Eric Frith (August 24) says he has lived in Malta for the last 25 years, and is convinced Malta is a good place to live in because he thinks it is simply Mintoff’s legacy coming to fruition.

We who lived during the hard and mostly unhappy years when Mr Mintoff was in power know full well that what Mr Frith is experiencing is the good, open and democratic government of Eddie Fenech Adami and his successor Lawrence Gonzi.

Mr Frith says Mintoff did not need spin doctors, but forgets that Mintoff, often making use of his men, used threats and strong-arm tactics to ensure he got what he wanted.

For all his undoubted brilliance, Mr Mintoff was hostile to intellectuals and succeeded in destroying our old University, and replacing it with a pitiable one running on the student-worker system, a system described by academic Ralf Dahrendorf as producing neither good students nor good workers.

It was Mr Mintoff who kept Malta back from introducing computerisation, and of course it was Mintoff who kept us well away from the European Union, imbuing the Labour Party with an anti-EU mentality it has begun to get rid off only under its present leadership.

When Mr Frith gets to know Malta better than he does now, he will find out that Malta as a modern state is no Mintoffian creation, but has mostly come about since 1987.