Sounds like you have a chip or two on your shoulder, must be a bummer carrying these burdens from the pretty remote 70s/80’s all the way into the 21st Century.

Personally I think that people who like to dwell on their old wounds, many self-aggrandised just to play ‘victim’ and nourish their inner hatred for others, must be miserable even today. The anger with which you write is a telling sign. Sad.

(Daphne – Hang on, this Adrian doesn’t sound old enough to have been around in 1964. It’s probably stuff his parents told him, who learned it in turn from their parents – you know, how they slept on bales of hay, were covered in fleas, etc etc, without pointing out that they would have lived in precisely the same conditions no matter where they were in Europe at the time.)

(Daphne – The clips are still there. Try again. To make things easier, the main one has been linked in my latest-but-one post, under the heading Oh. My Lord.)

@ Adrian
My guess is that you are another ‘young’ brainwashed Labour supporter who probably never experienced how terrible life was under the Labour police dictatorship in the 70’s & 80’s.

I still meet so many people like you who ACTUALLY BELIEVE that Dom Mintoff INVENTED social services like children’s allowance etc., when in actual fact these things were being introduced in many other European countries at the SAME time.

Mintoff’s propaganda machine was just very good at making his supporters think he was a generous benefactor when in actual fact he and the people around him were nothing but brutal, money grabbing thugs who all became millionaires off the people’s backs whilst the country was reduced to an impoverished, third world police state.

The education system was practically destroyed,(getting into university was practically impossible in those days!) and intellectual people were despised and persecuted just because they could THINK and question the almighty Dom’s policies.

Every now and then they would throw some crumbs (like children’s allowance) to the people and we were all supposed to be grateful whilst living in a decaying country without an infrastructure or a future.

Thanks to the PN (with their many, many, many faults) you now live in a free democratic European country and are using the most sophisticated technology to communicate with us and the world.

If that idiot Mintoff had his way you wouldn’t even have electricity or a telephone system today let alone a computer!

And if you did… there would probably be a police department monitoring sites like this (are there any!) and Daphne would probably be in and out of jail and her family persecuted until she SHUT UP!…THOUGH I BET SHE WOULDN’T !!

(Daphne – You know, I would have expected them to use the theme song from Chariots of Fire. I imagine they would have, if they’d known about it. The corniness would have gone right over their heads.)

(Daphne – Thanks for clearing that up, though I had no doubt at all that the three journalists on that show were identified by the Labour Party as those least likely to ask awkward questions, while still being able to bill them as representing the ‘English-language press’ . Perhaps I should explain that you are the editor of The Malta Independent on Sunday, and that the usual process is for the political parties to contact the editor directly, or his newsroom, leaving the choice of journalist up to him/them. Josanne Cassar shouldn’t have been claiming to represent The Malta Independent on Sunday on a televised Labour Party show without the authorisation of the newspaper she works for. She lives with someone who works, or used to work for many years, with Super One. She is hardly the best person to ask difficult questions of Joseph Muscat.)

(Daphne – Were we discussing Malta’s independence? Learn some history: the vast majority of people were living on the edge of poverty throughout Europe, not just in Malta, in 1964. Many homes in Britain didn’t even have bathrooms or indoor lavatories.)

(Daphne – Make yourself clear, please, Adrian. Which days?)

(Daphne – Oh dear, I think I have another whacko on my hands.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6OxXb6YrFI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7-xOsWuRys

(Daphne – Sorry to disappoint you, my little Labour friend, but I’m not an employee. This means that national holidays, Sundays and the rest are all the same to me. And I don’t eat bigilla. It was devised as food for the starving and desperate, and all you have to do is taste it to see why.)

Daphne, what do you think Gonzi/PN are going to come up with, with regard to divorce? John Dalli’s rather inane comment that it’s time to start a debate hardly inspires confidence that the PN are capable of safeguarding the rights of the minority on this. My guess is a wishy-washy white paper and long consultation process (before and after the white paper, in all probability) which will get us nowhere – at least certainly not before the next election. I am handicapped by isolation from gossip and the rumour-mills, as well as from those friends and acquaintances with connections to PN policy makers but you’re in the thick of things. What’s your guess?

(Daphne – I’m not in the thick of things at all, but my considered assessment is that the government fears yanking the bishops’ chains, not because of worries about their disapproval per se, but because the bishops are likely to push the government into a war it doesn’t want, thereby creating a major public affairs problem for the government, deliberately. They’ve already taken to their pulpits. If the bishops are out there polarising people and working them up into a frenzy against divorce, instilling doubt about the morality of MPs who vote in favour, it obviously becomes that much harder to shove the legislation through smoothly. The government is going to have to negotiate with the Curia to get it to leave Caesar alone on this one, but I really don’t know what the government can use as leverage at this stage. When it negotiated for the church’s lands and other property, it conceded to the church the absolute and uncontestable right to decide the fate of marriages celebrated in church, in cases where both spouses do not agree on taking the matter to the civil courts for a civil annulment. It also dissolved, at the church’s request, the 1975 requirement for all marriages to take place civilly without exception, even when there is a church rite. The minister who handled this was Guido de Marco, about which I shall no more. Since 1993, those who marry in a Catholic Church (but not in a Protestant church) needn’t go through the civil rite. Those of us who married between 1975 and 1993 went through two marriage rites – the religious one at the altar and the civil one performed by an official of the public registry, in the sacristry. What this means, of course, is that the state ceded a significant part of its authority over the formation and dissolution of marriages to the Curia, in exchange for church lands and the setting up of the Joint Office.)