Malta played a crucial role in the Mediterranean theatre of war during World War II, but you would never have thought it last Sunday. While the 60th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day was commemorated with official significance in the USA, Canada, Russia and the whole of Europe (with the understandable exception of Italy and Germany, where things were rather more muted), in Malta it passed unnoticed and unmarked.

There was nothing on the radio or television, or in the newspapers, to remind the Maltese of the momentous news of 8 May 1945, though heaven knows Malta had more reason than most to be thankful and to rejoice. Nor was there any official commemoration – no Mass at St John’s Co-Cathedral, no wreaths laid at memorials to the fallen, no statement made by our head of state. There was nothing.

On the 50th anniversary of VE Day, there was a magnificent fireworks display over Grand Harbour, to recall a similar display 50 years before, when Malta celebrated the end of a conflagration in which it played such a crucial part. There were all sorts of official ceremonies and statements, and we rose to the occasion with the proper level of dignity. Last Sunday, it was as though we were Pantalleria, or some other island affiliated to the Italian mainland.

We ignored the occasion, behaving as though Victory in Europe Day has nothing to do with Malta, or as though we were out of the equation or part of the Axis powers. While all the political and geographical heirs of the Allied Forces celebrated, we watched like mere onlookers.

On Sunday evening our television news showed us the extensive VE Day commemorations that took place throughout the day, and on Monday morning, our newspapers did the same. The shameful embarrassment is that none of those commemorations and celebrations took place in Malta, which was so heavily embroiled in the effort to win that war. We watched as others marked the day, and then reported to the Maltese how those others marked the day while we didn’t.

Yes, our prime minister joined 50 heads of state and of government in Russia, to mark what the European Commission described as the honouring of “the many innocent victims of past conflicts, and those who paid the highest price in defence of freedom and democracy … and the many millions for whom the end of World War II was not the end of dictatorship and for whom true freedom was only to come with the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

But his presence in Russia did not absolve Malta from the duty to mark the occasion here, too. The sick irony is that, on 7 June, the various dignitaries will be assembled for the usual commemoration of the day British troops fired on a crowd of Maltese rioters. What’s more important: Commemorating that, or commemorating the day that the whole of Malta was relieved, along with the rest of Europe, of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini? One day I might understand how our petty little minds work.

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There are many Maltese who see World War II as not being Malta’s war, as something that Malta was dragged into only on account of being a British colony. It is a spiel loaded with resentment, and fed down the years by those whose Nationalist sentiments owe their origins to pro-Italian politics that warped into pro-fascist beliefs with the advent of Mussolini. Watered by profound ignorance of history, international relations and politics (and might I add, profound ignorance in general?), this belief continues to prevail, and almost certainly accounts for the fact that Malta was the only former participant on the winning side of World War II not to mark the day last Sunday.

I don’t know what can be worse – that it was a deliberate omission (why should we mark it?) or that it was an oversight of the necessity of marking it (u ejja, why bother?). To perpetuate our reputation as the island of contradictions, while being the only ones not to mark the day, we continue to display the George Cross – won for valour in World War II – on our flag. Perhaps we have also forgotten the significance of that medal.

The fact remains that, whether Malta was a British colony or not, we would still have had to participate in the war. Staying out of the equation, like a Switzerland in the Mediterranean, was not an option. Had we not been a colony, we would have been faced with the choice of going in with the Allies, allowing them to use the islands as a strategic base (which is the purpose we did serve), or being taken over by Mussolini’s forces, forcibly and for precisely the same purpose, though with a different objective.

In brief, had we not been a British colony, and then had we not elected to be on the right side of the moral trench in the war, we would have found ourselves operating on the wrong side of that moral trench, whether we wanted to or not. Even if we had been content to be taken over by the combined jackboots of Mussolini’s black-shirts and Hitler’s Nazis, this still leaves to be answered the question of our moral obligations in such a decisive situation.

America, safe on the other side of world, need not have bothered entering the war, and did not do so until very late in the day, when it caved in to moral pressure. Sixty-five years ago, millions of Americans had close relatives – grandparents, parents, cousins, uncles, aunts and siblings – living in Europe, or had only recently arrived from Europe themselves.

In the final reckoning, America was faced with a choice between entering the war to quash Hitler and Mussolini or standing by and watching as they took over the whole of the continent. Microscopic Malta, had it not been a British colony and so never obliged to choose, would have been faced with that same choice. The role Malta played in that war was out of all proportion to its size.

Sixty years afterwards, we are behaving as though we were dragged into the war because of Britain. That doesn’t say much for our national character or for the moral choices that we make.

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Speaking of which, is it really necessary to enshrine Malta’s official anti-abortion stance in the Constitution? We can only have a law that permits abortion if the government enacts one. What is this government saying: That it doesn’t trust itself not to enact such a law? That it doesn’t trust future Nationalist governments not to do so? That it doesn’t trust the Labour Party not to promise the legalisation of abortion as a vote-catching ploy? That it doesn’t trust the people of Malta not to vote for a Labour Party that writes the enactment of an abortion law into its manifesto?

This is all very much a mystery. I see about me no mounting pressure by pro-abortion groups for the legalisation of abortion in Malta. I see no letters to the editor from young ladies who wish to have their babies aborted in Maltese clinics, rather than in London, Rome or Catania, as they currently do.

No Maltese are campaigning for the legalisation of abortion for the very simple reason that they can get all the abortions they want. They are only a 40-minute plane ride away, though there might be some complaints that the airport departure tax is now more expensive than the abortion itself.

Even if abortion were to be legalised here, you can bet your last lira that those Maltese young ladies will still carry on ending their pregnancies in London, Rome or Catania rather than at one of the clinics here, because none of them want the news to leak out that they’ve gone ahead and done it. They don’t want Maltese nurses looking after them and Maltese doctors operating on them. They don’t want their names down in the hospital records for some curious clerk to look at and go and gossip about.

This is all so much tilting at windmills, and worse still, it smacks of a publicity stunt. I believe abortion to be a bad thing, and it will remain a bad thing no matter how many millions do it and how much legislation there is to make it possible. My belief has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the fact that I can find no arguments against its intrinsic immorality.

Yet still, I find the suggestion that Malta should write its anti-abortion stance into the Constitution distinctly unpleasant and off-putting. It has about it the clear smell of fundamentalism, and anything with that smell is to be avoided by avowed democracies.

Nor am I impressed by quoted statistics that tell us the majority of Maltese are against abortion. I should hope so, for then what species of hypocrite would we be, with all our chest-thumping and mass-going and Good-Friday-fasting? But we all make a conscious distinction between what we consider to be wrong and what we would actually do ourselves.

The correct question to ask people in a survey is not whether they are for or against abortion, but whether they would have one, and if so, what might be the prevailing circumstances that would lead them to the decision to have one? If you ask people in a survey whether they are for or against adultery, for example, most of them will say that they are against, especially if they are married. And yet many of them will go on to be adulterous if the right opportunity presents itself.

To take another example, a woman who abandons her children knows that it is wrong and bad for mothers to abandon their children, and yet she abandons hers because while she sees such abandonment as wrong and bad in general and in theory, she sees it as right for her at that time and in practice.

Also, it’s crucial to distinguish between men and women, for the obvious reason that men never have to decide whether or not they should have an abortion, even if they often attempt to influence the choice of the woman they have gotten pregnant, usually to have an abortion so that they can get off scot-free of financial and moral responsibility for the mother and child.

It is perfectly possible for a woman to believe that abortion is very wrong, and yet still have one herself if she feels constrained to do so. Thousands of women who have abortions do so in the full knowledge that human morality is not on their side; even they themselves are not on their side. They know they are wrong, and that is why they prefer not to speak about it. That is why they might feel guilty or ashamed. They do it because they weigh up the consequences, or what they see as the consequences, of having an abortion and not having one, and they conclude in favour of the former.

Keep abortion out of the Constitution. It doesn’t belong there.