The Nationalist Party, yesterday and today, is to be judged in its encrusted philosophy. Historical veracity reveals this warts and all. The ‘new’ revamped PN, in its verbal and written approaches to equity with the individual citizen, needs exposure.
In 1963, I was awarded a scholarship at Oxford University. This was sponsored by the British Trades Union Congress and the British Labour Party. In February 1962, the PN had won the general election. This election, after four years of a colonial administration, was won on a purely emotive ticket under the guise of a valiant defender of the faith, charging a perceived enemy under the banner of an invisible umbrella.
In 1964, there was a change of government in the UK. My financial support in England carried me for the academic years 1963-1965. In 1965, I was to proceed from Oxford to the London School of Economics for further higher studies.
The new Ministry for Overseas Development, in the elected Harold Wilson government, had funds available for bursaries to overseas students. The monies were only distributed on a government-to-government basis.
British friends in high office reassured me they would endorse my name once this was forwarded from Malta. I made repeated representations to the Prime Minister of Malta, Giorgio Borg Olivier, both by writing to him in Malta and orally expressing my interests to him in London at the Savoy Hotel, where he was staying while negotiating with the British government.
No sterile or diplomatic explanation was ever transmitted to me by the Nationalist administration. I did not even receive the traditional hackneyed official letter of acknowledgement. I must put on record, however, that the prime minister would compliment me on the achievements, in general, of Maltese students whenever we met socially. I have documented evidence to prove the unfolding events of this saga.
As a consequence, I had to struggle very hard on my own. What is most painful is the very important fact that I was sidelined because of my open political leanings being very active in favour of the Malta Labour Party.
The PN in power showed their glaring negativity when they also failed to award this financial educational assistance to any other person. The funds were lost.
In the academic year 1967-68, I had to cut short my studies to return to Malta to start fighting an issue with my employer on a case of breach of contract of employment. At the time, the only remedy for redress – apart from voluntary conciliation and arbitration – was to refer the matter to the civil courts, which I did. The case dragged on for about a year. The courts upheld my case. The employer did not lodge an appeal.
I turned up for work to resume my employment. The employer resisted and agreed to pay up a slim, severance payment. Subsequently, I set up as a self-employed person introducing consultancy services utilising my specialisation in industrial relations. I started on my own as an industrial consultant.
All this was taking place in Malta against a background of a lengthy industrial dispute, which had been running for several months, between the General Workers’ Union and Malta Drydocks. Incidentally, my erstwhile employer was the GWU.
A few weeks into my new life there came a phone call at my tiny office. The call from the Office of the Prime Minister, at the Auberge d’Aragon, informing me that Prime Minister Borg Olivier wished to see me.
The venue, the day and the time were agreed upon. I was to go from the entrance in West Street, which I did on the appointed day in mid-morning. Meeting me there was a handpicked small delegation.
It was no cloak and dagger encounter. The message was basically wicked, as I shall explain.
I was being offered to take the post of head of personnel at the drydocks.
A wolf may modernise its approaches but its natural predatory instinct will prevail
I was taken aback. The carrot, including the financial package, was big and juicy. Borg Olivier, the same prime minister who had cruelly denied me the Overseas Development Scholarship, not out of any love, but glaringly spiteful, was now tempting me to hit back at my former employer who had only recently lost a historic court case.
I was, of course, tempted to say to the honourable and trusted messengers of the prime minister what I thought of the offer in unadulterated Maltese. I controlled myself and refrained.
I sent the prime minister this answer: “You may wish to know that I am a prospective Labour Party candidate in the forthcoming elections”. The message was crisp and curt. The only persons who knew about all this were Borg Olivier’s trusted envoys, the young secretary who took the phone call, my wife and myself. Nobody else on my part.
I did not use this as part of my campaign in the 1971 elections nor in the 1976 contestation, or in any other way later. I am exposing it now.
Today I feel it is important and more than justified to expose the shameful and evil tactics of the PN under different leaders.
So much for equity as dispensed by the PN when practising its way of deception!
The moral of this verifiable negativity is that a wolf of the pack may modernise its approaches to lure and lull with smooth emotive talk but, in the final analysis, its natural predatory instinct will prevail.