So the Scots decided not to strike out on their own.

The arguments for and against went round and round; there was massive spin by Cameron’s government which roped in banks to say they would relocate outside Scotland, experts who said Scotland does not have all that oil left; companies which threatened to love out and banks again to hint that in case of a Yes vote the ATMs would not work.

Can you imagine the majority going for a Yes vote?

There were not enough Bravehearts in Scotland this time round. On the contrary, 50 years ago this very night, there were Bravehearts here in Malta. They took their decision and stuck to it. And managed.

Fifty years ago, Malta was very different from what it is today. The bulk of the workforce worked for the British services and one reason why the British were so complacent about granting independence to an island that had served British interests for almost 200 years was because they knew that a Services rundown was on the cards and they did not want to get the political blame for that.

For almost 200 years, the Maltese had almost lost their consciousness of statehood, treated by the British on a par with colonials anywhere. But somehow, the idea remained in the national DNA.

Compare that to Scotland: for the past 400 years or so it has been under the British. Their idea of statehood has been wiped away. They cannot imagine life without Britain. Braveheart is for the cinema.

They were led by a man who promised milk and honey, and the more he promised, the less they believed him. He did not offer them blood, sweat and tears.

The real Braveheart was here, and his name was George Borg Olivier. One would perhaps add Dom Mintoff too had he not been corroded by angst as he was not the one to lead Malta into the Promised Land. The envious bile he harboured ever since he saw his father serving the British at Castille did not allow him to think straight. He did have courage aplenty but he did not have Borg Olivier’s prudence.

I was there 50 years ago, in Valletta in the morning, the parade disrupted by Labour, among the massive crowd at the Floriana arena at midnight awed by the significance of the flag ceremony, and again at the arena the next morning where for the first time (this has been completely forgotten) parts of the Mass were said in Maltese.

Years later I walked all along the Valletta Waterfront on 30 April and shared with the crowd the same mix of exhilaration and fear. If anything, this mix was present in a rather diluted manner in 2004 compared to 1964.

What did Malta have in 1964? It had masses of people employed with the Services; otherwise it had almost nothing: tourism was just beginning, so was industrialisation. Unlike Scotland, however, no one save for a small party of colonial nostalgics wanted to remain a colony. No bank threatened to pull out. One could perhaps say that, save for the partisan divisive politics, the Maltese people massively wanted independence.

But there is another facet to the Scottish vote. The United Kingdom is a monetary union too, using the Sterling. One of the imponderables facing the referendum was what would happen after secession: would an independent Scotland be allowed to use the Sterling? The Bank of England said No and Salmond could only promise to keep using the Sterling as Montenegro, for instance, uses the euro.

This monetary union works and is effective and one of the main reasons secession was turned down.

In turn, this could be a pointer to what’s coming next for Britain. In a few months’ time, the Brits will be voting in their own referendum: whether to secede from the EU or not. There is still much water to flow under the bridge, and the two situations are not necessarily parallel, but we could eventually see a repetition of what happened in Scotland: in the same way the secessionists were first said to be in a majority, but then people thought and thought about it and came to the conclusion that they were better off inside the monetary union than outside it.

Ultimately, for all our pride on Independence Day, 1964, we later on tempered our independence by joining a continental bloc, then a monetary bloc. Malta understood that sovereignty came at a cost it could carry but others it could not.

It was OK to have your own, minuscule army, foreign service and so on, but then Malta found it impossible not to fall under the influence of bigger neighbours such as Libya’s Gaddafi who was ready to fork out money to enable Malta to thumb its nose at Britain but was not ready to allow Malta to dig for oil in its own territory.

Hence our accession to the continental bloc and monetary union about which today, for all the periodic shenanigans and window dressing of secession, we are almost unanimously in favour.

Apart from Mabel Strickland who, for reasons of upbringing, could not conceive Malta not being a British colony, there was also my good friend Herbert Ganado who said and repeated Malta could not survive as an independent state. Many forget he had among his MPs or candidates people like Guido de Marco, Antoine Mifsud Bonnici. They later switched to the Nationalist Party and one, more than the other, was to benefit from Malta’s independence.

Borg Olivier was not just prudent, but over-prudent. His favourite tactic when faced with a problem was to let the problem solve itself alone. Both before Independence and after, he was sidelined by his own party and left on his own, surrounded by people who could not understand him. He was no macroeconomist, no student of political science, no great cultural figure. Yet he set Malta on a course which would have led us to have a better future had he not been succeeded by a man who desperately wanted to outbid his success, who was ruthless, cunning and short-term-minded (apart from being short-tempered), who led Malta into the blackest hole a newly independent state had the great misfortune to find itself in, years and years of austerity and penny-pinching, State controls over everything, years of negative growth and a tourism industry that plateaued. Yes, people got rich in those days, but only some people. The rest of the people made do with minimum wage increases and Dirghajn il-Maltin, Chinese-made chocolates and practically unobtainable toothpaste.

George Borg Olivier was a giant, unappreciated in his time and after, a real Braveheart such as the Scots wish they had on Thursday.

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