Not quite Boadicea

Astrid Vella has spent the past year inciting people against the city gate project. Only three weeks ago she led the masses – 200 people, max – in a march of protest down Republic Street while carrying a placard that bore the legend ‘Legality Now’.

They never made it to the Palace.

By then, all the demonstrators had melted away into coffee shops and boutiques, leaving her in the company of a few die-hards and a man in an anorak who sang ‘Give Peace a Chance’ into a megaphone and got the names of politicians wrong.

Mrs Vella has colonised the internet, the Labour Party’s television station and whichever newspaper will have her, with a litany of complaints about the proposed parliament house, open-air theatre and gateway to the city.

Her complaints have been unstructured, incoherent, ill-formed and largely the product of an untrained mind. Even today, if you try to pin her down on what she proposes instead of Renzo Piano’s ideas, you’ll find that she slips this way and that.

But nobody beats her for persistence.

That is why it was so surprising when she failed to turn up at the one forum that was the natural culmination of her 12 months of protesting and objecting: the official public hearing organised by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority.

The people who were most conspicuous by their absence there were the very ones who have for one whole year used the media to browbeat the public into submission and agreement with their views – though as the year progressed it became increasingly unclear what those views are.

Some of them want the old opera house rebuilt to Barry’s appalling design, for what purpose no one knows exactly, given that the dimensions are unfit for contemporary opera productions.

Others want a museum of modern art. Others still a national theatre built in a contemporary style, possibly after a ‘design your own theatre’ competition in which The People compete among themselves while a committee made up of other members of The People decide by popular vote which is best.

Then there are those who demand a referendum, completely unaware of just what it takes to organise one and how much it costs, and quite serious in their claim that a national referendum about a theatre is not ridiculous.

Bringing up the rear, though they are the loudest of the bunch, there are the ones who say that a prime minister taking a decision is a dictator; ergo, we live in a dictatorship.

Most amusing of all are those who have reversed reality and made an opera house a symbol of popular democracy while a parliament house is a symbol of privilege.

Almost none of these people were at the MEPA public hearing last Thursday. Of some 400 chairs, perhaps 50 were occupied and most of those by reporters and people from the government. Though they have spent 12 long months clamouring for attention, organising petitions and planning and executing public affairs campaigns, the assorted objectors couldn’t be bothered to drag themselves to Valletta and protest in the proper forum.

That is because, as many of us have long since realised by reading what they write and observing their antics, they are essentially undemocratic in their thinking. They wish to impose their will and desires on the rest of us because they believe they are somehow better placed to take decisions and they know best.

To Astrid Vella and her cohorts – I need not mention them by name but they have been all over the place though not at the MEPA hearing – the proper forum for raising objections to a capital project is Super One and a march on the Palace.

In her leader’s absence, Miriam Cremona valiantly held the fort at that public hearing. She has been roundly criticised for her performance but let’s put it this way: it can’t have been easy to be left holding the baby when everyone has bunked off and left you standing.

Her position was severely weakened even before she began to speak, by the failure of her associates to even bother turning up. The unspoken message their absence transmitted was that they didn’t feel strongly enough to be there.

So why should anyone else feel strongly about what they think, or even bother considering it for one minute?

Astrid Vella’s emissaries let it be known that she was away. Is that so?

If she was away, then she was holed up in a hotel room somewhere, or possibly armed with a Blackberry in some café, because while the public hearing was going on, she was busy posting comments in one of her happy hunting-grounds, the comments-board at timesofmalta.com.

Here’s a sample: “Not only are you right on the score of missing museums which exists in African countries” – so missing museums exist in African countries; that’s fascinating – “but some of the most impoverished countries in the world like Sierra Leone, Ghana, Papua New Guinea and Haiti, which do not share the long tradition of performing arts in the western sense, have prioritised building of a national theatre. As Joseph Calleja said, what does this administration have against culture?”

I think we should be asking now why Astrid Vella chose to sit at home and make that point via her laptop to a news website, while leaving her colleague Mrs Cremona to face the music alone at the public hearing.

Haiti? Sierra Leone? Anybody who uses the word culture repeatedly and like a weapon is automatically suspect in my book as the sort of philistine who puts creativity in a box and separates it off from the rest of his or her life: “Right, now it’s time for a spot of culture.”

Mrs Vella thinks of herself as some kind of cultural paladin, when in reality she is the worst kind of small-minded, small-town bore. Now we also know not to take her seriously when she objects and protests.

If she doesn’t feel strongly enough about a matter to take it right through to the end and turn up at the public hearing, then I think it’s safe to conclude that all she has done so far is not because she cares but because she wishes to be seen and her brief experience of it has made her an addict to the limelight.

After this, where can Astrid go?

I imagine somebody may yet discover another baroque house in Sliema, dating back to circa 1860. That should keep her happy for a while.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.