Blessed are the margins

I’ve always found it a touch ironic how the word “developer” has acquired such a negative tinge, rather like “conservationist” after bird killers and trappers appropriated it.

In any case, Malta’s developers have now been seized by a sudden and touching concern for European legality, lodging complaints about unlawful “state aid”.

One imagines them poring over EU treaties late into the night, eyes moist with civic duty, murmuring “proportionality… internal market…” as though they had discovered scripture rather than a convenient cudgel.

Let’s not pretend this is a Damascene conversion to the rule of law. It is not. This is a tantrum dressed in Euro-jargon, delivered by a team of legal beagles with elan and panache. Strip away the regulatory varnish, and the complaint is disarmingly simple: the government has interfered with their margins.

For decades, the Maltese property market has been a finely tuned exercise in extraction. Demand remained buoyant, supply carefully calibrated, and prices rose with the quiet inevitability of something that was never meant to stop rising.

In this, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia was the inspiration, onward, upward and let’s keep creaming, though at least the Catalan one has a noble purpose.

Perhaps prompted by the vulgar realisation that voters had been priced out of existence, the State intervened under the banner of “affordability”.

To hell with them, one can imagine it being muttered on the 4th Floor, needs must, and we need those voters. 

“Affordable housing” is, to the developer’s ear, less a policy than an obscenity. The very idea that property might be accessible without lifelong financial servitude carries a distinctly heretical note.

That is precisely the offence. The scheme, imperfect, no doubt, introduces the faintest suggestion that prices are not ordained from on high. That they might be nudged. Contained. Even in moments of real danger, stabilised.

This simply will not do. 

And so out comes the heavy artillery: “state aid”, “distortion of the market”, solemn invocations of competition law. From an industry that has treated the market as something to be stretched, squeezed, and gently throttled whenever required, the language is exquisite.

Distortion, it seems, is only objectionable when it happens to them. 

What truly unsettles them is not legality but precedent.

If the State can shape demand, temper prices, and make ownership vaguely attainable, then the entire ecosystem of ever-rising expectations might begin to wobble. Buyers might hesitate. Sellers might blink.

Prices might, unthinkably, level out. Or worse. 

Hence the spectacle: developers, draped in the flag of EU law, beseech Brussels to save them from a policy that benefits people who are not them.

One half expects a solemn liturgy to follow. “Blessed are the margins,” they will intone, “for they shall not be interfered with.”

Amen, and devil take the jumpers; they can vote for whomsoever they like.