A proposed new law, which is supposed to make easier the administration of justice, will give the police the power to arrest any woman who is wearing very few clothes and walking around in areas known for prostitution. In other words, if a perfectly ordinary girl decides to walk around the Gzira garden area wearing hot-pants and a tank-top, as many girls do in the summer months, under this planned law she can be hauled in. It’s insane, of course – you can’t arrest and prosecute girls and women for wearing scanty clothing, wherever they may be wearing it, in a red light district or otherwise, not unless you are a mullah in a repressive regime operating under shariah law. Is this what we have come to? There’s a basic lack of understanding here about individual rights and freedoms, and this allows the government, if it wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, to stampede all over them.

No government in a developed democracy should even think about proposing a law – still less successfully passing it through parliament – that allows the police to arrest women for wearing “indecent” clothing. You can arrest them for loitering, fine – and even that is arguable. You can’t even arrest them for prostituting themselves, because if they want to have sex for money, that’s their business. Plenty of women do it, from all social classes and in all kinds of circumstances; some even marry the man with whom they’ve traded sex for money, so that they can keep doing it under the guise of respectability. It takes all sorts and the law has no right to interfere in these matters, though it can and should interfere when pimps and white slavers force women into prostitution and live off their earnings. That’s another matter altogether. Those are human rights issues.

You can tell a street prostitute at 20 paces, even if she is wearing black up to her neck and down to her ankles. Ask me about it. I drive past them several times a day on my way to and from the office. I even walk past them when I go down to get a sandwich, and they’re often in the queue, getting sandwiches as well. They’re an established part of the local scene and the clothes are only a very small part of it.

The National Council of Women is fighting against this crazy suggestion in the White Paper (arrest all women walking through Gzira in hot-pants!). Vice president Grace Attard rightly says that the definition of “indecent clothing” is wide open to cultural interpretation. What might have been indecent to my grandmother (“Hekk hierga?!”) or to my mother (“Dak it-top trasparenti!”) or even to my father (“Dak tghidlu bikini?”) was not indecent to me. What is indecent to me – G-strings flying the flag above the tops of trousers – is not indecent to those who dress like this. Strict Muslims think it is indecent for women to wear anything less than top-to-toe and even facial covering. When I was 10 years old and obliged to go to morning Mass (yawn) in August, a fusty old neighbour crossed the aisle and threaded her way through the pews to inform me that my sleeveless dress was indecent (as though a scrawny 10-year-old could be the cause of improper thoughts to anybody but a twisted Humbert Humbert.

“It is not just a question of somebody being provocative. It is a very subjective judgement, and what might be indecent to you might not be indecent at all, considering today’s fashion,” said Mrs Attard. She’s very right about this, but as a basis for arguing against the proposed law, it quite misses the point. The point is that you cannot arrest women for what they are wearing, or not wearing, wherever they happen to be at the time.

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I didn’t vote in the “choose the picture that goes on the ewro” poll, for the simple reason that, because I work in the field and have strong opinions on the subject, I think that good design cannot be chosen by means of a public straw poll among those who don’t understand design at all. The very idea is appalling to me. To get good design, you have to go to somebody who understands design, and quite why the public should be involved at all is beyond me. We slam democracy in the face where it counts most (proposing laws for the arrest of indecently dressed women for one) and then, in trivial matters like the choice of design for a ruddy coin, we come over all pseudo-democratic, and ask the people what they think.

Well, here’s what I think. All the proposed designs are utter rubbish. If they had been put to me by an accounts executive working for a client, I would have assigned the accounts executive to tea-making and telephone-answering duties. None of them can work as a design reduced to the size required for the face of a small coin and, more to the point, none of them has any significance at all to anyone outside Malta. In other words, those designs cannot immediately identify the coin as being Maltese (remember that these euro coins can be used anywhere in the European Union) because to anyone who is not Maltese, they are entirely meaningless. To be brutally honest, several of them are meaningless even to the majority of Maltese, who couldn’t tell you who sculpted the risen Christ (or even that it is the risen Christ) in a million years – and, incidentally, try rendering that large, in the round sculpture to a relief that is even smaller than the full surface of a euro coin. Rubbish – I can’t say if often enough – utter and absolute rubbish.

Now the Akkademja tal-Malti has stuck in its two cents’ worth of whining and is insisting that the image of Dun Karm, our national poet (it’s all right not to know; most people don’t know who the national poet is, wherever in the world they may live; if they live in the kind of country that has one, he’s usually alive, as with Britain’s poet laureate). Any more suggestions, please? How about the carob tree, or perhaps an qaghaqa tal-ghasel, like the one that was projected onto the bastions during the ceremony to mark our entry into the European Union? And let’s not forget those mqaret, and perhaps a couple of Maltese goats scampering along a rubble wall with a dghajsa in the background and a little old man wearing a flat cap.

The only design that will work on this contentious coin is a symbol: the eight-pointed cross, the one that is known the world over, even among those who don’t know where or what Malta is, as the Maltese Cross. It fits all the requirements: it is clear, simple, easily recognisable for what it is and for what it signifies, and it fits without being compromised onto the surface of a small coin. Better still, it shouts “Malta”!

You have to be a real klutz not to realise, the minute you see a euro with this cross on it – and if you know that it’s called a Maltese cross – that the euro was minted in Malta. And you have to be a real klutz to believe that anybody is going to come here for a holiday because they’ve seen Hagar Qim reduced to a cipher one centimetre in diameter on the coin they’ve used to buy their cappuccino in Helsinki. We don’t have Dun Karm or the statue of the risen Christ on the flag flown by Malta-registered yachts, do we? No, we have the Maltese cross. Enough said. Or perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything at all, in case the Akkademja tal-Malti gets any ideas and starts lobbying the government to have Dun Karm’s face flying in the breeze.