Be careful what you wish for – Revel Barker
I was just starting secondary school in England when I first learnt how highly Malta rated itself on the world stage. Dom Mintoff (for it was he) was demanding, not independence for Malta, but a total merger with Britain that would see Maltese MPs at Westminster and full British citizenship for everyone. He proposed sending four MPs – the same number being mooted at the time for India, which had more than 2,000 times the population and was 10,000 times the size. Terrified of the precedent that four MPs would be setting for the vastly more populous colonies, London said no. I mention that for two reasons: first because Maltese school-leavers don’t seem to have been taught about it and, second, to show that Malta thought it was equal to India in terms of global presence. Fast forward to the present day and Malta, with about the same population as, say, Liverpool, has six MEPS (Liverpool had one) while Ireland, with 10 times the population, has 13. Malta has one seat in the UN general assembly, the same as the US, China and Russia. So, Malta can propose and vote on how the world should react to, say, climate change, while Leeds, a city with a population four times greater, simply...