hands with pleasure over the hundreds of thousands of liri the camera is bringing in, and how it has “paid for itself” within a short while. If there is no real safety requirement for the imposition of that ludicrous speed limit, then the camera is just a revenue-collection tool, and should be removed. There are speed cameras going up in all kinds of absurd places, and the suspicion lingers that the local councils think of them not as a safety measure, but as a revenue collection exercise.

In the light of this, I will confess to doing something rather naughty last year. When the St Julian’s local council inadvertently slipped my cheque for “speeding” fines among my various receipts for that same amount, and mailed it back to me – the clerks must have been particularly harassed that day – I didn’t return it with a note saying, “You gave this back to me by mistake, together with the receipts.” Instead, I laughed. I laughed long and hard and I ripped the cheque up. I laughed so much I almost cried. I laughed almost as much as I did when I was told that the “speed” cameras had caught a car going through the St Julian’s tunnels several times at 100kph with a rather vulgar sign concealing the number-plates. Suddenly, I felt vindicated for all those fines I had been obliged to pay against tickets that had come through the post, for offences committed in places where I could not possibly have been. It was enough to make me want to drive through the St Julian’s tunnels at 100kph with my number plates obscured by a sign saying “THANK YOU.” I’ve always thought that local councils were pointless gatherings of like-minded individuals. Now that they’re adopting the role of perverted Robin Hoods in our society, I dislike them even more. Perhaps it’s time we began to fine them for failing to maintain our roads, and for sticking a speed camera on to a bridge instead of repairing the bridge itself. Or perhaps we could try a little protest: men without tops and women in bikinis, driving away from the beach in a convoy of indecency.