‘…Meanwhile, plans have been revealed for a hotel in the protected Għadira Bay and a university campus in an outside development zone near Żonqor Point in Marsascala…’

Labour has nothing more to offer than this. It’s ideas nothing more than outdated and reminiscent of the 90’s boom. Times change.

The problem lies primarily with Muscat’s mental process; the marketeer in him does not believe design matters. Thus the meaningless spiel; upmarket, luxurious, quality jobs, the stale rant of someone who cannot offer anything other than an illusion. No different to the controversy surrounding Portomaso’s rocky beach, or the Radisson’s watchtower.

Those were leasons learnt two decades ago.

A quasi-tragic individual if I may, ensnared in these lowlifes’ insistence on calling themselves entrepreneurs. Literally if it was done twenty years ago, it can be done again.

If their business is hotels, perhaps looking at the signs of the times and new business models might help. Even because Costa del Sol’s proposal is anything but upmarket, more like sybaritic and plain vulgar.

If the proposal is a campus, will someone explain why students prefer staying in some exclusive Olympic style village instead of living inside the centres we so supposedly care for?

In both cases, the underlying determining factor is just to create a closed package which can be controlled, sold and speculated upon at any sign of difficulty.

It’s this quality of ‘developer’ Muscat wooed to his party and it will be this shambolic standard which will bring everything down.

The moment he’ll try to force it through, negotiating with the electorate on their behalf promising national parks in exchange, just has no dignity does he, he’s reduced himself to simple politician.

Good, it’s not as if he can retract.

Well spotted PN, that bill is the first sign of distinction. That the social pact be established and function be introduced into common parlance.

Read history: the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean, corsairing, slavery, slave-trading, the Order of St John, Venice, trade with the east & c & c.

You can’t read ‘links’ about it. Historic events cannot be studied or considered in isolation – and that is exactly the problem with the way the ‘great siege’ is taught in Maltese schools (without reference to the Ottoman Empire and trade-ships in the Mediterranean).

I was just going to write ‘Tibza’ mir-rix’ but then I Googled it and found the proper word lest Astrid should read my post on your blog. Didn’t want to sound unlearned.

Not only that, but Astrid Vella was actually decorated for services to Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party by the incoming Labour government in its very first honours list, which was made up almost entirely of people who had scratched Labour’s back to a greater or lesser extent.

But obviously, she thought it was for her services to the environment. That would be why so many other environment NGO heads were honoured similarly, then. But they weren’t.

It did something which no self-respecting environmental NGO should ever do – it got itself mixed up in party politics.

It worked and operated to the benefit of one political party against the other.

Its worst and most shameful moment was its vociferous, pathetic and wholly unjustified objections to the City Gate project which it tried to block.

Had FAA succeeded in its efforts, we would now have ruins of an opera house instead of a revitalised entrance to Valletta and a purpose-designed building for Malta’s Parliament.