Both the reds and the blues need to get together and tackle one issue with one voice, that is if they both are at all interested in first, preserving a welfare safety net and second, making sure that the really vulnerable live decently, which is not currently the case unless there is extra help from family and others.

The “relief” as it is known here, is simply not enough to live a half decent life. But there are so many claiming it unjustly that it cannot be increased, so one way or another the reds and the blues must take a common stand against this abuse, which is theft, not just from us as taxpayers, but almost worse from the genuinely poor who are really living desperate, no-hope lives and deserve far far more than we are giving them.

And there is real poverty in Malta. Not the inflated silly 15 per cent figures exclusion surveys show, which after all simply reflect our tendency to under declare our true income, but a bottom rung of a few per cent of our population, who live in abject poverty, poverty you can smell in their homes believe me, consequent depression and worse. We have to rescue these families to prevent these percentages doubling as these kids inherit their parents’ no hope lives because poverty is inherited, or even learnt, like any genetic illness.

The truth is that in modern Malta it pays you not to work, it pays you not to marry; it pays you to have children out of marriage and never even dream of working. Recent, reliable calculations show that unless you earn over Lm400 per month and you have a child, you would be better off, financially and otherwise, to simply take relief and all other allowances including free medicines, subsidised electricity (the list goes on and on), than you are working, paying for childcare and all the other hassles and expenses associated with working such as transport costs, clothing costs and others. Besides of course the obvious fact that work takes so much time out of your day.

So part of the so-called strategy to get women into work needs to tackle this issue thoroughly and fast. The financial difference between relief and jobs with a basic pay, around or slightly above the minimum wage are just not worth working for. Indeed you are much much, worse off working for a job around or above the minimum wage than you are living off the State! So thousands are voting with their feet, do not work (at least not officially), claiming all the benefits they can and then perhaps, if they are particularly ambitious, doing some moonlighting or undeclared work to supplement the relief if they do not have a partner who is working, a father who helps and so on. Many others are simply setting up home with their boyfriends, having children and taking relief and all the perks as pocket money while the boyfriends income pays for all the main expenses of the day. And when they come asking for help they are not shy of their professionally blow dried hair, their crafted fingernails, their tattooed eyebrows and lipline, their children in designer clothes. And you can’t tackle these kinds of issues in a Xarabank or Bondiplus type scenario, because none of the thousands who are living like this are going to admit this in public. Yet we all know a few, or many, who live like this and it seems we are powerless to stop it. And incidentally there are middle class as well as working class people who are grossly abusing the system!

Of course single parents are not the only scroungers, not by a long shot. There are also many unemployed men who are not unemployed at all! There are many who take this early retirement, euphemistically called boarded out (not boring at all!), who then manage to work in the tourist industry, or look after their daughters’ babies full time, yet somehow we are meant to believe they were too sick to go on working in admittedly stressful jobs like teaching for example, or the civil service?

So, is the answer to cut relief or to raise wages? Each would cause a social or economic uproar. But we cannot go on as we are. Perhaps the government could start with all these supposedly unknown fathers. Don’t tell me in a small society like Malta that we can’t root out these abuses? Every local social security office should have its own local contacts, networks and inspectors. Give these unknown dads a year to regularise themselves, and then tell them a charge will be put on their property to compensate for all the social security their girlfriends and children have enjoyed at the expense of the State, and worse, of the really poor.

Let’s start to manage this problem locally, rather than totally control it centrally, which is not working well. There is no way you can root out local abuse with a national office. It can be done locally though, in every town or village until people learn that benefits are there for those who really need them, and not so those of us who work fund people to have hundreds of pounds a month in pocket money and leisure time. Let’s start with one locality that has a high proportion of people claiming benefit as a pilot project and see how this works at least. With cross party support of course!

The situation is getting worse and worse. The scroungers are having a field day because the political classes do not have one voice on this issue (as with so many others). The disservice we are doing to the genuinely poor and vulnerable is nothing short of criminal.

But sadly, the genuinely poor don’t have enough votes because they are not 15 per cent of the population as unrealistic surveys show, but closer to a few per cent. The scroungers are a bigger mass of voters so we are apparently scared to really touch them and really stop it, for good.