In the end, the whole country heaved a sigh of relief. In the end, a violent confrontation was avoided. In the end, the forces of order triumphed and the forces of disorder were routed. In the end, those who began the strike with so much bravado had to slink away defeated, gaining no points and losing more than the ones they started with.

The thing is that the government’s plans for transport to assume a more widely patronised public service, should have made these guys happy and ready to work. But, such is the mentality that accrues to a monopoly, they looked upon this as a threat, a threat to their cosy life.

There was not just the disdain, the hostility even, towards their clients, but also a complete lack of understanding of the real state of affairs, and also of the fact that their interests, while sometimes converging, were also at odds with each other. Hence, while they must have thought that ‘fl-ghaqda s-sahha’, and came together in a federation, in the end the union was always destined to be short-lived and eventually crumble. And crumble it did precisely with that sector, the hearse owners, on whose behalf the whole action was supposedly taken.

They had a rather dim appreciation of the resilience of the government, of the country as a whole. They expected to bring the country to its knees, that it would come begging them to resume working as they were bringing the whole country to a standstill. They were not exactly wrong, for innumerable governments had succumbed to this threat and forked out more money. Only for the people to keep getting the same shoddy service it always got.

One must remember here that many times a tourist rarely meets a “normal” Maltese. The more frequent contacts a tourist has in this country are with people like hotel waiters and chambermaids, taxi drivers and public bus drivers. This is where Brand Malta succeeds or fails.

Apart from that, while ordinary Maltese normally rarely get to use public transport, the most vulnerable sectors of the population, that is the lower classes, young people and the like, mostly depend on public transport. And, despite the new buses, they have been getting the same shoddy treatment for years and years.

For these two reasons, therefore, the transport sector was one where, for a variety of reasons but mainly because it was a monopoly, no real improvement had been registered. This failure, in turn, reverberated on other sectors and contributed to keeping Malta backwards. It was high time it was tackled and major surgery done.

This is where last week’s industrial action played into the hands of the liberalising forces. Because, by mounting such a draconian strike, by not allowing alternative means of transport, by allowing so many acts of violence, by causing general public revulsion against the strikers (read the blogs), by hurting the economic sectors on which the transport sector lives, by causing so much material and other damage and, principally, by then cracking up and surrendering, the strikers have themselves hastened their sector’s own liberalisation.

Mainly, the government now owes it to itself and to the people to ensure that the people (and naturally the tourists who come here) benefit most from the coming changes. The country cannot afford, like so many times in the past, to make grand announcements of reform only for more of the same to happen again. Once it is understood that the root cause for the non-progress of past years was the continued existence of a series of monopolies, and once the monopolies are well and truly abolished, one should see a radical change occur, such as has happened in those countries which liberalized similar long-standing monopolies in the transport sector.

In particular, we welcome the government’s stated intention to create one or more tram services linking the high-density areas such as Sliema, St Julian’s, Hamrun and Birkirkara to Valletta. Anyone who has travelled and used such services in the cities of Europe can understand what a huge improvement that would be for Malta, as long as it is well-planned, well-executed and well-run. Let us not repeat the mistake of the train service, which after a long gestation crumbled when faced by the forerunners of the bus service.

At the end of such an eventful week, there are many sectors that come in for special praise: the people itself for its spontaneous, bi-partisan revulsion at the acts of violence, and for its patience; ditto the tourists who happened to be here, especially the young English language students who had to walk everywhere in such heat; the police for not over-reacting even under duress, and for having kept their heads and ensured that only the due processes of the law were brought into play; and the government for not giving in to anger, acting on impulse, exacting revenge or over-reacting to particular cases; and all those who helped minimise the impact of such actions.

The due processes of the law (the law as such has been changed over the past years, although the federation does not seem to have grasped this, especially as regards the banning of sympathy strikes) will now come to the fore. Beyond the courtrooms, however, this has made many of us all that more Thatcherite.