Reading Daphne one easily gets the impression that a major reform of the rent laws was at hand, which has now been put on hold because the Greens have irresponsibly taken the plunge and gone ahead with their plan to hold a referendum doing away with the collection of legal absurdities and obscenities that burden our statute book.

Looking down her long nose at everybody and anybody, she makes out that it is rash to rush off and sign the Greens’ petition. She makes it no secret that she thinks everybody else is stupid in her article “Enough rope to hang themselves” (TMIS, 26 June).

Ranting, raging, using foul language and worse orthography, she denounces the whole referendum bid as “naïve impetuosity” and “misinformation”. I must confess that I was delighted. If Daphne has been commissioned to confuse the issue, it must mean that we have the system rattled. Daphne is the Greens’ litmus paper of unsustainability; if she is commissioned to justify a development, it means that it must stink to high heaven, if she is commissioned to attack us on a particular issue, it means that we have drawn first blood. If she’s misspelling obscenities in Maltese (iwwahluhulhom [sic]) we must have them on the run already.

Nobody, but nobody, can believe a word of her scaremongering. If the government had an ace up its sleeve, what on earth would persuade it to keep it a secret at this stage? They could come out and steal the show from the Greens. If we had a Bill on the table of the House that would end the misery and suffering of thousands of people, all the referendum effort would instantly evaporate. Clearly, the government has been bluffing, it has sat on its hands once more and now it has nothing to say or do but unleash the dachshunds. All Daphne’s yapping and clatter will not change a thing.

It is true that Daphne rarely has a good word for anyone but she surpassed herself in negativity last Sunday: not only will it be catastrophic if the referendum is lost by the Yes, she would have us believe that it would be catastrophic also if it is won. She argues that people do not care about the issue and will not turn out to vote causing the referendum bid to fail. Then she argues that not only will the threatened tenants turn out to vote but also hordes of Mesdames Defarge will take the trouble simply to spite other people’s landlords. She claims that the EU referendum was a personal issue that produced a good turnout while rent reform is not. Where did she learn her logic? What is her brief? Defending the miniscule minority of opportunist millionaires not embarrassed to squat in controlled rent properties?

At the last count there were 17,000 controlled rent properties. Some of them are owned by a small number of landowners. The vast majority of them are owned by families with one or two properties. Almost all of them have a plurality of part-landlords. Simply, in a one-to-one relation, a man and his wife being the landlords for each property, there must be 34,000 landlords, at least. Chances are that there are many more. The heirs to property, which remains undivided because of the controlled rent situations, are often numbered in the tens and twenties. Collecting the 30,000 signatures we need to hold a referendum is a mathematical certainty. It is just a matter of time and money. If enough donations come in to beef up the campaign, we can have it all wrapped up in a fortnight. If not it will take a little longer.

Nobody can foretell the outcome of the referendum itself. Contrary to what Daphne claims, referenda are not held only when the outcome is a foregone conclusion. That was nobody’s feeling in 2003. Had rent reform been a done thing we would have Tonio Borg sending circulars to the tiddlywinks clubs like he is doing on abortion. The Greens will not be so arrogant as to offer outright victory just as Daphne, crystal balls or no crystal balls, cannot foretell certain doom and gloom.

What is certain is that from here to there will be several months, plenty of time to make everything very clear to every Mr Borg and his dog. It is only in Phase I that we focus on the frustration, the insults and neglect suffered by thousands of controlled rent landlords. Their support is more than enough at this stage, so why should we trouble anybody else? They will be the principal and immediate beneficiaries and it is fair enough to expect them to make the initial effort, even to fund their own campaign.

Once we have collected the necessary signatures, we can start on the rest of the country. In a campaign of many months we will be able to explain how the insane rent laws affect us all, landlords or not. Young couples whose hopes of owning a home have been dashed by skyrocketing property prices will come on board. So will economic operators who have started to feel the pinch of property prices: our tourism product is overpriced because the land element in the economic equation is pushing us out of our traditional markets. People who happily own a home and feel that this has nothing to do with them will be invited not only to sympathise with other owners of property which has been expropriated by an absconding government, but will be invited to consider the effect of doing nothing about the rent laws until the irrational exuberance about property prices gets where it is certainly going: the fallout will leave nobody uncontaminated. We have the time and we have the will to involve everybody. Daphne’s polemics only add to the fun.

Achieving the 50 per cent turnout mandatory for validity of the result, will not be anywhere near impossible. Expropriated landlords, former expropriated landlords and their descendants in the second and third generation are already campaigning with us from every corner of the earth. E-mail is a wonderful thing and we have had a stunning response from Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, from people who would have liked to retire to Malta in a family property, which currently earns them a handful of liri per year. They are raising Cain through the Internet.

In Malta, thousands more are busy running their own mini-campaigns. Something is happening at last. We can also rely on tenants to come to the polls. Most of them find it hard to justify in public an extension of their privilege of paying less than they give to the church on Sunday for the untrammelled possession of home sweet home, but they will never dare opt out of voting. They bring us even closer to certainty on the turnout issue. There are also those, 55,000 of them at the EP elections, who normally do not vote in protest at Maltese politics. This time they can best express their protest by voting, not by opting out: one in the eye for political parties who have been absent without leave on this issue for generations.

Unlike Daphne I have no deep-seated contempt for my compatriots. They have decided wisely, if by very small margins, time and time again, also under heavy propaganda bombardment. If the rent reform issue is discussed at all, I have little doubt where their hearts and minds will be. By the time we are finished, they will all be rent law experts and spitting mad.

While collecting signatures at City Gate last week, a gentleman stopped to ask how long we would be there in order to inform a friend. He immediately called him on his mobile and it was arranged that we would drop off some petition forms at the friend’s home in Marsa. As our contact walked away I enquired whether he had signed up. He shyly informed me that he could not because he lived in a controlled rent dwelling. We smiled at one another across the divide and agreed to disagree.

It was only when the petition forms arrived at their destination that we realised that his friendship had overcome his personal interests in a spectacularly generous way. We were also in for more displays of generosity. The friend owns the little house next to his. He has no intention of evicting his octogenarian neighbour he has known all his life. He just wants to be sure that her lease will not be inherited and that he will have the comfort of his daughter living next door once the neighbour passes away. I cannot but admire people like him. They have nothing in common with the pathetic snobs, probably imaginary, whom Daphne addresses.

Not only are the Maltese not the envious have-nots whom Daphne describes as dying to strike a blow at the privileged, the long deprived haves are generous with the rest, and those in controlled rent dwellings, well one of them at least, can feel compassion for a friend in search of a modicum of justice. The Maltese will not let down the Maltese particularly on an issue on which they have been let down by every government for as long as anyone can remember.

Whatever the outcome of the referendum, one thing is certain: the body of people who recognise the injustice, the stupidity and socio-economic threat posed by the rent laws will be a definite element in the political equation. It will not be the hunters and the Armier boathouse squatters alone who determine government policy and expenditure: vast tracts of land given away to hunters and invaluable coastlines earmarked for the benefit of squatters with an expenditure of Lm22 million.

Won or lost the referendum will produce a reversal of the situation where this lobby, studiously ignored by both our rivals for six very long decades, will have them both eating out of its hand. Being cheated out of a property, any property, cannot be compared to wanting to enjoy “a traditional pastime’ or a view of the sunset over Comino acquired by right of conquest and monumental cheek.

The burning injustice now experienced by thousands as a private matter, a family tragedy, will have found its voice on the political stage. They will know they are not alone and that their cause is acknowledged and endorsed by many thousands of others. There will be no turning back. To that extent, victory is assured. Long neglect and a long series of cruel insults have produced the impossible, a rebellious middleclass.

Perhaps Daphne’s most pathetic whimper was about the rent issue not being a political issue. It makes me laugh. Both our rivals now agree that the environment should not be politicised. Where they have scandalously failed for decades, now they try to wriggle out of any political accounting. The environment, our quality of life is the supreme political issue. The proof is that both our rivals are falling over themselves to appear greener than Green. Even Daphne has become a champion of the environment and claims to do a better job at it than the NGOs she despises so much and the Green Party that makes her so nervous.

Rent is far more political. It is the supreme showcase of our national political stagnation: how zero-sum politics and the paralysis of decades produces thousands of casualties, collateral damage in the fight for the premiership. Who cares who goes broke, who is locked out of the economic life of the country because he or she has been picked out by Lady Luck to bear the burden of social housing in the reverse lottery of controlled rentals? Neither of our rivals gives a damn about expropriated landlords, Red, Blue or Green. They could not have made it clearer.

Today, dispossessed owners have nothing to lose but their chains. They want their assets back and they want them now. Waffling about studies and reports to Cabinet, white papers and secret statistics will only confuse that tiny minority still joined at the hip with a party that has sucked the lifeblood out of it and continues to demand and receive its homage. Daphne will only confuse them. She is welcome to form her own little club of the perpetually-waiting-for-nothing-to-happen-again-for-another-half-century. She can offer them one certainty: if they do nothing, nothing will happen. If they like the status quo that much, they are welcome to it. Greens & Co beg to differ.

It is not the Green vision of our common future. We envisage a time when the Lm44 billion worth of assets which the Maltese have sunk into property will produce more wealth that it does at present, much more than the three per cent of GDP than the building industry now produces, little more than the agricultural sector, our economic Cinderella. We like to think of a time when politics will be a competition of positive proposals, of dynamism, of freedom to create, of courage and hope of a better future. Daphne has only the politics of fear to offer. What a way to make a living.

Dr Vassallo is Chairperson of Alternattiva Demokratika – The Green Party