Like EU membership 10 years ago, talk about the island’s independence split the nation. Former Times of Malta editor Victor Aquilina recalls the arguments made against this political goal.

Few, if any, would dare say today it might have been better for Malta had it not become independent 50 years ago.

But at the time there were more than a few who were against independence, not so much because they would not have wished to see Malta become a sovereign state but mainly because they did not think the island was yet economically ready for it.

An equally important concern was their fear of Malta being left undefended.

Toni Pellegrini, leader of the Christian Workers Party, one of the three small parties represented in the legislative assembly, feared, for instance, that as the island was small and unarmed, it would have been an easy prey to “any scrupulous nation eager to attain a commercial or a military foothold in the Mediterranean”.

Herbert Ganado, leader of the Democratic Nationalist Party, had a vivid imagination, too. He believed that, if independence were to fail, bitterness and economic and political chaos could drive Malta to become the Cuba of the Mediterranean.

For good measure, Mabel Strickland, leader of the Progressive Constitutional Party, had strong views of her own as well.

She was dead set against independence, preferring to see the island become an interdependent state. In her typical blunt manner, she had told Duncan Sandys, chairman of the Malta Independence Conference: “...I oppose independence, definitely opposite it, because in the world today it is interdependence that we are all asking for ...”

She and her newspapers, Times of Malta, The Sunday Times of Malta, and Il-Berqa, stuck to their guns, as did Mr Pellegrini and Dr Ganado. The PCP had one seat in the legislative assembly, but the other two had four each. The three leaders were vociferous in their stands, with Mr Pellegrini and Dr Ganado being the most fatalistic of the three.

Mr Pellegrini said he wanted “to avoid a national catastrophe through the granting of immediate independence”. In his view, Malta ought to have negotiated what he called “co-citizenship”, a form of association that could answer all of Malta’s requirements. Interesting!

Dr Ganado feared that, with the projected unemployment, Malta could only expect chaos unless the country concentrated all its efforts on changing its economy. The country might also become “easy prey” to Russia.

Arguing her stand in favour of interdependence, Mabel Strickland submitted that Malta could be fully self-governing, but interdependent in matters of defence and foreign affairs, with sovereignty remaining with the Crown.

Her first original preference, way back in 1943, was integration, or union, with Britain, but she had dropped the proposal when she was told that as part of England, Malta would have had to adopt its laws, including those dealing with divorce.

Like Mr Pellegrini and Dr Ganado, she and her newspapers had often stressed the need for the improvement of the economy first. Their stand was not dissimilar to that taken by the Malta Labour Party in 1945 when it pressed for council elections, rather than waiting for the restoration of self-government, on the grounds that Malta had not yet reached a “satisfactory stage of economic rehabilitation”.

To Ms Strickland’s credit, once independence and the defence and financial agreements were wrapped up, she accepted the historical fact and changed course. There was no recrimination in her newspapers’ editorials, with that for September 21, 1964 in the Times of Malta calling on the people to pray “that realisation of what independence really means will bring about resolve and willingness to be worthy of it and our destiny”.

When, the following day, the newspaper briefly brought up the cross-currents among the parties, it quickly added it hoped that these “should not be permitted to rock the boat at a time when it has not even gathered way”.

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