A pundit in a local newspaper wrote that Maltese governments have had no vision for the future. There was one exception according to him: the Fenech Adami administration which kept to the compass of making Malta a full member of the European union.
One can hardly find a better example of how right wing elitism in this country tries to rewrite history according to its own classist criteria and values, outside of which nothing exists. How ridiculous!
The columnist involved either does not know about, or has forgotten, or deems not to have existed: the Labour government of the forties decade of the previous century, which launched the welfare state; the Labour administration of the fifties, whose dynamic vision was to modernise the island on all levels; the Labour government of the first half of the seventies, whose successful goal was for Malta to cease its dependence on the presence of a foreign military base.
He also forgot, who knows why, that a Nationalist administration of the sixties, for all its defects, still had a vision to make the independence of the island a success.
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Urban heritage
Those NGOs which are seeking to create awareness about the importance of our urban heritage merit support. However for many of us, environmentalism should really concern the preservation of the unbuilt open spaces which over the years were destroyed or have shrunk.
But the need to preserve what’s “beautiful” must extend too to historical constructs. It’s true if platitudinous that human life is a story of unstoppable change. On the other hand, allowing the destruction of all we see about us in the city, till everything ends up reflecting the realities of today, good and bad, seems to me an unacceptable approach.
Man is an animal which lives off its memories. Those it carries in its consciousness, as well as the concrete ones in and around which it lives.
If our urban environment were to change all the time, people would feel as if they had reverted to the life of nomads.
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Bratislava
Shortly, EU leaders will be meeting in Bratislava to consider how to cope with future challenges, not least those provoked by Brexit. In the past week in Brussels, I heard quite a number of people who are in the know, predicting that the meeting will lead to nowhere.
I was impressed by their pessimism. Their take is that the EU will be treading water for a while because there will be no consensus among its leaders over the decisions they need to take.
However the suspicion soon prevails that those who are talking this way have their own views about how decisions should be taken. Let us say that you will find the same people claiming that the UK should immediately register its application to leave the EU.
Some seem to be in a hurry. They want to promote an agenda of new federalist proposals for the EU by leveraging them with the UK’s exit. The wisdom of such a strategy is less than clear.