Roamer's Column

If you thought you'd heard everything about the opponents of the "right-to-live" lobby, think again and see how this one grabs you. My sources insofar as the facts of the case are concerned, are The Daily Telegraph and its sister on Sunday.

Briefly and starkly, here is how it goes. Leslie Burke has a degenerative brain condition. The condition is not yet bad enough to prevent him absorbing the ramifications of the murder by starvation of Terry Schiavo in the United States. This seemed to him to have been a legal murder too far. He decided that if the habit caught on it was a matter of time before he was done in, so he took the matter to court and last July won the right to stop doctors withdrawing treatment, to be kept alive. The High Court ruled in his favour.

You would think that that would have been the end of the story, a slap in the face for the court in the US that had despatched Mrs Schiavo so unceremoniously to another world, but no. Enter, of all bodies, not one but two and arm-in-arm: the General Medical Council and the Department of Health. Both the Department and the British Medical Association oppose Mr Burke's right to life as found by the High Court. They have taken the matter before the Court of Appeal.

An uncharacteristically parsimonious Health Secretary is maintaining that "life-prolonging medical treatment has very serious implications for the functioning of the NHS" and would lead to "inefficient and unfairly skewed use of resources".

This is rich coming from the representative of a Labour government criticised for spending hundreds of millions of pounds on reforms of the service that promise targets which repeatedly fail to hit their mark. But once she too that stand the bizarre conclusion to be drawn is that the practice of suspending the administration of food and water (neither of which is a costly commodity) to terminally ill patients is a fairly common one.

The two bodies responsible for keeping people alive, one by virtue of governance, the other because its members are bound by the Hippocratic oath, an oath increasingly broken in the enlightened days of the late 20th and early 21st century, argue that keeping terminally ill people regardless of any beneficial effect and with a similar disregard for cost is a fearsome thought. There cannot be an unqualified "right to treatment". To which the obvious reaction must be that offering a patient food and water regardless of his or her condition does not constitute treatment.

As we become more and more selective at one end of the scale - opting for a "designer baby" for example, opening banks of embryos some of whom are deposited (significantly, my computer contested 'whom' and offered 'which') many others not credit-worthy, it seems to be the case that governments and medical associations are being quite cruelly de-selective at the other end of the scale. At birth, a Venus or an Adonis regardless of cost (and that only if a modern Jupiter and Dione and Latona did not take the decision to abort) but in the dying of the light, crude extinction because of funds. Rum world. Rum values.

Good old Leslie Burke then. He recognised the signs of the times, found them a trifle skewy and decided to take out a legal insurance against being killed by starvation and dehydration - extinguished, they claim, in "his best interests", of course; which is not how Mr Burke sees things. But wait. There is still the hurdle of the Court of Appeal that Mr Burke must metaphorically jump and who is to say that he will not come a cropper there, a worse cropper than he already is in his wheelchair?

Et in confusione erimus

There is nothing that would delight Eurosceptics in Britain more today and next Wednesday than a No vote by the French and Dutch electorates to the proposed European Constitution. Indeed, rumours are rife that pews in Westminster Abbey and in hamlet churches across England will be packed with worshippers and supplicants. There they intend to invoke Almighty God so to guide the hearts and minds of their brethren across the Channel that Valery Giscard d'Estaing's voluminous document will, as a consequence, be consigned to a 21st century version of Savonarola's bonfire of the vanities.

And talking of bonfires, if the vote goes in favour of rejection, these will be lit from Land's End to John o' Groats and jubilant Englishmen and Englishwomen will party through the May night. And regardez! Even the widow of François Mitterand has come out against.

There is an irony at work. The British hate the Constitution and all its works because it centralises power in Brussels, diminishes the sovereignty of member states, is in short too statist for their taste. The French see it as an English bid to turn the Union into a free market zone at every conceivable level of economic operations. This cannot be good for French farmers and wine growers who have an alarming tendency to take to the streets at the drop of a cabbage or a grape.

What is the state of ratification play as the French go to the wire this morning? Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Slovak Republic, Germany and Austria are in the bag. The Constitution has been approved by the Belgian Senate. Estonia, Latvia, Malta, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, Luxembourg, Poland and Portugal still have to decide. Britain is a no-no but current niggers in the woodpile are France today and Holland on Wednesday.

Will it be the end of the world if voters in these two countries say No? Let's put it this way. It will not be a happy outcome. Change that. It will be a very unhappy one, but need not be the calamity the British are making it out to be, the Great Unravelling, the bursting of the European bubble that will make its South Sea counterpart sound like a gentle hiss.

Regardless of today's outcome, the process of ratification among countries that have not assented to, or dissented from, the Constitution will go on. Only at the end of it, some time in the summer of 2006, will we really know the state of play, the depth of the damage - and what actions flow from the end result. In between, of course, we may see Britain opting out of the ratification process altogether for the sole political reason that there are one or two Brown-tipped arrows already embedded in Mr Blair's flesh and he may decide against becoming a latter-day St Sebastian. No arrows dipped in Eurosceptic poison, please.

A No vote today and on Wednesday will, of course, bring to a disastrous conclusion the presidency of Luxembourg, whose prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker has been insisting that there is no Plan B (but there is always a Plan B in whatever garb it is dressed, even if it is just to sit and wait for the final result before taking any precipitate action). The same No vote will also usher Britain into a presidency that will spend the next six months picking up the pieces, a dull job but one that, like keeping streets clean, simply has to be done; more importantly, Britain's task will be to keep the whole thing together.

Still, it is not the first time that the polls have been wrong and we may say, tomorrow morning, that today is yesterday's tomorrow and all is well. Which is more than Herr Schröder was able to say after his party's crushing defeat in North-Rhine Westphalia where it lost more than six per cent of the vote it had garnered in 2000.

Those blessed roads and things

With prudent spacing in between I have for many years encouraged this government and its predecessors to get the small things right, those little bits and pieces that nark the public (the electorate) because they are so easy to spot. Thus litter; thus dumping; thus road markings; thus traffic directions; thus road trenching; thus road works minor and major; thus public transport; thus those daily chores which, left undone by local councils or by central government, are an irksome reminder of our failure in civic responsibility. 'Our' failure means yours and mine, the local council's and the government's.

Thus road works, but first let us get this in the perspective of our membership of the European Union and our friendship with Italy. This year alone, thanks to these ties, Malta is receiving just under Lm10 million (Lm6.6 million from Italy and Lm3 million from the EU) and investing a further Lm6 million of our money for creating a badly needed road infrastructure.

The latter has been neglected for decades, not taken seriously enough by successive governments and not so wonderfully by the colonial administration that had 164 years in which to bequeath a far better system of road engineering and building. As a result our roads have been, and in a number of areas still are, a bit of a standing joke with visitors and with all of us who have travelled abroad.

There were two main reasons for the reputation earned by our roads. They literally had no real infrastructure (base) on which to base the superstructure (tarmac), which was of the flimsiest kind: one good winter's rain and the pot-holes were soon in evidence. In short, roads were engineered, if at all, with a staggering ruined-by date. Even when the superstructure began to improve, the concoction of the infrastructure remained stubbornly Neanderthal.

The fact of the matter is that to build a good road you need engineering know-how and plenty of cash; which is what the Lm16 million sloshing around the budget for roads are all about. We are, it is true, starting to build better roads and, given the finance available, so we should be doing. The problem is not money but application, first by the contractors who are winning handsome tenders for building our roads and by the government to ensure that the millions of Maltese liri are properly spent and accounted for.

This must mean watching the contractors every step of the way to make sure no short cuts are taken when it comes to materials et other ceterae. The roads minister is only as good as the standard of the roads built under his stewardship. For roads minister, so much is this aspect of his portfolio in the public eye, read Government.

References to the huge sums of money being expended on roads crop up with almost weekly regularity. No sooner is a project completed, or even half-completed than we are informed of what a lot of cash is being poured into our new road system. This is good; it would be far better if in setting up this system we did not have to suffer as road users from non-technical inefficiencies.

We still seem to be aeons away from getting to grips with these, the length of time it takes to get roads finished, the irritating absence of an efficient system for re-routing traffic, warning traffic well in advance that a deviation will soon be in operation and creating a proper diversionary route. These non-technical aspects of road building ought to be money for jam; too often our road programmers and contractors make heavy treacle of it.

These are small matters but they matter a great deal to the electorate. Mr and Mrs Voter-at-the-next-election may with some difficulty understand why he has to pay more for this and that, but it is beyond his comprehension that common and garden services and facilities are not provided in a professional way.

It irritates them beyond endurance to see 400 metres of road or less (between the Sliema police station at the top of Manwel Dimech Street and the end of Rudolph Street) take more than three months to be brought into shape. They know that good middle management and supervision would eliminate these inconveniences once and for all.

The prime minister should have a long chap with his man on roads and impress upon him that it is all very well to keep telling us what we are getting from the Italian financial protocol and from the EU to build and improve our roads. It is at least as important for every programme of road building to be user-friendly in the sense that it is carried out with the least convenience for the monarchs of the road we have become.

Cara Chiara,

This was the first time I sat through an entire Eurovision Song Festival (I understand there have been 50 of them) and the experience has convinced me that I need not do so again - unless you are there. Your song was beautifully delivered. Your dress could have been better selected. How refreshing, though, to see just one singer on the stage without the 'voices' and the drummers (one or two should be in some house of the bewildered) never mind the yobbo antics of this or that team as their singer cashed in douze points or crept up the ladder of success - just a lovely voice with a good ballad, the singer making no meal of it, standing there alone and wowing the crowd.

And I watched your early progress, your regress at times, and your final sprint to second place with more excitement than I dared think myself capable of. Prosit.

But listen, I do not know what weight you carry (pun not intended) with the local organisers. I heard they were going to slap in a protest about some Romanian irregularity. Sit on them and urge them not to do it unless, of course, they have a cast-iron case and proof up to their larynx. Sour grapes never won fair title. And we have little to be sour about, thanks to you; disappointed yes, but that is another matter.