As elections approach anything becomes news, as long as Ministers get their time on TV and their face in the papers. The set up for Aaron Farrugia’s press conference in Ħaż-Żebbuġ suggested he was going to announce a space mission (more on that in a separate post). The big announcement? The Local Council is going [...]

Times of Malta reported that Ian Borg stood idly by as anti-covid rules were flouted grotesquely at the St Philip Band Club during the Żebbuġ Festa yesterday. In his defence, such as it is, Ian Borg said Bernard Grech was there as well. Ah, that's alright then. I'll just leave this here. The man on [...]

Size, history, ethnic makeup, relative religious homogeneity, peripherality, maritime and front-line geographical location: all these are possible causes, ingredients in the mirky soup of our particular brand of nationalism. If the causes are debatable, the manifestation of nationalism in this country should be beyond doubt. The fact that we don’t think about it too much, [...]

In 2018, former premier Joseph Muscat predicted that Malta would be the best in Europe and the envy of the world. A little more than a year later the man crowned as the most corrupt politician of 2019 resigned in disgrace under pressure from civil society. He is now a nobody living in Burmarrad with [...]

Norma Saliba and Quinton Scerri defended, poorly, TVM coverage of conditions inside the prisons after a complaint filed with the Broadcasting Authority. The Broadcasting Authority ordered PBS to carry a feature which depicts the “real situation” and which “respects people’s intelligence”. Which means TVM’s reporting did not report on the real situation and was disrespectful [...]

Please find me someone in the country, even the most adulating and fawning Laburist sal-mewt, the most indebted crony, the discarded but vaguely sentient attempts at cloning Jason Micallef, the lazier spermatozoa dozing in the recesses of Glen Bedingfield’s wrinkly scrota, who is taken in by hyperbole like “we’ll be the best in the world”. [...]

I wish I could be constructive about the prime minister’s announcement of his "vision" for the next ten years. I wish there were things we could take home from yesterday’s press conference. I wish we could hope for some return from the money the government is spending on this tax-payer-funded pre-election publicity exercise for the [...]

My closing remarks at yesterday's launch of The Third Siege of Malta. You’re walking away with 135,000 words I wrote so the last thing you need is a speech. So just a few words of thanks from me. First, thanks for everyone helping out tonight and for the panellists who took time out and managed [...]

Calling Alessandra Dee Crespo the "editor" of The Third Siege of Malta is reductive. It suggests a purely revisory role, a censor who is perhaps kind, but a censor nonetheless. Alessandra's role in this book is of co-creator. Choosing themes, joining disparate writings written over four years and sewing them into a coherent narrative is [...]

Some images from yesterday's book launch at Margo's in Mistra. Thank you for being there. If you weren't, do buy the book.

The Justice Minister’s article in today’s Times of Malta is a national embarrassment. People at the Venice Commission must be reading it and rolling on the floor with laughter. What a proper buffoon. I’ve already written why I think Edward Zammit Lewis lost the argument here. I feel no inclination to repeat myself just because [...]

Edward Zammit Lewis is reported to be objecting to Police Superintendent George Cremona being made head of the asset recovery bureau. That’s an office that largely exists as a legal fiction rather than in reality. It is meant to seize objects owned by criminals acquired from the proceeds from their crimes. Typically, this would be [...]

Minister Miriam Dalli called a press conference to announce her vision for a new undersea electricity cable connecting Malta to Sicily. This is not something that is actually going to happen in this legislature. So consider this a Labour Party press event funded by the government. There would have been no harm in the Labour [...]

Whenever consequences are demanded by the angry and lonesome few with a conscience left in them, the government buys time by claiming confidence in the institutions. When it is the government that the institutions are supposed to investigate and expose, the government’s confidence in the process is far from reassuring. Yet, one cannot ignore the [...]

Joseph Muscat and Labour’s chief selling point in their aggressive and expensive election campaign of 2013 was the promise to slash utility bills. Labour presented their offer of a new face for local politics, one Konrad Mizzi, a smooth faced newcomer, gracing every press conference, every debate and every advert. He sweet-talked his way with [...]

Last Sunday I wrote a piece about needing a government that plans for a new economy that makes sense in a world pushing back on climate change. I called for imagination to outgrow our dependence on the evasion of tax levied by other countries. I pointed out that the givens of our past economic successes [...]

Four years ago today I looked for the first time at the audience measuring tool that comes with a blogging website. The previous morning, I had published my first ever post in a Google blog app hurriedly put together for me by a tech savvy colleague at work. The piece, called unimaginatively “It hurts, doesn’t [...]

I trust this is sufficient notice to remind members of the Board of the Planning Authority that the Board is due to meet this Thursday at 10am to discuss the application by the dB Group to “develop” (as they insist calling the erection of concrete Titans on relatively unspoiled land) the former ITS site in [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "We can raise our angry fists at these realities of the changing world and stubbornly cling to an economic model that, like slavery or textiles, is past its date, or we can get real, be part of the global deal for reform and find a new role [...]