Those who drive buses and white taxis have never been the most popular service-providers, but now we view them with even greater contempt than ever before. It’s pointless saying that some of them are all right, and they shouldn’t be blamed for what the others do. So what if some of them are all right? Most of them are not. The service they provide is, in general, absolutely terrible. Many of the drivers of white taxis are actually frightening. You don’t feel you can trust them. Having grown up near the Preluna Hotel, and exposed for years to those who sat in the white taxis at Ghar id-Dud, I have retained a suspicion of them all my life. On the rare occasions when I need a taxi, I call a chauffeur service. Not only is it safer, more comfortable and cleaner, but it’s cheaper, too. I would never dream of calling a white taxi to take me to the airport, for example, because I wouldn’t want the driver of a white taxi to know that I am away.

Is this prejudice? No, it’s just common sense. And looking at the way some of them have been behaving over the last few days has just entrenched my deep mistrust of them: attacking ordinary citizens, hijacking vans and stealing the keys, forcing soldiers out of emergency transport (and what kind of soldiers were those, eh?), and smashing windscreens. It doesn’t help matters that one of the points their friends the hearse-owners are bickering about is their insistence that men with a police record should be allowed licences to drive hearses. It’s bad enough that the men deployed at funerals by firms of undertakers usually look like characters in a black comedy skit. We’re expected to accept bad boys at the wheel, and to allow them into our homes if the funeral cortege isn’t leaving from a hospital morgue.

Sympathy for the strikers stands at nought. We didn’t like them before Monday, and we like them even less since Monday, when they have been behaving even more like farmyard animals than they usually do. Everybody is saying how tough Austin Gatt is not to climb down and give in to their demands, but guess what? I’m concerned about the plaintive note that I’ve detected in his communications with Victor Spiteri and all the other transport ghouls. If he feels like pleading, he should get a grip on himself immediately. What was all that about Dr Gatt saying that he can’t believe the hearse people are so immoral as to not even allow one hearse to provide a funeral service? He should know what sort of people he’s dealing with. Corpses are just corpses to them. Corpses are their core business. It’s not like none of us has ever been to a funeral before. The hysterical hearse-owners wouldn’t give a damn if the corpses began to flow out of the hospital morgue and into the canteen. Let’s put it this way: if you were a sentimental, touchy-feel sort of chap, you wouldn’t go into the hearse-and-funerals business.

Besides, it’s not like they’re going to lose the work or the money. They’ve got a bit of a cash-flow blip for now, but because everyone seems to be storing their corpses and declaring that “funeral arrangements will be announced later”, the current dearth of cash-flow is going to translate into a sudden abundance. All the burials they’re not doing now they’ll be doing later, when they decide to stop their daft strike. Meanwhile, their business is being kept on hold by customers faced with a choice between keeping their dead relatives in the hospital freezer or cobbling together a DIY funeral with a shroud instead of a coffin and a borrowed SUV instead of a hearse. And we don’t even know if that’s allowed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t, given the tight controls on everything except parking your bus in the middle of a main highway in the rush hour.

Perhaps the government is afraid of being seen as too authoritarian if it clamps down on these unpleasant and unpopular savages? Maybe the government thinks it will be seen as quashing legitimate strikers, which will go down about as well as the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Well, then, more fool the government: never has the general public on both sides of the political spectrum – and believe me, that’s a first – been so keen to see massed ranks of riot police move on these people and their bloody buses. Nobody wants to see any violence or beatings or anything like that (I’m sure some people do, but I am not going to aid and abet them), but everybody, and I mean everybody, wants to see those buses moved out of the main roads and back where they belong, by large contingents of police officers and soldiers using requisitioned tow-trucks. I can’t believe I just read the reported reply of Austin Gatt to a journalist’s question about the buses blocking the roads: that it’s hard to decide what is legitimate and what is not legitimate in a strike. It can’t be that hard to find out that it isn’t legitimate to park your buses on a main highway, obstructing traffic, strike or no strike. And it is even less hard to work out that sending bands of pickets to key areas like the cruise liner terminal, the park-and-ride car-park, the ferry landing, the airport and roundabouts on main thoroughfares, to intimidate service providers and their customers and to commit violence is a criminal offence.

The contrast between the velvet gloves the police are using now and their aggression against two African men in Paceville a few days ago, in a case that made the headlines, is remarkable. So an African man arguing outside a nightclub gets pounced on by several officers, handcuffed, kicked in the guts, manhandled into a van and kept chained to a bench, but taxi-drivers and bus-drivers who smash windscreens, terrorise coach-loads of kids and tourists and frighten ordinary citizens trying to get to work are... what? So a couple of arrests have been made: big deal. Compare that to the number of violent incidents and the number of men sitting by their buses parked in the middle of the road and trying to stop people getting to Valletta and the airport. They’re actually chatting to the police now. It won’t be long before there’s a barbecue going on the Luqa roundabout.

I’ve just read the news reports about 50 disgusting savages trying to board the emergency ferry to Valletta so as to intimidate the captain. The police “persuaded them” to leave. Oh really? Didn’t they have 50 sets of handcuffs then, or enough vans to chuck these public nuisances in? They could do with a spot of being chained to benches in police stations until they calm down. I’m quite sure several members of the public are dying to take a crowbar to those buses blocking the roads, but are controlling themselves.

It’s the thinking behind the strike that none of us can sympathise with. “They’re taking my work away!” Ar’hemm hej. Imagine if the rest of us were to adopt that attitude. Imagine if I were to lie down and scream and park my car on a roundabout each time a newspaper, any newspaper, engages a new columnist or somebody publishes a new magazine. It never works to protect people in a particular line of business, especially one providing an essential service or product, because they have no incentive to invest or improve their service. No matter how appalling they are, people still have to use them. Look at the hearse-owners: they expect their customers to store their bodies in the freezer until they’ve done striking, in the full knowledge that they will still be their customers no matter how shockingly they have treated them. It’s the same with the buses. That’s why drivers are so fond of telling their customers: “If you don’t like it, get off my bus and walk.”

These legacies of a distant past don’t want competition because they can’t deal with it. They don’t know how to operate in an environment where, if they shout at their customers, assault them, or force them to leave their bodies in the freezer, those customers will no longer be their customers. The sense of entitlement is amazing. Listen to the words of a taxi-driver who was among the pickets at the cruise liner terminal, and who tried to assault a chauffeur who picked up some passengers: “He’s a strike-breaker and he’s taking my work away from me.” MY work away from ME. What makes it his work? And what makes him believe that he has a god-given right to it no matter how appallingly he behaves? And you can’t call somebody a strike-breaker who is not in your line of work and doesn’t belong to your union, anyway. That’s ignorance for you.

I don’t think the government is being tough on this one at all. I think it’s being wet, so wet that it’s dripping. Withdrawing the emergency service because the drivers are being intimidated? Come on – where are we living, if soldiers and emergency drivers are terrorised by roaming hordes of pickets in under-vests, unbothered by the police? Where are we living, when 60 striking drivers can gather outside a government minister’s house at night without being moved along? Democracy doesn’t mean allowing pickets to break the laws that the rest of us are not allowed to break. Democracy means protecting the rest of us against their uncivil excesses.

There’s something else: it doesn’t reflect too well on our character that we aren’t fighting back. Part of fighting back is showing solidarity with those who are suffering as a result of the actions of these awful men. A couple of hours ago in Attard, I drove past a young lad wearing a Farsons uniform, covered in sweat in the blistering heat while walking and trying to thumb a lift. Cars were driving past him, even though he looked like a harmless young chap still in his work uniform, and not like a thug or a criminal. He had already walked around two miles from his workplace. I picked him up and drove him home to Rabat, a tiny detour for me but a major help for him. If you see people stranded or trying to hitch, for heaven’s sake pick them up. It’s not going to kill you, and it’s one way of undermining the people who are trying to undermine the country.

The damage being done to tourism is great. Thousands of people work hard and invest time and money in trying to persuade people to come to Malta when they have a wide choice of other far more interesting places to go to. And then they come over and find this, and go back home to badmouth Malta. One of my sons went to the airport in the early hours of Tuesday morning to collect a friend, and ended up making two trips to Bugibba, ferrying distressed Belgian tourists with children because he felt sorry for them. “I couldn’t just walk off and leave them there,” he said. “There were so many of them and they were completely bewildered. And when I asked the police officers what those people were supposed to do, they just shrugged.” The pickets didn’t catch on, and he was impressed by the fear on the faces of those who were driving hired vans owned by private companies. One driver, he said, was perspiring and trembling, as though under threat of gunfire, and after he had loaded a couple of suitcases, pulled them out again and drove off, leaving his putative passengers stranded.

I’m not impressed by all this talk of trying to come up with solutions for people arriving at the airport. How hard can it be to commandeer government vehicles – we’re not talking of requisitioning private vehicles – and set up an emergency service for incoming tourists? They’ve saved up, looked forward to their holiday and paid good money to come to what, on a bad day, seems to be little more than a glorified dump – and this is how we treat them? They could have gone to the Greek islands, but instead they came here, and this is the thanks they get. Possibly, the emergency vehicles could take a detour past St James Ditch where there is now a new zoological attraction: men in vests, plumber’s cracks on display, having barbecues next to their parked buses.