Valletta Won't Bend: The City Pushes Back
Flimkien għal-Ambjent Aħjar, Residenti Beltin, Moviment Azzjoni Soċjali, and the Fortunato Enrico Mizzi Foundation have all asked the Planning Authority to refuse it.
Three separate civil society groups have said the same thing about Valletta this week, and they have said it plainly enough that only the Planning Authority seems not to have heard it: the capital is being hollowed out, one catering licence at a time.
The immediate cause is a permit application for a catering outlet near Ta' Ġieżu, the Baroque church on Triq il-Franġiskani that has watched centuries pass without needing a restaurant next door. Flimkien għal-Ambjent Aħjar, Residenti Beltin, Moviment Azzjoni Soċjali, and the Fortunato Enrico Mizzi Foundation have all asked the Planning Authority to refuse it. The language they are using — "hollowed out" — is not hyperbole. It is the precise clinical term for what happens when a living neighbourhood is converted, permit by permit, into a service corridor for tourists who leave at ten and take the good air with them.
Malta's relationship with Valletta has always been complicated. The British treated the city as a garrison with good views. Independence brought pride but not investment. EU accession brought the money, and the money brought the terraces, and the terraces brought the noise, and the noise drove out the families who had survived everything else. This is not a planning dispute. It is the last chapter of a very long dispossession.
Across town, a different kind of battle over symbols. Jason Micallef, chairman of the Valletta Cultural Agency and Robert Abela's special delegate for Labour's cultural arm, called banners reading "Justice for Daphne" vandalism. The Nationalist Party is now demanding that Abela either discipline Micallef or, by his silence, own the sentiment. Abela will do neither with any speed — this is a man who has elevated the management of ambiguity into a governing philosophy. But the PN's demand at least forces the question into the record, which is where it belongs.
Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Chris Fearne is in Brussels defending Malta's veto rights against a push by larger EU member states to shift certain foreign policy decisions away from unanimity. He is right to fight it, and I say that without much hesitation. A Malta that surrenders its veto on international affairs becomes, in practical terms, a constituency of Germany with better beaches. The Knights understood four centuries ago that size is irrelevant if you control the gate. Fearne understands it too, even if he'd phrase it differently.
What ties these three stories together is simple enough: Malta is arguing this week about who gets to decide what happens here — in Valletta's streets, in its courtrooms, in Brussels. The answer, as usual, will be determined less by principle than by who shows up and refuses to leave, and the protest called for September 16th will be a measure of exactly that.
