Roamer's column

Was a time, post-independence, when Malta's economy was built, after a fashion, around industry, agriculture and tourism. Running alongside these three sectors were the economic benefits to be had from the presence of British troops who dwindled down to nothing in 1979.

There was a negative side to their presence and Malta's use as a naval base. It created distortions in the economy and excessive dependence on inflows from Britain's defence requirements. They took time to straighten out. It remains correct to say that from 1964 onwards, we signed up to a new reality.

I am not alone in thinking that we have done remarkably well since then. There are still a handful or two who still subscribe to the idea that the world before 1964 was the best of all possible worlds. Yet it is true to say that tied to mummy's apron strings we imbibed a work culture that delighted in dependence on others. It took four decades for the Dockyard, at one time highly unionised, overmanned and debt-ridden, to enter the real world.

As if one such enterprise were not enough, Dom Mintoff dreamed up another massive money loser. He cost us dear, that man. He dreamed of creating a shipbuilding yard where the world's largest oil tankers would be built. Enterprise Tankers Inc failed magnificently. Instead of huge vessels ferrying oil from the Middle East to Japan, China, wherever, we made a nonsense of building some ships for - was it the Soviet Union? - and knocked together the Gozo Channel fleet, the latter project completed well after Mr Mintoff's regime came to an end.

Good money wrote off the debts of the docks, shipbuilding and ship repair yards, once, twice, three times and still the union, never mind the workers, refused to see the writing on the wall. Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was famously to look upon the dockyard workers as an "aristocracy". They showed little class when it came to turning in a profit. Today the workforce of the two yards has been decimated to numbers that make more economic sense. The taxpayer coughed up for that decimation, too.

Slowly, the work culture is changing, but you can still witness a little-work-for-a-full-day's pay in areas of the public sector and by some local council employees. You can still see it in the poor service offered at a number of restaurants where, I was reading the other day, some have taken to converting euro rates to their advantage. The MHRA, extremely vocal on what everybody else should be doing to buck up the tourism sector, should bring its members into line.

But there have been dramatic improvements, too, in no area more striking than in our burgeoning financial services sector. These now include 18 banking institutions, something like 150 investment funds and nearly a rosary decade of insurance management companies. It is a matter of time, and that not long hence, before the number of companies registered in Malta reaches the 40,000 level and it is well to mention the employment, since 1994, of more than 5,000 men and women in the financial sector. Overseeing the sector is an efficient Malta Financial Services Authority that has the confidence of both political parties; which must be praise indeed.

We are witnessing a surge in employment with new-fangled call centres. Two more companies have joined in the fun, invested nearly Lm3 million in setting them up and, with the operational HSBC call centre will be employing just under 2,000 people between them.

As labour-intensive industries gave way to leaner operators, as the IT sector took off, as financial services increased and multiplied, it was the governments following Mr Mintoff's in 1987 that created a brand new, economic profile for Malta. The mess that existed before 1987, it should be remembered, was further compounded by an awesome fear of technology - computers were the devil's very tools, digital telephonic systems his satanic form of communication, even of colour television. There was something of an Aegean stable about the economic environment and other environments besides. The Herculean task to clean it fell upon governments led by Dr Eddie Fenech Adami and his successor Dr Lawrence Gonzi.

Now that much of the muck has been removed, by no means all, it becomes more and more imperative for Dr Gonzi to insist with his ministers that they run their ministries with ever surer hands, removing irritants that so love to work their way against good governance. The Big Task is over even if various challenges lurk everywhere, like bringing the SmartCity project to term.

But it is looking to the Small Things, now, that will win Dr Gonzi the next election: projects tidily wrapped up; the building construction industry made to obey every regulation in the book or else; tree-planting like our existence depended on this activity; road management upgraded (the replacement of the Manwel Dimech Bridge leading to the tunnel on the regional road is a fine place to start impressing the electorate); ditto the public transport system; ditto the banishment of exhaust emissions that continue to defy legal enforcement; ditto the continuing shambles at Ghar id-Dud in Sliema where mounds of soil remain uncovered, debris is all over the place (just the right sight to greet weekend strollers) - and the trees are a paean to deformity.

Ministers need to enter 2007 as if they had just been appointed after a long spell in opposition. So by all means circle February or June 2008 for an election date, Prime Minister, but beware the Small Things, especially if you go to the country on the Ides of March.

Billions of them

You are familiar with the advertisement that makes, on the surface of things, an impressive mathematical claim for a germ-destroying product. X brand, it boasts, kills 99.9% of germs in your kitchen, toilet dead. This was great news to an unreconstructed hypochondriac, but hypochondria has its inbuilt system for never quite seeing good news. 99.9%. My goodness! But even as I mentally made that exclamation a germ of a doubt invaded swirling grey cells.

Ninety-nine point nine per cent of 100 leaves precious few germs around, I grant you, a mere point 1 per cent; so whence the misgiving? Well, I harbour this feeling that germs roam around their victims in numbers that are astronomical. Millions emerge from the simple sneeze. With our propensity to keep our mouths uncovered during this expulsion of potential killers, these millions roam around in attack mode (gainsay me, clever dickies). Killing 99.9% of, say, 20 million, still leaves an awful amount of survivors with a fatal attraction for any respiratory tract, mine in particular, where they settle and live happily enough to ensure you catch an imperial cold, imperial flu and majestic pneumonia.

I work out the number of germs cocking a snook at the vapour that eliminates a mere 99.9% of their neighbours at - how does it work? Point one per cent of 20,000,000 equals point 1 over 100 and the answer to that goes into 20 million which equals... no, let's try a simple one first for the purity of maths evades me. Five per cent of 500 equals 5 over 100 (what we used to term five into 100) times 500; so, five over 100 equals 20 and 20 into 500 is 25. Right. Point one over 100 equals 1,000; 1,000 into 20,000,000 equals 20,000. That means this know-all that claims to polish off 99.9% of the germs still allows a sizable 20,000 to go unharmed, in search of my respiratory tract. Big deal, but as percentages were ever a stumbling block on my way to an O-level and remain so among many other bits and pieces of mathematics, I may have got that sum wrong. I hope so.

I have gone into billions because science blinds us with billions and billions point four or five (these point bits really get me). It has taken billions of years for the universe to form and there are billions of galaxies in which stars are billions of light years away. And 60.4 or 60.5 or 60.7 (take your pick) billion years ago something happened.

Science, faith and British Airways

Everybody takes these figures on faith but balk at God, for Whom there is a reason. As the song goes, "Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever can." Dawkins denies this with a savagery that suggests some doubt. He says, and so do other atheist scientists, that everything comes from nothing. Yet the darndest things is that the order evolutionists claim the universe came into being was already recognised in the first chapter of Genesis, whose author could not tell an atom from a hippopotamus.

What is known with far greater certainty is that not so long ago, certainly not a billion point three years ago, in fact a mere 2,000 years ago, a Man named Jesus was born, claimed to be the Son of God, was put to death and rose from the dead. And if He wasn't he must have been a prize lunatic. His followers knew He was the former. Their belief led them where they had no particular wish to go had they not believed.

They could, of course, have retired into the background from which they had been called, fishing, collecting tax, generally leading mundane lives. Instead they chose to preach His death and resurrection and were put to death for doing so. Twelve men - and thousands of others - changed the world because they could not help preaching a Man who died on a cross. But as this happened within the timelines of recorded history and not three point four billion years ago, some tell us that the evidence is quite unsatisfactory.

British Airways, to name but one British corporation, is doing its bit to go against that world. Some time ago it sacked one of its employees, a Christian, for wearing a small cross at work. In last Tuesday's Daily Telegraph I read, in a statement issued by BA, "that all staff must conceal personal items such a jewellery beneath their uniforms, but it recognised that this was not practical for some religious symbols, such as turbans or hijabs". You know what BA is getting at. You also should have guessed what BA is not getting at. Crosses out, turbans OK and we'll have no fuss from the turbans.

But at last Christians are making a holy fuss. To his eternal credit, the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York Dr Sentamu was outraged by BA's approach, which he described as "flawed nonsense". He asked BA "to look again at this decision and to look at the history of the country it represents, whose culture, laws, heritage and tradition owes so much to the very same symbol it would ban". (Are we seeing the next Archbishop of Canterbury?) Nearly 100 British politicians across party lines have condemned BA's "deplorable behaviour" and sentiment is spreading across the UK in favour of a boycott of BA, which had problems enough of its own before this egregious decision was taken.

Ms Eweida, the person caught up in this extraordinary decision by BA, has been on unpaid leave for the last two months. She intends to take the case as far as the High Court if this should prove necessary. There have been calls in England for the public to boycott British Airways. Any solidarity with Ms Eweida this side?

Jitters in Lebanon

The assassination of another Cabinet minister in Lebanon shows up the risibility of those who advocate that Syria, which has been deeply implicated in the assassination of Lebanon's prime minister Rafik Hariri, last year, and Iran, which refuses to withdraw its position on the right of the Israeli state to exist, should be placed on the top table in talks seeking the resolution of the crisis in Iraq and the Middle East generally. Needless to say, the UN-backed international tribunal set up to inquire into Mr Hariri's assassination is languishing if not moribund.

How the Syrians and the Iranians must be chuckling as they wait for their absolution-by-Baker. There they were, before the Democrats wrested control of Congress from the Republicans, pariahs down to their toenails and all of a sudden there is Mr Blair granting his own absolution and saying that the two countries should be brought into any conference dealing with the region. The expression 'one for the books' must have been created with just this sort of development in mind.

Imagine if you can what the agenda will look like. Israeli-Palestinian peace; Syrian renunciation of violence in Lebanon; Iranian withdrawal of weapons support for Hizbollah; Iranian withdrawal of insurgent-sponsorship in Iraq; Iran's disavowal of its nuclear time-bomb; Hamas drinking champagne with Mr Olmert; American withdrawal from Iraq (the British foreign secretary already seems to have made up her mind that British troops will be withdrawn but Britain, she says somewhat quaintly, will not cut and run - work that one out, later); proclamation of an Iraqi peace; Israeli withdrawal from settlements in the West Bank; Israeli demolition of the wall they have built at such expense; clamping down on terrorists. It is the sort of agenda that should see us well into 2020 and beyond, by which time many dark things will have happened. Meanwhile Lebanon is in a state of jitters.

Quote...

I've been to marvellous party,
We played the most wonderful game,
Maureen disappeared
And came back in a beard
And we all had to guess her name!

We talked about growing old gracefully
And Elsie who's seventy-four
Said, "A, it's a question of being sincere,
And B, if you're supple you've nothing to fear."
Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier,
I couldn't have liked it more.
(Last verse from I've Been to a Marvellous Party by Noel Coward.)