If you are in the lucky, or unlucky position, as I am (depending on your point of view), of having limited but real contact with those people who have to make decisions, aka the government, as well as the general public through work, friends and a normal-ish life, which politicians and their close hangers-on do not manage to have (believe me), you begin to realise the great and enormous gulf, as illustrated by the Ramla saga, that is widening by the day between some elements of this Nationalist administration and their core voters – the thinking, reasonably honest and reasonably hard working and affluent Maltese and Gozitan middle class.

I say reasonably because I would love to see the published names of all those mainly men, I suppose, who paid a bribe of sorts to get their skipper licence without attending any training. A mere 500, but the number could be much higher! And we know some of them. I am sure it is an indictment of us all as a nation that only blames politicians for all our wrongs, but when push comes to shove, this national rule-breaking way of living is as natural to some of us as eating rabbit on Mnarja!

People, too many of us really, collude in bribing people to get what they want (and yes I know, or I hear, that in many cases it is so much the norm, say in the development industry, that it is the only way to survive), and then moan about all the corruption which is endemic and rife, and will be whoever is in government unless we start to re-educate our children out of this colonial type education system we still labour under. An education which could give us pride in working and working well, real pride in our country, the courage to fight wrong even if it comes from those above you and the willingness to pay the price when you are blacklisted or whatever for your honesty.

Instead we are proud of being abortion free or divorce free, when we really are none of these things. We are obsessed, Italian style, with the superficial manifestations of success – having wife or hubby, penthouse, Versace jeans, Bulgari bling. The Church too colludes in this superficiality via its endless duttrina classes, and more that is much worse such as its protectiveness of paedophiles and that things just do not change enough for the better. It is hard to be honest but if a few more did it we would not be in the mire of a mess we are in today. And if we can’t be honest can we all be a little less hypocritical when we throw stones?

And it does bear saying (whoever is in government) that it is very hard, very tough and more being in government. Anyone who thinks it’s a picnic should really stop reading this because the politicians I am close to work ungodly hours. True many are arrogant. True some are veritable pains. True some are just not competent or up to the role. But hard work does characterise most of them. One of their problems seems to be that they just do not understand us any more. They understand the lower or the working class who knock at their door, who make appointments to see them to moan about their daughter needing a job, their son needing a subsidy, their disabled grandma wanting a lift for free from the government.

Those people they understand. Those people they work very hard to help. Those people are being listened to.

So the votes the PN lose will not come from there, will not come from those who are getting those vouchers to help with their electricity bills, but will come from those who have to pay unfair amounts of inheritance tax on a property built with taxed income, or who have a house with a well-off tenant paying no rent while this government and the Opposition refuse to say they will at least phase out the right of inheritance

And yet these huge chunks of people don’t go to ministers at all. This huge chunk of people who form Malta’s coping class, you know work for their bread and get no tax breaks, are livid about Ramla. How could we get it so wrong? The minute there was a whiff that somebody, anybody wanted to redevelop that site the PM should have been told that this was as worrying a development as an abortion ship off our shores, as worrying as 400 young people losing their livelihood. But those in government simply can’t see the impossibility of this application because they are not in touch, or not in touch enough with Malta’s coping class, with Malta’s reasonably educated, with Malta’s environmentalists, to use that term very loosely.

Nobody from the MEP or Castille should have been trying to help with this application in any way whatsoever. They should have reacted as I did when in my first months in my other life as Housing Authority chairman, a group of businessmen came to my office offering me (as in the Authority) 200 flats in order to help get them a permit to develop a site in a scheduled part of Malta. And for those of you who want to know, this forms 99 per cent of the, of course, unofficial requests of those who want public private partnerships with the government! They were promptly shown the door! This Ramla application was a nightmare from day one and should have been seen as such. Much as Verdala was, much as Ta Cenc is, much as the Golden Bay area was. And yet it wasn’t really spotted. It is even more significant because so many of us have gone to Ramla, Malta and Gozo’s best beach, one of the finest beaches in the Med. so we feel the anger more than we do about Ta Cenc, which far fewer visit.

If the only solution is to buy back that site for the people of Malta and Gozo then the government must buy it, as it must buy back Ta’ Cenc, with its value not as a building site but as an area of outstanding natural beauty and of huge ecological importance and value.

There really is no other way. Perhaps it should be the Prime Minister’s real present to Malta’s coping class at the next budget. Buy back that site. Give it to the people of Malta and Gozo as a present. Clear the area of any development and let’s be done with it. That site cannot be redeveloped, must not be ever touched again.

If there were the threat of abortion coming to Malta this government would move mountains in its determination to stop it. We need the same determination about Ramla too. Ramla truly is all our embryos. Its protection is what should define us a 21st century nation.

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