I thought that Jeff Twitchell-Waas made some very fair points in his letter of September 30 (‘Comparing Malta with Singapore’). But he misinterprets what I said in my own article when he accuses me of “gratuitously wind[ing] up by damning Singapore as a ‘near police-state’ and declaring he prefers to remain Maltese”.

My actual words were as follows: “Would I prefer to live in Singapore or Malta? While I would welcome not having to gripe every few weeks about Malta’s lawlessness, the litter in the streets, the poor governance and administration of these islands, its general lacklustre standards in all things, I think that I would find the near police-state atmosphere of Singapore, its soulless and ugly high-rise buildings, its Big Brother inhibitions on representative democracy and basic freedoms – of the press and freedom of speech – too stifling to live with. Give me Malta, warts and all.”

Readers will note that I talked about a “near-police state atmosphere” (quite a different thing from being a Police State), and nowhere did I refer to preferring “to remain Maltese”.

I wrote throughout about whether or not I would prefer to live in Singapore or Malta.

And concluded that I preferred to live here, warts and all.

Twitchell-Waas appears to have arrived at the same conclusion, and he is all the more welcome here for that.

 

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