One day, sooner or later, all this will be reversed.

"Dream on," I hear you say.

If I am wrong, and you are right, that's very bad news for our island.

For the processes now raging will continue unabated, without any correction at all.

Buildings will continue to be pulled down and others built. The new buildings will inevitably be taller, bigger, than what's there today. The little unbuilt land there is today will continue to decrease. 

If we look back at the past century and a half we can see a trend of development that grew and grew, that at most paused, but only for a short time. But it was never reversed. And as a result we now are running out of time and of space.

The government's recent initiative, without consultation, which has raised so much opposition, not just from the PN opposition but also and especially from the environmental NGOs and the public in general, will be rammed through.

The consequences will have to be borne by the next generations. Like the massive public debt. Like the over-population. Like a disfunctional structure of politics that by reducing everything to two parties, ensures that one party will always be on top and the other always beaten. The few times this order was changed always sounded like a revolution, so drastic it was.

So we are doomed to continue along this line. But we can't - that's the tragedy. Can we host more people, tourists, TCNs, people working here, etc? Can we have more cars on the roads?

We may possibly have a better health service but that comes with a hefty bill that we can't afford.

So the situation will have to be reversed. Otherwise all Malta will be built, a horrible unattractive slum peopled by TCNs who by then would have supplanted the native population, bringing a definite TCN touch to everything.

Including the Maltese language, already facing existential difficulties due to its uniqueness as the only Semitic language written like a Western language. To which we may add the reckless massacre by almost all Maltese of our language on the social media.

It's true - Italians tend to skip the tedious conditional and the Brits take short cuts especially with tricky words. But I have yet to meet a people so reckless, so careless that I doubt if they themselves are able to understand what they meant to say.

What I'm talking about here are ongoing processes that usually over the years increase and expand, unless there's a conscious and deliberate decision to rope them back. In a confrontational and knife-edge democracy such as ours, it's very hard to pull back.

Hence the processes dig deep, whatever the consequences. We can see this around us every day.

The dire state of the environment is the surest sign things are going from bad to worse, in other words, that the PA has failed.

Given that a government in hock to (some) developers is the least qualified to tackle this problem, and that the Opposition, in its present state (and, one suspects, in any future configuration) is very chary of trying to check the developers, can anyone imagine how development can be checked, controlled, even reversed?

That is why our streetscapes are anarchic, why there is no uniformity, our towns and villages have lost their distinguishing features. Look at German or French villages and compare them to the Maltese anarchy.

This isn't a recent development: Valletta's unique profile was irredeemably destroyed when the friars built an enormous dome to outdo the Anglican spire.

And it was successive PN governments that allowed Tigne Point to come to resemble Manhattan.

Who gained from all this? Not the country as a whole but a select group who always wanted more. Today's developers are following in their footsteps. And they are as wrong.

History note

Religion and the Church in the 19th Century

Historian Michael Refalo examines the intersection of religion and the Church in Malta during the 19th century particularly focusing on the influence these had on Maltese society.

This paper discusses the evolition of the Church's role from medieval times to the Hospitaller rule to the subsequent British colonial rule.

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