I cannot remember the feeling of many Maltese in 22 March 1972 when a triumphant Dom Mintoff came back after his brinkmanship with the British led to them paying far more for the use of the base that they had got away with under Borg Olivier.

There was then this sort of triumphant savage war cry that Dom had been proved right and that the Brits coughing up money proved Borg Olivier was a pushover.

There have been even more desperate cries of despondency this week. First there was the misconception that this was the Prime Minister’s Canossa and that the Commission had made him introduce the residence condition. That was manifestly incorrect.

Since then, as the details (or better the government spin) were given, the despondency and depression have become far more prevalent among those who opposed and oppose the citizenship scheme.

There is the widespread feeling that the interests of Malta have been badly let down by the Commission and by one of the most redoubtable of Commissioners, the Iron Lady herself.

Even more than I remember from 1972, there is the definite feeling that with the kind of revenue IIP will be bringing in, the government can do without the EU, does not need to battle or scrounge for EU funds, can thumb its nose at Brussels, can do all kinds of infrastructural projects without being subject to all kinds of rules.

There is the distinct feeling that with IIP, all those we give Maltese passports and ID Cards to will troop here at election time to vote for the party that opened the doors to them and against the party that said it will deprive them of this citizenship.

If I am guessing correctly, this feeling derives partly from partisan feelings and emotions but even more widely it derives from a feeling people get when they are faced by a runaway bulldozer and they are right in its path.

The situation, these people feel, has been badly compromised. Maybe too, it is irrevocable.

But to look back at the 1972 experience, the money that Dom Mintoff obtained from the British was soon spent in setting up the big institutions of the central economy – Air Malta, Sea Malta, the lot. But since the economic model was based on a central economy, soon, very soon, we had to face the oil price spike and then austerity, huge dollops of it. By 1985, it was clear the economic model had to change, the KMB government did try to change but again it was still anchored in the labour corps mentality and its efforts came to naught.

So there is much to say for taking a more long-term view of things.

First, the Commission. Whether it was taken in by the government’s arguments, whether it wanted to get rid of this problem as quickly as possible, whether it did not want to go down the long haul of investigations and possible legal action on something which, at the end of it all, is a national jurisdiction, remains uncertain.

It is not the first time the Commission has watered down what the Parliament agrees upon. On the contrary, it seems to have a track record for this. I admit that for the Commission to have swept the vote by almost 90% of MEPs under the carpet takes some courage, but that’s the Commission for you. And with Parliament being on its last legs there is simply neither the time nor the energy to take up that battle.

It is also becoming quite clear the Opposition was wrong-footed on this issue and gave out hostages it did not need to.

I had written before: this whole vote issue is a charade and it has now come to this. In Dom’s years, we had strict rules for entering or leaving the country with the embarkation cards. These were done away with and we now have no record of who is here and who is away. Nor can these rules be brought back. People now leave for extended periods to study or to work and the attempts, by either party, to exclude voters because they did not fulfil the residency requirements is both time-consuming and self-defeating.

Lately, we added the Lm10 plane ticket jape to the mess and this has now been extended and widened far more than people know. It used to be for people, for example, from the UK or Brussels, to enable them to come back and vote, but it has now been extended to people coming all the way from the other end of the world.

The party systems to keep tabs on voters has broken down, which explains why, to many people’s relief, there are no longer those phone calls urging people to go and vote. But maybe not even the mighty parties themselves know who is voting or not. I have been told that people who availed themselves of the cheap ticket offer actually did not go and vote.

People are now acutely worried that at the next election we will see a Chinese family ahead of us in the queue and a Libyan one behind us. (Or other nationalities).

I ask, maybe naively, if the Australians who obtained Maltese citizenships, many after a long time, do feel it imperative to come and vote. I think not.

We asked for it, with our razor-thin majorities, with people using the power to vote to blackmail the party in government. We refused to change our electoral system even when this was patently being abused. The two parties found it cosy to share power without allowing for a more equitable system that represents the entire voting population.

The real risk I see is if (hypothetically) a future prime minister got so disjointed from his own grass roots he sets up his own party and beats his own party, though I readily admit this is far-fetched. It happened in France, if I remember correctly.

In the end, there are two considerations about which I am utterly convinced.

The first is the economy. One reason why I am and will remain against this citizenship programme is because this is not the right way to drive the economy forward. On the contrary, this goes against all economic principles I know of.

It is like we have found the philosopher’s stone which will make us rich and lazy. It’s like oil without the mess.

Then of course, if in the end we are proved right and rich people do flock to come and get a Maltese passport, you can rest assured more countries will come in and maybe undercut our system.

Secondly, this is proving to be the right discriminant between who is nationalistically Maltese and who is not. I admit we have been very, criminally, lax in offering citizenship to non-Maltese simply because they marry a Maltese. We are not on a multinational level as other countries, but hey! this is Malta, an island, which has for centuries had to defend itself.

It is true that genetically we are a mixed race and that our history is not as linear as we make it out to be, but there is a bedrock of what being a Maltese means and this is being broken all the way today, with people of all races (I say EU citizens more than people with a dark skin) flocking in. If we look around us in most towns and villages (some more than others), this is not the Malta we know. It is time to tighten up, rather than extend citizenship even further to people who have money, and to people with no other link with Malta.

Whatever Commissioner Reding has approved, whatever the form of IIP that will become law, whether the Opposition disagrees with it or is shamed to agree to parts of it, this IIP Mark 4 or whatever, is distasteful to my being Maltese. It is time for the real Maltese to stand up and be counted.

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