Yes, and KMB was on the back of an enormous truck (presumably a Drydocks one) signing autographs for adoring female fans, whilst accompanying the thugs down Sta Lucia Street after they smashed up the Law Courts … and were on their way to mete out the same treatment to the Curia, in September 1984.

I will never forget the terrifying sounds of the chains and various tools the men were banging against the sides of the truck – I was 17 then, and working in a Sta Lucia Street office for my “points” (since I attended St Aloysius’ Sixth Form at the time).

The intention was good?????
Why have i suddenly lost the will to live?
Why didn’t KMB do something about the education system we were all paying for? Instead of ruining it , just like his cousin UMB.
When i was 11 years old i got a scholarship to St Aloysius, but my father sent me to the Lyceum, a government school, which was ‘perceived’ to be a better school. But that was 1971 before Agatha Barbara got her hands on it, and i had to switch to a church school before it ruined my chances of getting anywhere in life. Then she got her hands on the teachers’ college and closed that down, which ensured that there were very few good teachers around. Then they tried their hand at screwing up the university (putting an end to my university degree) and finally taking a shot at the church schools. This was a systematic attack on our education system by a Labour Government, and Gerald tells us KMB’s intentions were good!
Honestly you are daft silly creature!
And just in case you think i am an apologist for the PN, the system still sucks, from university down, but then what else do you expect, when the system was screwed up so badly in the first place.

[Daphne – If the system didn’t suck, would a man who can’t write in either English or Maltese, and who knows virtually no English, graduate magna cum laude in law?]

Incidentally, one of the direct results of the war against Church schools (KMB had referred to it as a war that had to be fought) was the ransacking of the Curia, recently recalled by Fr Joe Borg in his blog.

[Daphne – My god, yes, and that was in the run-up to the 1992 general election. I remember the exact phrase he used: our houses will be like rabbit-hutches and then what will women do if they can’t pass the time cleaning? And Victor Laiviera voted for this man – and his wife is supposed to be a women’s issues campaigner.]

Oh yes, I remember it – was he REALLY dumb enough to think people like my parents would send us there? My mother would much sooner have home schooled me!

Oh those terrible days – my school was not even a church school, dear Gerald, but a private one yet that twit closed it down too – did the twerp expect the private sector to provide schooling for free too?

Education had nothing to do with the whole saga, it was pure class hatred brought about by the evil Dom Mintoff!

What utter rubbish. The battle cry, as you no doubt remember, was ‘jew b’xejn, jew xejn’. In other words, either everyone was to have access to private school education, or nobody would. If the schools were ‘the best’, why do you admire KMB’s policy of shutting them down and depriving everyone of what you claim he thought was the best education?

I’m sure you also remember the KMB-led government’s ridiculous attempt to force private school pupils to migrate to newly set up state schools – and what a waste of money that was, given that it would have been far better to invest that money in existing state schools, than to create ghost institutions that nobody wanted or needed. Pupils were banned from attending their schools and sentries were posted outside the buildings to ensure that pupils were physically barred from entering.

That ill-advised, poorly judged, and mean-spirited policy was just another example of KMB’s detachment from the reality around him. He really believed, it seems, that it was for him to dictate and for everyone else to obey, that a school is just a building rather than an institution that is more than the sum of its parts, and that he, an abject political failure and hopeless administrator, could control the uncontrollable. You know the result – and I don’t just mean the underground schooling organised by the networks of parents and pupils that quickly formed and developed to undermine the government’s unsound policy decisions. I’m talking about KMB sparking the biggest public protest that Malta had ever seen.

Face up to it, Gerald. KMB’s policy on private school education was a miserable failure, but even that was barely below the abysmal depths of his economic and financial policies, including bulk buying and the potty suggestion that Malta could borrow money on international markets at low interest rates and relend the same money on the same markets at high interest rates without anyone noticing.

Spare yourself the embarrassment of trying to defend the indefensible. Some good people may have emerged from state school education, but that they did is no thanks to KMB and his henchmen and supporters. Why count yourself among them, and undermine your very argument by doing so?

[Daphne – And when his ghouls set up a state school for pupils of the private schools he closed down, what did they call it? SANDHURST! That was supposed to appeal to dawk tal-pepe. Looking back, I can only sob with laughter. It was like a black comedy.]