Malta has come a long way since 1964 – but will it arrive by 2015

To celebrate my third anniversary of writing for this august publication in my adopted country, I dedicate the whole column to Malta.

Last week I read two pieces that fascinated me by their contrasting views of the island. They were set apart by 80 years, the Second World War and an empire. As a result, by well reflecting their period and views in both cases, they painted a very different picture of a place that otherwise is completely physically recognisable in each account.

The first was The Moon’s a Balloon – the 1971 autobiography by the well known and much loved British actor David Niven who was stationed in Malta with the Highland Light Infantry between 1929 and 1931 as a very young officer.

Niven describes places in Sliema, Valletta, Floriana, St Elmo, Marsa and elsewhere on the island in 1929 and a Maltese reader today would know the exact spot in a second. However, the 19-year-old officer found the island to be little more than ‘yells, bells and smells’. He thought it grew smaller, dustier and smellier by the week during his two-year stay – he seems to have got used to the noise but not the smells and rejoiced when the regiment was recalled to its bleak Dover Barracks in England.

Moreover, he didn’t appear to have too much time for the Maltese people either. He felt they were not always trustworthy and all too often cruel to their animals – especially their horses. There was clearly an ‘Empire’ attitude to his thinking which would have been quite natural in 1930 but doesn’t seem to have diminished much by 1970 when he wrote his story in a very different world.

This is most interesting as it contradicts the mutual admiration that Great Britain and Malta obviously had for each other, as they were forced to bond in the brave and gallant days of 1940 to 1943. In 1942 King George VI awarded the whole nation the George Cross for its heroic role and devotion to defeat a very evil enemy. This was and remains the only time Britain’s highest civilian medal has been awarded collectively. And the Maltese people responded by receiving both the King and Winston Churchill rapturously once the North African campaign was won.

Indeed, other than some incredibly selfish dockyard industrial action – when dockers threatened not to unload a British submarine that had risked all in order to bring in supplies to a starving population – Malta accounted for itself with great distinction during WW2. As a result, a grateful but bankrupt Britain, when the war was over, still found the cash to rebuild the Maltese infrastructure and economy. It also goes a long way to explaining why over 35 per cent of the 1.2 million tourists who visit the island each year are still British, which makes them the largest section of Malta’s largest industry.

However, Niven’s words are living proof that the relationship was not always so equal, or so friendly, and was often put under some strain as Mussolini’s Italy sought to whip up trouble here in the early 1930s when the dictator desperately wanted the island for his own naval aspirations.

His picture also proves how far Malta has come since those days when compared to the second publication that I referred to earlier – the eight-page independent feature by Image Diplomacy issued with every Daily Telegraph sold in the UK on 16th June this year.

This unashamed sales document, which paints a very rosy picture of Malta, isn’t always completely accurate and concentrates happily on all the really pleasing aspects of Malta – a place bursting with culture, history, gorgeous weather, clear seas and warm and friendly people.

This is, in part, all perfectly true but we all know that, in part, it is also very misleading as the culture and history are often falling apart and in some cases have been surrounded by an awful Mintoff period suburbia. The beaches can be horribly overcrowded and frequently dirty; the island is overrun by uncompleted buildings while the wonderful city of Valletta is collapsing into ruin; and when any new building is finished it is nearly always extremely ugly and out of character with the island’s old and beautiful architecture.

Meanwhile, there are over 50,000 vacant properties but the island is still an untidy building site as even more new hideous creations are started.

The roads are among the worst in Europe; the driving is the worst in Europe and some of the island’s warm and friendly people are nevertheless the biggest litter bugs in Europe – which is why the Maltese are often subjected to this French charge that they are really Arabs who snuck into Europe silently via the late British Empire.

There are some good hotels but plenty more bad ones. There are some excellent restaurants, such as the Lord Nelson in Mosta, but these are outnumbered by hundreds of poor ones. And what about the islands’ resorts? It is perhaps better not to talk of these save to say that, quite frankly, I would prefer to holiday on the Gaza Strip than in Bugibba. The former is possibly less violent and at least you don’t get the dregs of British society there either.

Nor is the cure to this malaise found in building more 5-star hotels there or anywhere else. There is nothing wrong with 2-star hotels as long as they are clean and not in vomit coated streets baking away in the midday sun following the drunken excesses of nocturnal visitors.

So, in tourist terms, the wonderful gems of Malta are almost suffocated amid a clutter of building sites, dumped rubbish, dilapidated housing and ghastly resorts where horrible hotels cater for a number of horrid people. And there you have the rub of it – for every wonderful and truly beautiful aspect of Malta – and there is no doubting the existence of the history, culture, beautiful churches, climate, coastline and honest and decent people – you have a list of disasters, that the government has failed to tackle and which casts a heavy shadow over the tourist industry.

There is nothing wrong in attempting to sell Malta as a tourist destination abroad. Absolutely nothing and moreover the gems of Malta are truly worth it. However, tourists have eyes and, what is more, the sophisticated ones are accustomed to seeing the likes of Positano, Cannes or Portofino. Many decent folk who could come don’t, having heard about the state of the island from others, and many more go home disappointed. You should hear them talk, as I often do, on their flight home.

Therefore, the crime is not to promote Malta. No, the crime is to pretend the island’s drawbacks don’t exist rather than stopping construction corruption and eradicating dirt, rubbish, shocking roads, atrociously dilapidated housing and horrible resorts which attract the wrong sort of tourist.

As a result, Dr Gonzi’s boast that Malta will be the leading Mediterranean tourist destination by 2015 is sadly as self-delusionary as it is ridiculous. And until someone realises that rubbish and the unchained aspirations of a greedy property development sector are seriously damaging tourism, Malta will fall further and further behind in what is an ever increasingly sophisticated Mediterranean tourist market.

However, not all of the government’s Vision 2015+ is failing. Malta has made great advances in financial services. Both large international corporations and high net worth individual are basing themselves here increasingly, enticed by sensible double tax treaties and high standards of service, security and integrity set by both the MFSA, under the firm leadership of Professor Joe Bannister, and the Malta Stock Exchange, whose chairman is Dr Arthur Galea Salamone.

The financial services sector has no nasty little surprises unlike the tourist industry. This sector is growing and will continue to expand as Malta really does become a favoured destination for international finance and business. The EU tightening of financial dealings with the likes of Monaco, Bermuda and the Channel Islands etc will only speed up this process. Dr Gonzi, his ministers and permanent secretaries all deserve tremendous credit for this. The knock-on effect to the whole Maltese population will be very positive as more and more money is based here.

So even if the place is a bit of a wreck rather than a gem in the gleaming Mediterranean, the streets could still have their million potholes filled with international gold – thanks to the MFSA and the government.

Furthermore, manufacturing, which hardly existed at the time of independence, now makes up 17 per cent of Malta’s GDP and the island now hosts over 200 international manufacturing and distribution companies. There are also a growing number of successful Maltese companies. The guidance of Malta Enterprise has played its part in this growth.

Moreover, the government seems to have ridden out the worldwide recession much better than some of its much bigger but more foolish, high borrowing, EU partners. Alan Camilleri, the chairman of Malta Enterprise, follows the new British government’s line of small government. “I think the secret of our success is that we are small so we can listen then act and we do this in a relatively short period of time. Structures are not very vertical; people are encouraged to take decisions. People like the ministers and me are very accessible. We understand the beat and then we beat the drum.” Well done again Prime Minister Gonzi on making this sector an emerging success.

The Freeport has achieved all that was asked of it and there are countless other projects which are joining it in assuring that the Maltese people are protected from the current economic recession and are ready to deal with a future which looks increasingly bright.

So the conclusion must be that Malta has come a long way from being reliant on the British for military related jobs, as described in David Niven’s 1929 account of the island. Its achievements since independence are most admirable in so many ways. However, unless it goes that extra mile to protect its largest GDP earner – tourism – it is needlessly undermining its ultimate success.

Surely, the intelligent men in government realise this. Of course they do but that is not the question. The question is do they have the power to stop the lousy corruption that is at the heart of the Mepa related construction industry? Do they have the energy to fight for their share of EU funding for developing the roads and saving Valletta? What can they do about the dilapidated houses? How can Bugibba be made more desirable than a week in a Far East gaol? And does the government have the nerve to tell the Maltese to tidy up and start imposing some painful fines for rubbish dumping? Only time will tell but somehow I doubt it and that is really a shame.

‘You can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’ could be ‘you can show a Maltese a rubbish bin but you can’t make him use it.’ So a financial services success on a litter ridden building site seems to be what my adopted home has settled for. Thank God for my adorable Mdina, where most of the aforementioned mess does not exist.