As you read this, lots of people out there will be feeling a strange

sense of anti-climax. All those months of preparation and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is over in the blink of a very tense eye. It appears to have gone very smoothly, with the minimum of disruption to daily life for us, mere mortals – though it has to be said that the average person remains mystified as to what it was all about. It’s a safe bet that many thousands don’t even know what the Commonwealth is. For this they cannot be blamed, as awareness of the Commonwealth doesn’t form part of our school education syllabus, and it is not the sort of thing that parents teach their children at home – even if they know enough about it to do so. Somehow, there isn’t in Malta that sense of being part of the Commonwealth that there is in other former British colonies. We have rejected our British past so fully and absolutely, in all senses and together with the language, that this is not at all surprising. Likewise, we should not be taken aback at the notion that ‘CHOGM’ is but a meaningless acronym to so very many Maltese: ic-chogging.

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Traffic management by the police was superb and there were far fewer inconveniences than one would have imagined beforehand. With a bit of lateral thinking and a modicum of cheek, the system could also be turned to one’s own advantage, as I realised when I was extremely late for a meeting last Friday. A police car flashed past, siren wailing, leading a convoy of important limousines. There was no police car bringing up the rear, so I pulled out of the inner lane, joined the convoy at a very respectable distance, and high-tailed it all the way to my meeting. What bliss it was, making rapid progress unencumbered through extremely busy roads, watching the traffic melting away to the left at the approach of the siren. A couple of other canny drivers cottoned on to what I was doing, and followed suit. By the time the limousine convoy reached its destination – which was ours also – it had gathered quite a bridal train of assorted cars with very grateful drivers.

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On the one hand there are those who reject entirely Malta’s British legacy, and on the other there are those who still think of Queen Elizabeth as “our Queen”. This feeling was tangible during her public appearances, and in Valletta one man actually shouted it out: “You are still our Queen.” History dies hard. Driving down to Vittoriosa for the inaugural ceremony at the Grand Harbour Marina, for my first ever real-life glimpse of the queen and her consort (I’m a sucker for this kind of thing), I saw rain-soaked streets so deserted it was almost as though everyone had stayed indoors deliberately. And then, standing on a corner, there they were: a lone middle-aged couple in the drizzle, each carrying little Union flags on sticks and staring hopefully into the distance. It is easy to imagine that it was not fondness for the queen as such that drove them out of their homes to stand in the rain just to watch her whiz past in a Rolls Royce, but nostalgia for the period when she was Queen of Malta. Perhaps it is the same with many of the older generation who turned out to see her, their faces shining with emotion. You have to admit it, regardless of your personal politics, your attitude to the British in Malta, or even your views about warships: Grand Harbour comes into its own with a vast naval vessel or two, and looks terribly sad, empty and even pointless without them. Cruise ships are not the same thing, somehow, despite the business they bring. They lack the romance and the drama that warships bring with them. Grand Harbour was made as though for fighting ships, and for so many centuries, that was its entire raison d’être. After 1979, it just looked strangely sad and empty. I like to imagine it as it must have been years ago, packed with merchant ships, naval vessels, and little rowing boats going to and fro laden with passengers. The wharves were alive with activity, buzzing with people of all nations: sailors, traders, ships’ passengers, and crowds trying to sell them things. It would have been a lot more interesting than the anodyne, sanitized present, and in those who remember it like that, the presence of the woman who was once our queen will trigger a wave of nostalgia.

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Speaking of which, it is odd how we so often become nostalgic about buildings and places, without concurrent nostalgia for the life that went with them – except in rare cases like that of Grand Harbour, which is virtually meaningless as a place without the activity that made it meaningful for centuries of history. The ‘nostalgia prints’ that are distributed with The Malta Independent are hugely popular. People pick them up and scour them for clues, making comparisons with the present. “Oh how much more beautiful it was then,” they say. I look at the popular prints, and the first thing that strikes me is the absence of human beings. Where are all the people? Are they indoors, sheltering from the midday sun, or did they not go out at all? One photograph of that part of the Sliema seafront where I grew up left me completely perplexed. It was already chockfull of houses, built in a steady, uninterrupted terrace as far as the camera could see. And yet there were no people walking around on the promenade or the pavement, no carriages in the road, not even any lone riders on horseback. It was like one of those towns in a spaghetti western, where immediately after the opening credits have rolled, all you can hear is the wind whistling over the eerie silence, and the only movement is a saloon sign flapping rhythmically. Then Bud Spencer moves into view, his right hand on his holster. Brrrr. Far from feeling nostalgia for something that I never knew, and thinking, “Oh how much better it was then, and how nice it must have been to live there,” I shiver at the very thought. The lovely old buildings have been replaced by unaesthetic concrete and aluminium, but life is so very much more interesting and comfortable now – especially for women. I’d rather have that than the buildings.

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One thing no one is ever going to publish a nostalgia print about is Tony Zarb, even though he is such a throw-back, with his national protests and his senseless battle-cries. He called his people to march under the banner of ‘solidarity with the workers’, quite as though the rest of us are heartless robots who don’t feel any empathy for those who are suddenly out of a job because the factory they worked for is closing down. Of course we feel for them; we would be inhuman if we did not. The difference is that we know marching will not solve anything, because the closure of Denim Services Ltd is not the government’s fault – not this government, and not any government anywhere in the world. It’s the nature of the beast: being alive means being at risk; being in employment means being at risk of being unemployed. No government – here or elsewhere – can possibly have any control as to where Levi Strauss places its orders for the manufacture of jeans. In the home of Levi Strauss, the United States of America, many thousands of jobs were wiped out overnight when the company decided to close down the last of its manufactories there. At least, the people who lose their jobs here don’t have to travel to the other side of the continent in search of another, as those Americans did, the whole town having survived on Levi Strauss business.

In this tough environment, businesses which operate on an international scale, and even those that don’t, have to take decisions that appear ruthless, harsh and even anti-social so as to stay afloat. If the job losses are not here, then they will have to be somewhere else. ‘No to redundancies’, the General Workers Union said in its advertisement for the national protest. Redundancies are not the decision of the union, nor are they the decision of the government, unless the employees in question are government employees. Redundancies are the decision of those who own the business. If they cannot afford to pay their workers, or if the presence of those workers on the payroll is prejudicing the future of the company as a whole, then redundancies have to be made, and no amount of screaming by Tony Zarb and his throw-back collection is going to change this simple fact. The days are gone – praise be the Lord – when the government that Tony Zarb supported forced business owners to keep on the payroll staff who were effectively redundant, even when there was no money coming in and wages could not be paid, still less national insurance and PAYE. That is no way to make Malta grow, but a way to shrink it – as, indeed, Malta did shrink to grey and puny misery in the early 1980s, when it was led by people of the mindset of Tony Zarb.

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How easy it is to ignore the fact that the people who owned Denim Services have lost far, far more than a job with a wage that can be replaced within months. They have lost half a lifetime of hard work and all of their investment in time and money. They have seen the business they spent years building up, to its recent level of 850 employees, wiped out overnight. They have had to go to bed every night and then to wake up every morning knowing that it is over, over, over, and that all they have worked for is gone. They have had to bear the terrible burden of making redundant 850 people with families, a month before Christmas. Their own families are having to endure psychological devastation of a kind that Tony Zarb, with his pay-cheque from the union and his risk-free existence, cannot even begin to imagine. When you lose a business that you have spent years and a great deal of investment building, then you lose your very core, your sense of self even. When you lose your job, you go out and get another, sooner or later. When you lose your business, you lose everything. It is at times like this that people like Tony Zarb should thank God that the country is not made up entirely of people like him, and that there are a few individuals who are prepared to take the tremendous entrepreneurial risks that will provide work for others as well as rewards – or disaster – for themselves. Would Tony Zarb have done it? No. He is happy with his pay-cheque. Then he should keep quiet – or build a business that will provide work for some of those people.