It was good to see tens of thousands of mainly young people out protesting in London yesterday against the prospect of being wrenched out of the European Union against their will. The two-mile march from Hyde Park to Westminster included many parents with young children, and people in their 20s and 30s. The television cameras homed in on the placards, one of which piquantly summed things up: “YOU F*CKED UP OUR FUTURE”. In Parliament Square, there was an unexpected message from Jarvis Cocker – no introduction needed to those at the demonstration – who held up a map of the world and said, “You cannot deny geography. The UK is in Europe.” Bob Geldof – no introduction needed to those who are reading this – spoke to the crowd and appealed for two years of campaigning against Britain being taken out of the European Union. “We must do everything possible within our individual power to stop this country being totally destroyed,” he said. Geldof is a citizen of Ireland, but has lived in London since the 1970s.

***

I am astonished at the manner in which both the government and the Opposition in Malta are treating the referendum on Britain’s exit from the European Union as “Britain’s business”. Both the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader have completely overlooked the fact that in the referendum last week, Maltese people (and Cypriots) had the vote. Eligibility to vote was based on fulfilment of two criteria: citizenship (British, Maltese and Cypriot) and residence (registered resident of the UK). Being British was not enough – you also had to be resident in the UK. This means that British, Maltese and Cypriots voted in that referendum on exactly the same basis.

Maltese and Cypriot citizens had the vote because of their countries’ particular status as members of both the Commonwealth and the European Union. Their ballot was no different to that of British citizens because there is no such thing as a first-class vote and a second-class vote, nor are there tiers of ballots. Many thousands of Maltese people live in Britain and they voted. No doubt some of them will have voted to Leave, especially the older ones who have been in England since the 1960s and 1970s. I think I detected an elderly Maltese woman among the people who the BBC and SKY News interviewed on the street somewhere in deepest, darkest England. There were the remnants of that immediately identifiable accent and that typically Maltese quirk of ending a sentence with “you know” (taf int). But the thousands of younger Maltese who have moved to Britain post-EU membership seem to have voted in force to remain.

The point here is that because Maltese people were in the unique position (along with Cypriots) of having the vote in this British referendum, then it is indisputable that Malta and the Maltese have special status to comment as involved parties. Maltese politicians – and they have not understood this yet, clearly; it may not even have occurred to them – should be speaking from the perspective of directly involved parties, because the citizens of Malta had the vote in that referendum.

Over the past few days I have greatly enjoyed myself telling British – make that English – people who voted to leave the European Union, and who more or less told me to mind my own business because it is “a British decision” and “not the business of the Maltese”, that actually, it was not a British decision and that it is very much the business of the Maltese because the Maltese had exactly the same right to vote in that referendum as the British did. There just happen to be far more British people registered as residents in the UK (obviously) than there are Maltese. This explanation generally floors them because they were not aware of it.

***

I think we have a great deal to worry about in Malta. The Prime Minister said immediately after the referendum vote that he will not call a similar referendum in Malta because he “will not allow the country to commit suicide”. This suggests that he thinks a vote to leave the European Union will go the same way in Malta as it did in the UK. The Prime Minister is a shallow opportunist with no real values or beliefs, and no political ideology. He pushed all the buttons available to get into power, and now that he has made such a hash of retaining the majority of electoral support which put him where he is, he may be driven – desperate times call for desperate measures – to begin playing the xenophobe, anti-EU card if he feels it will give him an electoral advantage over his pro-EU rival Busuttil. As the hideous clouds of neo-fascism begin to gather over the continent, Muscat may yet decide that it rather pays him to begin pushing all those fascist buttons again, just as he did in the run-up to the 2013 general election. Oh, did you not understand that this is exactly what he did? Then you must have been more than a little blind. Those were not liberal songs he sang. Those were fascist chants. Muscat’s appeal in 2013 was not liberal; it was fascist – as were the propaganda, methods and tactics used to attain power. I truly dread what I think will come next.

 

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com