Promoting the idea of boycotting the developers of the towers in Mrieħel and Qui-Si-Sana to underscore the gravity of the matter may have some effect but striving for it to actually happen would be politically naïve and unworkable. Most of all, it misses the whole point of what is at stake.

The issue is not just the building of an unbearable eyesore. What is at stake is the island’s social landscape, its social fabric, the concept of neighbourhood and the very identity of a community set to be dwarfed by a skyscraper, if not two.

In Sliema, there was no plan, no study, no analysis, just a “sham” environment impact assessment, to apply the term used by the chairman of the Environment and Resources Authority. The talk about Sliema’s drainage infrastructure, the traffic generation, the years-long building works or, in the case of the Mrieħel towers, the very legality of the planning system applied, just misses the root of the problem: does this country need these projects and, more importantly, do people want them?

To consider boycotting the Gasan and Tumas groups, which are behind the projects, is to trivialise the matter. The only boycott that worked in recent history, and even that only to an extent, was the National Party’s blacklisting of firms advertising on Xandir Malta in the 1980s. It took the whole party machinery to maintain that boycott in an intensely hostile political environment and, in the end, it was called off because, among other factors, it changed nothing. It just made a point.

Boycotting the developers and the architects would be a herculean task and, the question that naturally arises, where would you stop? Do you also boycott the building contractors, the numerous companies that will service the projects and then, the companies operating from inside the skyscraper? More important, what would it achieve? It will probably not stop the skyscrapers.

The problem that Sliema is facing is a political one, one that no protest or boycott will solve. The ‘new’ Planning Authority has let the people down. The new Environment and Resources Authority was nowhere to be seen and there is no saying what it would have done anyway.

The debate has focused on the individual protagonists, like PA board member Timmy Gambin, who emerged from the affair bruised, and ERA chairman Victor Axiak, whose handling of his absence from that fateful board meeting was messy at best.

But the issue is not individual players, or how close the vote was, but why the situation was created in the first place.

There is no denying that the government, led by Joseph Muscat, is fascinated by the high-rise buildings in Dubai. They think it signifies progress but it is only a fascination, something local developers have latched on to, and got their towers in Sliema and Mrieħel.

Coupled with this are the failings of public institutions, which repeatedly under successive administrations, toe the government line and do not defend the national interest or the common good. All the talk of autonomy, of experts or of studies sounds hollow and unconvincing.

The high-rise controversy is the result of government policy. No boycott that targets the symptom but not the cause will change anything.

What is essential at this stage is finding out whether, after all the charades that led to the predictable, it was just a pre-electoral promise.

That would make it far more serious because it would constitute a threat to democracy as well.

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