The silly season starts here

The battle over Renzo Piano’s briefs – I’m sorry, I couldn’t help that; it’s all so ridiculous – continues.

Now that FAA has been told the obvious, that there was no written brief because people of Renzo Piano’s calibre are engaged as creators and not as executors, its members have retreated to the tea-table once more to come up with a fresh line of attack.

FAA has yet to tell us what it actually thinks about Renzo Piano’s project, and forget the brief.

Fussing about the brief is just an elaborate exercise in obscuring its members’ incompetence in discussions about architecture and real environmental issues. That incompetence is revealed in sporadic comments which they post on the internet, like that of the FAA member who sought to give Renzo Piano some style advice, no doubt after a successful redecoration of her drawing-room, much admired by her friends.

He should use sheets of bronze instead of sheets of steel at the entrance to the city, she wrote, because they would ‘tone’ more with the bastion stones.

By demanding the (non-existent) brief so as to prove to The People that Piano’s hands were tied by the nasty ogre who lives in the palace on the hill – Booooo! He’s right behind you! – FAA’s members have shown a lack of clear thought.

I assume that they have been following this increasingly tedious saga since the day the prime minister announced that the opera house site would be used for Malta’s first-ever parliament house, and we all began to bicker at once over what it should be: parliament house or theatre/opera house/museum/national arts centre.

We carried on bickering until it was pointed out to us, by none other than the architect whose hands were supposedly tied by the ogre, that there’s room for both.

Parliament house can fill up that gap which the original planners of Valletta never intended to be empty (in fact, it never was) and the opera house ruins, a place of spirit and memory, would be incorporated into a contemporary theatre.

So it was in the news more or less from day one that Renzo Piano effectively wrote his own brief, placed parliament house in Freedom Square and a theatre in the ruins.

FAA’s leading lights are incensed when they are accused of having ulterior motives. Yet they are the ones painting themselves into this particular corner.

They keep shifting the goal-posts. First they demanded a theatre on the site of the ruins, saying that parliament house could be located elsewhere. When they got that, they began objecting to parliament house itself, saying that it is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Are these the concerns of a self-described environment group? I hardly think so.

I would expect an environment group to discuss, instead, the environmental aspects of what will be Malta’s first and probably only fully ‘green’ public building: parliament house. There hasn’t been a word about that.

Instead, FAA has rejected the ‘green’ building out of hand and is demanding instead that the government knocks a few ‘palazzos’ together, possibly after requisitioning them from some hapless owner, and adopts a Blue Peter “here’s one I made earlier” approach to the creation of a makeshift parliament house, in hopelessly unsuitable quarters and with no ‘green’ infrastructure.

The maxim that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing has been borne out by the behaviour of FAA and its more assiduous members. Their tenacity is to be admired; the same cannot be said for their incompetence and their utter lack of focus. If they are an environment lobby group, they should stick to the environment.

Where and how tax-payers’ money is spent is a political argument and not an environmental one. That is just one reason why they are being accused of political motivation.

Labour controls inflation by importing food and nappies

The Labour Party has told us what it plans to do about inflation. It’s all more of the same and could have been written by an A-level student. Labour’s simplistic approach to life and its myriad difficulties invariably rubs me the wrong way. You’d think the party’s regiment of silly people would have got over their basic housekeeping approach to economic policy, but no.

I especially loved proposta numru tlieta, which tells us that the government should import products and services huwa stess and then sell these b’mod differenti.

Are these people for real?

So a Labour government is going to be one that goes into the importation business (been there, done that, never want to relive the experience), distorting the market and competing with the private sector, while distracting itself from what it really should be doing, which is looking after matters of government.

I’m not sure we should be surprised. After all, it was Labour deputy leader Toni Abela who suggested, in all seriousness, that the Labour Party should create different streams of revenue by setting up a Labour supermarket. His reasoning was that the Labour Party has the support of half the electorate, and that this would automatically translate into half the market.

If you vote Labour, you’ll drive for miles to the Labour supermarket from wherever you live, to buy your Labour groceries there.

Ah, but here’s the conundrum for Toni Abela. What would be the raison d’etre of a Labour supermarket: to make money for the Labour Party, or to provide an inflation-busting supply of non-profit or low-profit goods to starving Labour supporters who are living in absolute poverty because of the ogre in that palace on the hill?

Does Labour compete with the rest of the evil businesses who are running their cruel supermarkets and ripping off Les Miserables, so as to make enough money to pay Jason Micallef?

Or does it run a charity non-profit NGO supermarket in line with its socialist ideals? Hmmm – tough one, that.

This article appears in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.