For me, it was quite moving to watch recently on the website of a local paper a short video of Sliema in the mid-fifties. Most of all it shows has disappeared completely. Yet I realized how well I still remember it in great detail. 

The Ferries, with on one side the huge shed where the horse  drawn karozzini would assemble, and on the other, the shed where the Marsamxett ferryboat berthed. Tower Road where cars were so few in the wide spaces of the empty (then) thoroughfare. Further, the esplanade which set out from the Chalet, a structure stretching into the sea to serve as an entertainment palace, now totally dismantled. And the promenade to the Exiles and Balluta bay, with St Julian’s on the opposite side, totally free at that time from the monstruous buildings that contributed to its ruin in later decades.

There’s no better word for what I felt – a deep nostalgia. Marcel Proust endeavoured to recover time past and lost, and that was part of it; but also the feeling that Sliema and its neighbourhoods were in a much better shape in the 1950’s than the one they are in today.

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Nowhere to live

Frankly, I fail to understand the social (humanitarian) logic of what happens when a police force enters buidlings where yes, irregular migrants – and let’s be clear and say it how it is, they’re black – live in primitive conditions suitable for animals, horses perhaps or worse. And they kick them out.

So these people – they’re all like us true? we’re all equal! – now they’ve been evicted, where can they go? It’s all so fine not to let them live in squalid and inhuman conditions... so long as one provides some alternative. This is not happening.

The life logic of the people concerned is much clearer. Give us a chance: if you cannot or do not want to provide us with a decent place to live in at a rent we can afford, allow us at least to live in a pigsty. This way, we can with our work continue to sustain your economy which is booming!    

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Qualified majority

Within the European Commission (both new and old) as well as the European Parliament, stands are increasingly being taken in favour of the need for decisions in important European domains to be taken with a qualified majority: which means they will not need unanimity but a “two thirds” majority or more. Unless this happens, so the argument goes, paralysis will continue to prevail in crucial areas.

For a country like Malta, this idea might sound appealing when raised on subjects like immigration. A reform of the Dublin agreement about how and where immigrants arriving in Europe should be accomodated is necessary to improve the position of “frontier” states. These are obligated under the agreement, to host all arriving immigrants. There is no unanimity in favour of this necessary change and so it remains pending. With a qualified majority it could be adopted.

But would it be in Malta’s interests were the same qualified majority procedure to apply to tax policy? to foreign policy? to defence policy?

Above all, there is a clear danger that such a procedure would reinforce rather than diminish the centripetal forces which have increased in a subterranean way between  different regions and countries of the Union.