The Easter holidays have interfered with public debate and comment about the government’s proposed sale of its majority shares in Maltacom but the first sparks of the storm to come are already appearing on the horizon.

Obviously, we will once again hear the same tired phrases about selling the family silver, and more this time given the gap between the share price on the stock exchange and the price being offered for the corporation.

The government has been commendably sticking to its guns and refusing to allow itself to be panicked into a drastic rethinking that could either block the sale itself, sell a minority share or else declare a U-turn and sell to the public on the open market (or popularisation, as an ex-minister once defined it).

Just as it may have made sense to popularise other share offerings, so too there is a case to be made to sell a majority shareholding to a strategic partner with world-clout. Whatever critics still say (they would, wouldn’t they?) we (or at least most of us) can now see it made great strategic sense to sell one of Malta’s main banks to HSBC. It brought world clout, a different way of doing business (which has been followed by the other banks) and, most importantly, it has cut the umbilical cord between banks and political power where every change in government brought with it a change in the bank’s top management and consequently in the middle to lower ranks as well.

On a more general level, if Malta is ever to make it in a more globalised world, it must stop being insular and thinking that anything Maltese is by definition better than anything done abroad. It was this skewed mentality that led us to try and manufacture chocolate and carpets “our way” when the world had long enjoyed its way of manufacturing these and others, to its profit.

Instead, if we are to make our way in the future, we must learn from other peoples, and then learn to do it better than they do, just as we have always done in so many different areas. We do not need to be afraid of the foreigner nor seek to hide behind our solid bastions out of fear. We are already seeing that for all the panic-mongers who claimed Malta would be swamped by EU nationals if it entered the EU, this is hardly the case and, if anything, Malta has only been swamped by illegal immigrants most of who did not come here by design but by accident.

Speaking of panic-mongering, one can only look back and wonder. In 1959 they said that Malta would starve to death if it was given independence, yet here we are. They said that democracy was dead in Malta in 1984, yet a free election overturned 16 years of Labour. They said, as late as 2003, that Malta’s economy would falter and sink if Malta entered the EU: two years after accession we do have our problems, even though we do not have the 9.3 per cent unemployment they have in Germany, the 9.2 per cent they have in France and the 7.7 per cent they have in Italy; even though taxation has been raised considerably, and people complain their wages cannot cope; yet people have a higher rate of expenditure than they had two years ago, as one can readily see all around. In other words, we do have our professional panic-mongers, yet their own words and reality itself around them discredit them easily.

It is a telecommunications company that is being privatised, in other words a company that straddles continuous change, with one part already belonging to history and the other grappling with new developments and new concepts, such as mobile telephony and Internet access. Even if keeping it Maltese would be in our strategic and national interest (though one fails to see why and how), do we really, really think that keeping it all Maltese would allow access to the technological developments all around us (let alone the business opportunities) than would opening it up to international bidders?

The above is by no means an endorsement of the proposed purchasers nor an attempt to pre-empt the discussion but an appeal to the country once again not to allow itself to be swayed by the doubting Thomases, those who find fault with anything and everything the government does and those who are always ready to keep the nation all wrapped up when it’s healthier to allow it to swim in moderately rough seas.

At the same time, too, this is also an appeal to the government not to squander the money it will get from Maltacom’s privatisation to further fund a social net that already is far more protective and comprehensive than that which exists in other countries.

Information that reached us from inside the government tends to lead one to believe the government is just about to do precisely that: use the funds received from some privatisation or other to bolster a new type of social spending to cushion the impact, for instance, of the electricity surcharge, just like controlled housing and social security and karta r-roza were used in other times to ‘temporarily’ cushion some impact or other. Ten or 20 years down the line, everyone still lines up for his hand-out and everyone has forgetten why that particular benefit had been brought in.

It would be worse than useless, it would be dangerous, to replace one social assistance system with perhaps another even more extensive one.