Right now, the talk of the town is not quite what the government wishes it to be - how the cheap and tacky Simon Busuttil has been cheating on expenses and “stealing fuel”. It was a non-starter anyway, because even to the dumbest “Maaaaa, those Nationalists” switcher, Busuttil does not come across as the sort of person who would fiddle around with his petrol vouchers.

This particular tactic from the government’s Dirty Tricks Department – or is it the Labour Party’s Dirty Tricks Department; hard to tell the difference nowadays – has backfired pretty badly. People are not upset at the suggestion that the Opposition leader is creaming euros off his fuel allowance, so much as they are upset at the way the government thinks them so stupid as not to see what it is up to.

Though no facts have emerged, because in true Stasi fashion the story was whispered and leaked, most people seem to have put the whole thing in context, at least judging by the feedback on the internet. Few seem to believe there is any fiddling at all, while everybody is clear on the matter that if there really is fiddling, then Busuttil is no more responsible for his chauffeur cheating on petrol chits than a company director is responsible for one of his employees fiddling on expenses. On the contrary, the employer is an injured party and sacks or suspends the employee pending investigations, as has happened here.

But this did not stop the Labour Party issuing one of its standard sonorous statements telling all listeners of Super One (talk about a Stasi station) that Simon Busuttil is involved in a case of “serious fraud involving public funds”. Did this convince anybody at all, except the usual suspects? No, it did not. It actually turned very many people off, because it is so obviously not just transparently a case of politically motivated nastiness, but also so scheming and wrong. It is the kind of tactic that, rather than prompting delight and Schadenfreude at the misfortunes of their enemies, makes people feel deeply uneasy about their own safety.

Nobody likes to feel that its government is plotting and scheming against individuals, whoever those individuals are and however much they might dislike them at a personal or political level.  That knowledge makes people feel unsafe. A government which schemes and plots against its political adversaries will scheme and plot against individual citizens, even private citizens. People understand this instinctively; they don’t need to have it explained. Beyond that, those who lived through the Golden Years of Labour not only understand it but react to it with a visceral gut-wrenching disgust and fear. We know what they are capable of, and I say ‘they’ advisedly because lots of the very same men from those years are right there now.

I have realised that what I most associate with the Labour Party in government is not violence, or oppression, or assaults on freedom of speech. No, it is that constant, nagging, unquantifiable feeling of unease, of being unsafe without being quite sure why, of waiting for the next thing to come out of left field and of wondering what harm is being done to you beneath the surface, for you to discover later.

A lot of people must feel that way because they would not, otherwise, be so guarded, so placatory, so unwilling to speak out, so fearful of consequences. The change in people’s attitudes from the last government to this one has been dramatic. We have gone from people feeling perfectly safe shouting “F@cking w@nker” at a cabinet minister, or shrieking “Dictator” at the prime minister in between howls of “Shame on you”, to people quivering at the thought of saying what they think, and whispering it instead to their friends and family. You don’t even get political talk at supper, lunch or parties anymore, because the huge ‘switcher’ vote in the last general election has left people unsure of whether they are in ‘politically mixed’ company or not. So the conversation skims along the surface in a generalised fashion, and when the government comes up, people hurriedly brush it off or change the subject, lest they find themselves reported to the Stasi, by some secret switcher, for saying bad things about Joseph.

This is no way to live, and those of us who had become accustomed to years of freedom after growing up under a form of vicious tyranny are particularly upset by it. We can’t tolerate a government that spies on its own people, leaks stories about its perceived enemies with the aim of destroying, harassing or discrediting them, and abuses its power and influence to attack or undermine individuals so as to better its own advantage. That is revolting. We deserve better. And no, we have not got the government we deserve. General elections are not there as a means of punishing us for our own foolishness. That is not democracy.

What we have got is a government that lurks in the shadows, spying, plotting and whispering, ready to leap out and strangle us in secret so that it can carry on looting the shop. Some people might be happy with that, because it suits their avaricious or even vicious purposes. But they are fools. The situation is not tenable.