We seem to have reverted back to the old Mintoff ways of celebrating Christmas with a surprise, usually of the negative type, awaiting us on Christmas Eve.

The country spent countless days approaching the Christmases of old asking what would the government pull out of its hat come Christmas Eve. One day it would be the termination of the British base, in another year a sacrifice that was needed by the ‘country’.

Yesterday Minister Joe Mizzi announced that the government is buying back Arriva, lock, stock and barrel by the end of the year.

An agreement of sorts seems to have been drawn up, or almost, between the government and the private company. The minister did not divulge, nor  does it seem, he knows (at least from a reply he gave to another online news service) what this will cost the country.

Parliament is due to meet again after the Christmas holidays in mid-January, so there does not seem to be any need to convoke the House and discuss the issue.

It would seem the government plans to run the bus service together with help from Arriva officials ‘in the interim period’.

Then will come a call for expressions of interest, the selection of the preferred bidder and the negotiations hopefully leading to a new contract.

The minister remained unclear on how much does the government estimate this change will cost.

All he continued saying was that this change would entail ‘difficulties’ and ‘hard going’. That’s the Mintoff Christmas carol after all these years.

Along with the rest of the country, this paper has been very critical of the Arriva reform in most of its aspects. There were issues that needed correction and a heavy one at that, right from day one, and the Arriva fiasco was surely one of the reasons for the previous administration’s downfall at the polls.

So far, it seems that two very important novelties when the country swung from the old system to the Arriva one will be retained, all criticism apart.

First of all, we will not be going back to the old buses, the minister said. So at least, the goodbye we waved some years back to the old monsters belching fumes and mostly run on kerosene, with high steps that cannot be negotiated by the old and the disabled is a goodbye and ‘get lost’.

Secondly, it would also seem the government has no idea of reverting to the old system of owner-run buses but to a private operator who will be responsible for the system.

The minister also made the point that the demands by the public and the local councils for a better service must be taken on board. Arriva used to complain the cumulative import of these demands would make their system impossible to run, especially when one coupled this with the government’s (right) insistence on the banning of bendy-buses. How the new operator and the new agreement will square the circle will be for the minister to deliver and the public to judge.

There is one issue about which the government would be well-advised to steer clear of: that, beyond the many justified complaints by the public regarding Arriva, this reform of the reform is not being undertaken for partisan reasons, in other words, because the previous reform, the botched one was by the previous administration, and the possibly more deleterious whisper that the new incumbent has already been chosen.