Organising boycotts of businesses and operations to which you object is bad. Organising boycotts of anything associated with individuals to whom you object is even worse.

Both smack of totalitarianism, the latter more than the former. For one individual to urge other individuals to boycott something on principled grounds is one thing, and perfectly in keeping with individual liberty and freedom of expression. But for political parties and organisations to urge boycotts and attempt to organise them is another thing altogether. It is wrong. That kind of assault is completely unsavoury. If a boycott is systematically organised and adhered to, people who never did anyone any harm will lose their jobs because of their bosses’ corruption and political back-scratching, while their bosses will go relatively unharmed.

The worst thing about organised boycotts is that it allows people who organise them at an official or unofficial level, for reasons that go against freedom of expression or individual liberty, merely to get back at those they don’t like, whose political views they object to, or with whom they don’t agree, to feel justified in their endeavours. But those endeavours are fundamentally wrong.

The one time I urged people to boycott any business was when I wrote a blog-post recently saying that we should not fly with Turkish Airlines, which had just sacked, en masse, around 2,000 people with families to support on the basis of their political views, which were thought not to concur with President Erdogan’s. Fly with another airline, I wrote, even if it makes life more difficult for you. It is the best way you have of registering your objection. I have very strong views against the arbitrary firing of vulnerable people in countries without labour laws to protect them, and I feel more strongly still about firing people for their political views, more so from a business where political views are irrelevant, like an airline.

But other people may not be able to work out when a personal decision to boycott a business is justified, and when they are not merely being spiteful if they encourage others to do the same. I think a lot of what has been said about boycotting businesses owned or run by the individuals involved in the five planned skyscrapers has to do with spite. That is unjustified and unacceptable. Avoiding anything to do with the skyscrapers themselves is, however, entirely justified, and it is a principled position if you are against them. It would be completely unprincipled, on the other hand, if you claim to object to those skyscrapers but then buy up any bonds which the company issues to raise finance for the construction, or even worse, buy one of the flats or take out a lease on one of the offices. You may not disagree with the construction of a skyscraper but then seek to make money off it or somehow have a part of it.

Alternattiva Demokratika has urged a boycott of any bond issue that the skyscraper companies may have. They are not likely to be successful because if there is one thing that is guaranteed to make a Maltese person change or shed any stated views or principles, it is the scent of money. The prospect of even a couple of hundred euros a year in interest payments will make small investors suddenly develop a passionate interest in making sure the skyscrapers are built and that they succeed. Skyscraper enemies will suddenly become skyscraper fans. We saw this happen with the government’s sale of citizenship scheme.

All the estate agents, consultants and lawyers who had been ringing me and emailing to express outrage at the shocking way the government was “prostituting our citizenship” changed their views immediately the government and Henley & Partners gave them a scant slice of the cake by permitting them to ‘introduce’ applicants and sell/lease houses and flats to them. Their real objection had been to Henley & Partners getting it all. It’s so very easy to buy people on this island. When one of my sons was researching the specifics for an economic history of Malta which he wrote, he came across, among the notes to and from the British government and the colonial administration in Malta, archived at Kew, a reference to how certain individuals could simply be bought off with a stipend of a few pounds a year. Another official, very early in the British period, wrote back to his superiors that he had never seen so much corruption as he had here. It is our default characteristic, and it happens because of a culture of what anthropologists call amoral pragmatism. This is not the place to describe what that is. If you are reading this online, simply look it up.

If you have to call for an organised boycott on grounds of principle, then it has failed already. Anybody of principle will have worked out already that strong objections to the skyscrapers are not consonant with helping to finance them through taking up bonds. And those without such principles are beyond reach. Safe in the knowledge that their investment decisions are private – as they should be – they will buy all the bonds they can and help finance the skyscrapers while objecting to them at dinner parties.

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