There’s more room for electoral blackmail at the Labour ranks of Air Malta. Other public entities will likely follow.

You’ve got to hand it to Labour though. They will treat democratic institutions with disdain, the law of the land with contempt and the rules of basic decency with an oblivious forgetfulness of a recanting heretic. But their hubris will not make them take their own voters for granted.

They will pump out their chests with testosterone-stinking arrogance at anyone who looks at them askance, but when a Labour voter clicks their fingers, they’ll grovel on their knees.

The Times reports today that a third ad hoc kangaroo court is being set up at Air Malta to review complaints from employees “who feel they have suffered some sort of injustice” before 2013 and to grant the complainers some form of restitution.

Two previous boards were set up in 2014, and again in 2017. Times of Malta reports that “the two boards examined 696 cases of alleged injustices in all”. Now Air Malta employs less than 800 people and some of them, at least, were employed after 2013 so they’re not eligible to complain about their unhappiness from the dark days of Lawrence Gonzi.

That means that at Air Malta before 2013 almost everyone was supposedly being treated unfairly.

As individual cases, these are understandably confidential. But clearly, someone should be providing information about the aggregate nature of these complaints.

Were employees made to pay for the fuel on the flights? Were they forced to push the planes? Were their trousers too tight or their skirts too short?

Just how unhappy must an entire workforce have been for a third grievances tribunal to be necessary for the remaining odd 150 employees to have the opportunity to complain about the dark days before the great sunrise of 2013?

This has nothing to do with old injustices of course. Anyone seriously aggrieved by a 2012 decision will not have missed the opportunity to seek rectification in 2014 or 2017.

This is a way for Labour to promise its greedy voters it will find a way of appeasing their outrageous demands in a transactional politics that is now beyond clientelism.

The race to the bottom has come to pass. Look at them race by.