Dominic Fenech excuses the Labour Party ('Shades of Black Monday', The Sunday Times, October 11) for the thuggery and violence on that fateful day and not so implicitly for the period 1971 to 1987, by claiming that "Back at party headquarters we used to be infuriated by such occurrences" and that "political power was hogged by a handful of ministers".

Now I tend to believe that the learned professor of history was personally averse to these abonimations. He is too intelligent not to have seen the seeds of disaster for Maltese democracy and for the Labour Party itself.

However that is not the issue. The question is what he did about it as party general secretary. What did he, and others who claim that they were against such occurrences, do?

Did anyone resign to prove that things were not on the right track? Did anyone from the Labour Party protest openly when the Mintoffian regime nationalised broadcasting and turned it into a tool of repression and incitement ?

Did anyone protest when pressure was brought on the courts, when free trade unions were discriminated against, when war was declared on Church schools, when private hospitals were taken over?

In short, did anyone protest openly when an authoritarian and violent culture was consciously nurtured as an instrument of power?

All this culminated in the killing of Raymond Caruana and the frame-up of Pietru Pawl Busuttil? What did the Labour 'moderates' do? There were two resignations only when the people booted out Labour, not from moderates but from people better described as impulsive hotheads.

The minister responsible for the notorious secret treaty with North Korea as well as the foreign interference legislation has not only been welcomed back to the fold but democratically voted to the top echelons of the PL.

This speaks volumes about the active Labour grassroots, the same grassroots who voted Joseph Muscat to the top spot.

As a historian, Prof. Fenech should be aware of the danger of revisionism, not least for the health of the present day PL.