That mysterious pAtition

I’ve done my duty – I wonder why no reporter bothered – and asked around, and nobody in government appears to have a copy of Mrs Vella’s petition. She never delivered it. Maybe she was too embarrassed to show that most of her backing comes from people who can’t think, and who appear to be objecting to a ‘waist’ of money.

So where is this mysterious petition? On the FAA’s website, there are some 700 ‘signatures’, and very interesting ones, too. I’ve uploaded some of them on another post. I can’t trace the other 800. Perhaps they’re on random bits of paper lying around the Tower Road, Sliema war-rooms, a Tower Road flat built on the site of a Tower Road house. Oh, blissful irony.

So come on, Astrid. Where’s your petition? Publish it, if you dare – in full, and with all the moronic comments and people called Anonymous.

A friend emailed yesterday to remind me that around three years ago, an extraordinary 15-year-old boy called Ivar Grech collected 40,000 real signatures to a petition calling for enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act. He rounded up most of them himself. His photograph was all over the newspapers. And he gave the government the petition in hard copy because he had nothing to be embarrassed about.

Then the FAA, with its army of militant bridge-players (my husband is one, so please don’t all take offence), its support from AD and Graffiti, its email campaigns and Astrid banging those telephones, managed to round up just 1,500, more than half of which are invisible and the rest mainly people who left school sub-literate.

You’ve been getting away with murder, Astrid. That’s over now.