Charles J. Buttigieg wrongly assumes (January 2) that I experienced nothing of the political period in the 1950s concerning integration with Britain. I did and I didn't find it a particularly romantic period.
How could I? Malta was being offered to the United Kingdom for keeps, hence depriving the Maltese people of their right to gain independence and choose a path for their future. Nothing romantic about that. Of course I have problems in accepting that overnight Malta would have enjoyed all rights and obligations on day one had we been integrated with Britain.
It so happened that Joseph A. Zahra, in the same issue of The Times, quoted Dom Mintoff's own estimation at the time that Malta would have needed 15 years to catch up with Britain's standard of living.
Besides that, Mr Buttigieg ignores the fact that the minority of Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1950s were discriminated against and they only reached their equality with the rest of the population, in terms of rights, fairly recently. Could you imagine Malta, a Catholic rump, in an overwhelmingly Protestant kingdom, having equal rights?
Active partnership with the United Kingdom at the time would have been a pie in the sky. Both the Welsh and the Scots would disagree that they were equal active partners at the time. Only recently the Scots won the right for their own Parliament and the Welsh their Assembly, with limited powers.
Once more Mr Buttigieg confirmed that for the Labour Party, Independence was a fallback position. Hence I stand by my original view that the MLP never believed in the abilities of the Maltese people to succeed as an independent state. A version of the same position was played by the MLP and Alfred Sant in particular as to our ability to become members of the European Union.
Mr Buttigieg dismisses written history of the period when George Borg Olivier demanded independence from Britain as "biased". Elsewhere he referred to these eminent Maltese historians as "spin" doctors. Facts remain facts but Mr Buttigieg allowed himself to indulge in fantasy. It was Dr Borg Olivier who asked for independence against the wishes of the British establishment especially those of the military.
Regarding the politico-religious dispute, that was not solely about Mr Mintoff's "crusade" for independence. That is too simplistic an interpretation of history. We certainly need historians. If we were to rely only on fantasy and romanticism, we end up with a very subjective and distorted account of our history.