We need to have the facts on Mrs Bland
Yana Bland - she didn't use 'Mintoff' in the United States - as a school principal in Texas. Wouldn't she have had to be a US citizen to live there and do that job?
Mrs Bland needs the facts on human rights abuses committed by her father’s government. But we need the facts on Mrs Bland herself.
Perhaps, instead of demonstrating that she is her father’s biological daughter, she would show us a modicum of common courtesy and tell us the barest facts about herself.
She is asking us to vote for her on what grounds? Who is she, exactly? Where has she been all this time and what has she been doing? We don’t even know whether she’s Maltese.
1. We know that she married a man called David Bland and they both ran a school together in Texas. Who is David Bland? Is he American? Is he British?
2. Where is Mrs Bland’s husband? Are the Blands divorced, or are they still married?
3. Is Mr Bland planning on emigrating from Texas to be with Mrs Bland in Malta if she is elected to parliament, or does he fully intend to stay where he is?
4. Does Mrs Bland have children? (She does.) How many, how old, where are they and what do they do?
5. Why did she leave her job at the Katherine Ann Porter school in Texas and return to Malta? Is it because she is 60 this year, has retired or been retired, so majtezwel?
6. And the most important issue is: is Mrs Bland Maltese and was she ever Maltese? She left Malta before the country became an independent state in 1964, which means that she didn’t leave on a Maltese passport, and she never returned here to live again, which means that she never had any reason to get one. Her mother was British. Until just a few years ago, Malta did not permit its citizens to hold dual nationality (two passports).
Children who were born with the right to claim both British and Maltese citizenship (and there were many such in Malta) had to make a permanent choice at the age of 18. They either relinquished their right to British citizenship and took Maltese citizenship, or they took British citizenship and relinquished their right to Maltese citizenship.
Those who took the latter option became, in the eyes of Maltese law, just another British subject even if they had Maltese parents and had lived in Malta from birth until the age of 18. They had to leave the country immediately and could not return to Malta except for holidays.
It is most unlikely that Mrs Bland has been living in Britain and the United States of America (and elsewhere) for these last almost 50 years on a Maltese passport. I don’t think she ever had one. I think she was a British subject who acquired US citizenship during her long years in Texas, and that the Maltese citizenship which the Constitution dictates that she must have so as to stand for election to the Maltese parliament was only recently acquired, after the law changed to allow Maltese citizens to hold another passport too.
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Her two children, Cetta and Daniel, carry a different surname – Mainwaring. Was she married twice?
Yes. I never thought I’d say anything positive about anyone connected to the Mintoff family but I actually attended a public lecture given by Cetta. She was very good (although somewhat too left-wing for my liking).
I believe she’s reading for a PhD at Oxford
She had an ID card in the name of Manwaring up until at least October 2004.
ID CARD LOOKUP 0706451M
APR 2011 Bland Joan k/a Yana 23, Triq ir-Rnella, Il-Kalkara
APR 2009 Bland Joan k/a Yana 23, Triq ir-Rnella, Kalkara
APR 2007 Bland Joan k/a Yana 45, Zebbug Zghir, Joann Garden, Tarxien
OCT 2005 Bland Joan k/a Yana 45, Zebbug Zghir, Joann Garden, Tarxien
OCT 2004 Mainwaring Joan k/a Yana 45, Zebbug Zghir, Joann Garden, Tarxien
MAR 2003 Mainwaring Joan k/a Yana 45, Zebbug Zghir, Joann Garden, Tarxien
Source: Local Council Electoral Register
Who on Earth would name their house ‘Zebbug Zghir’?!
Can the lady from Texas tell us where she pays her Taxes?
David Parker Bland
I.D. No. 0012609L
Date of birth: 31 August 1938
Resides at: 23, Triq ir-Rnella, Kalkara
I expect Labour to be stupid enough to insist on striking people off the electoral register come next election.
I have no doubt that you are spot on here, regarding Dr. Bland’s past/present nationality status.
I’m reading this right after seeing your previous post, where I questioned Bland’s original intentions on coming back to Malta, prior to her popping up as a star candidate in Muscat’s gang (how ridiculous).
I find it impossible to accept that all of this was part of the greater plan, and think it much more likely that her intention was to bugger off back where she came from, after Dear Dom pops his clogs.
[Daphne – That’s exactly what I think. That she flew to Malta in anticipation of her father’s death and all that inheritance to sort out. Can’t have him signing everything over to the trusted help now that he’s gaga and helpless – too much of a risk. But he’s hanging on rather longer than expected so she has to do something to pass the time. Why not stand for election? What a good idea.]
Baxxter Consulting Inc. has been hired by the Malta Tourism Authority to design their next advertising campaign. Our branding will be focused on what scientists call ‘sports and recreational tourism’:
Visit Malta, where you can swim, cycle, dive AND stand for election. And if that’s not enough you can read for an LL.D..
Two humble suggestions to be included in the small print of the advertising literature, for consideration by Baxxter Consulting:
1. To stand for elections. If you are over 60 years of age, you will be an automatic candidate on the list of the Labour Party, a progressive movement which will take us all back to the Golden Years – the years of “Engilbert Hempertink.”
2. To read for an LLD. Your application to join the course would be considered favourably only if you spend a couple of years in Malta working as a “gernalist” for One TV beforehand. By that time, you would not only be a tourist, but a Maltese citizen, and can not only stand for elections, but you can vote also.
Ciccio, the main point of our branding campaign was to show that you do not need Maltese citizenship to stand for election. You can be a tourist and land a place in government! Yeah! And at preferential tax rates! Plus sun and sand (no sex though)! Yeah!
Brand Malta! Malta di best! Mietna ta’ xejn! Mietna ghal barrani li dalwaqt ikun fil-gvern.
One more humble suggestion, then:
Brand Malta! Malta di best! Mietna ta’ xejn! Mietna ghal barrani li dalwaqt ikun fil-gvern. Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox!
I don’t really know anything about Mrs. Bland and I don’t think most Maltese do either, but I feel sure that we will be hearing a lot about her in the very near future.
One thing to her credit, as I see it, is that she could have returned to Malta any time she wanted when Dom was in power, and she could have picked any job or position that she wanted.
The fact that she didn’t, proves that she has a mind of her own and did not want to be just “Dom’s daughter.
To me she seems to be a woman who might have a lot to contribute. So how about giving her a chance.
[Daphne – Honestly, Silvio, what tripe. Who in their right mind wanted to return to Malta in the 1970s and 1980s? What’s the point of having ‘any job you want’ when life is generally awful, when you can’t lead a normal ‘European’ urban life? Yana Mintoff was never Maltese. She was always English, and literally so – raised almost single-handedly by her English mother, sent away to England (never to return permanently) at the age of 11, and raised outside Malta. Given a choice between living in England/the United States and living in Malta back in those years, what would you have chosen if Malta wasn’t your home anyway?]
Maybe she didn’t stay away from Malta but from a tyrannical ‘padre padrone’.
So, to get this straight, Mintoff was married to a British woman, but eventually both he and his daughter ‘fought’ to have the British removed from their countries of residence, one in Malta and the other by supporting the IRA?
Mintoff did not fight to have the British removed from Malta – on the contrary he tried and failed to integrate Malta with Britain and later tried and again failed to keep the British forces in Malta while charging them an exhorbitant rent.
When all that failed he rewrote history to make it look like he ‘kicked out’ the British from Malta.
Very well said. These very relevant questions need to be answered by Mrs Bland. Did Joe Muscat bother to check these facts before accepting her as a candidate?
We expect answers both from Mrs Bland and Joe Muscat. I wonder why none of the media bothered to ask such questions.
Probably they did not enter their mind. The fact that she is Mintoff’s daughter is enough for them to accept whatever she throws at them (no pun intended) without question.
I’ve been asking the same questions myself – of course, to insult our way of life she must become one of us. It’s the same thing about complaining about one’s own country. We do it amongst ourselves (or most of us do, anyway) but we wouldn’t want a non-Maltese to complain or insult us about it, even if complain about identical things.
And frankly, Ms. Bland has no right to insult our standard or living or way of life. Indeed, her father saw to it that we remained blighted with ignorance and poverty and I want to get this off my chest, if you allow me Daphne.
Mintoff did not give the Maltese a better standard of living. He only attacked the middle class and the professional class and brought them down to create the illusion of equality. Besides, by giving people social assistance, he was not necessarily helping them. HIs friends, the Chinese, would have taught him that you need to teach people how to fish not give them fish.
Indeed, children’s allowance and similar social services were a good idea but then to pay them out of Ghaddafi’s money is an insult to us. So he “rid us” (reference here is made to this great myth to which you referred a couple of weeks ago) of the British (allegedly) attach us to Ghaddaf’s hip. Some way to improve our standard of living!
Oh God, why can’t we be left in peace? Why can’t we just enjoy our lives and not tremble at the thought of yet another election and, hence, yet another attempt by the yobs and the (wannabe) dictators to hijack, once again, our lives?
I am sure Labour asked all these questions before they started parading her around. I would expect a response almost immediately….. or not.
More info from Government Gazette Issue No. 18,120:
Kalkara Id-dar Nru 23, bl-arja tagħha, fi Triq ir-Rinella; David Parker Bland u martu Dr Yana Bland 706451M.
[Daphne – Ah, so she’s 61 this year, not 60 – really retirement age, then. And she’s not got a resident alien’s ID.]
No Mintoff in her surname here.
And how does her marital status, amount of children, and her husband’s citizenship reflect on her ability/lack of ability to be part of the (potentially) governing party?
Explain.
[Daphne – We should know who we are voting for, Joe. And it is common courtesy to make these facts known. If I had known certain things about Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, all to do with his ‘private’ life and his personality, I would not have voted for him. You get a good indication there about what a person is and how they deal with situations. The same goes for Franco Debono. If people had known about his ‘personal’ flaws and his ‘personal’ situation (interminably engaged to the most patient woman in Malta, with a house of his own, but living with his mother in his late 30s) they might have thought twice.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yana_Mintoff
[Daphne – Very vague.]
Why not edit it? That’s what Wikipedia is for.
It’s ironic that Yana became an economist while her father was closing down the Economics Faculty in Malta.
Daphne, the immigration laws in USA do not allow and recognize its citizens to hold dual citizenship. Additionally, before one becomes a US citizen one has to take an oath of allegiance to USA, which means one has to place the interest of USA before their native country.
If Yana Mintoff is a US citizen than as a Maltese legislator she would be in conflict with the Maltese laws as she is legally bound to put the interest of the USA first. Potentially, could become a Maltese traitor if as a legislator she would place the USA interest before Maltese interests.
My gut felling is that she is not a US citizens but holds the permanent green card which entitles her to live and work in USA. If Yana has a British passport, she is legally bound to place the British interest first.
Out of loyalty to her father, Dr. Muscat couldn’t say no to Yana, knowing full well she doesn’t have a prayer chance of getting more than a dozen votes.
[Daphne – You have to be a Maltese citizen to sit in the Maltese parliament. But I don’t know why we are speculating. This is information which Mrs Bland is OBLIGED to give us when asking for our vote. I would go one step beyond that and say that the Labour Party is obliged to do it.]
Nothing to do with the article directly but I would like to share this with you. A poster on some of the PL clubs shows the PM holding some euros in his hand and the slogan “give them back!’ Well he did give them back.
But can the PL give us back the the right to a full education, the right to lead a normal tranquil life without any fear of the police, bombs and arson? Can the PL resurrect the men who died because of the grave injustices done to them?
No it can’t, and to add insult to injury it is trying to rewrite that part of our history and wash it away as if nothing happened.
I hope and pray that in my lifetime I will be able to vote for a change of government but definitely that time is not the next election.
Let us, for a moment, forget that she’s Mintoff’s daughter. The ‘like father, like daughter’ association does not necessarily hold any water.
My biggest concern about Dr. Bland is that she has been away from Malta for so long (more than 40 years it seems).
[Daphne – 50, actually. She left at the end of primary school (Tal-Handaq, not even a Maltese school) and she was born in 1951. She would have been gone by 1962 – even before Malta became an independent state. Imagine that.]
How can you represent, in parliament, a country you have been away from for so long and you know so little about? Apart from her vague recollection of running barefoot on the bastions, whatever happened in between, she has lived none of it. And it shows when she speaks.
For me, it sounds like a mum or a dad wanting to be a parent to a biological son or daughter when they have been missing from most of his or her life.
Silvio Parnis may, at least, represent the hamalli who attend his coffee mornings. Yana Bland hardly represents anyone on this rock.
David II – It wasn’t even her own recollection, but that of one of her new-found Valletta ‘constituents!’
I wonder if similar questions ever arose when Lord Strickland decided to involve himself in Maltese politics.
At least she can express herself in Maltese. He didn’t, as far as I know.
[Daphne – He didn’t have to, Silvio. Malta wasn’t an independent state, as you recall. It was a British colony. Self-government was a concession, not a right. In fact, it was suspended between 1958 and 1962, thanks to Mintoff and his riots.]
In Strickland’s time, Italian was spoken in the Legislative Assembly, not Maltese.
Yes I remember,it was the same time when they sang ” La Giovanezza” or am I wrong?
Silvio, it’s Giovinezza and there’s no article.
You might not appreciate this but it is strange for someone like you to disapprove of fascism and then admire Mintoff.
Mintoff is the closest Malta ever came to having a Duce.
[Daphne – Antoine, you might not appreciate this, but you are more accurate than you think. Silvio actually is a great admirer of Il Duce and fascism. He’s an old-style Nationalist of the near-extinct type. People who are that way inclined are now attracted to Labour, not the PN. In fact, you can sometimes see Silvio struggling with his attraction to the Labour Party despite his traditional loyalty to the PN. Sorry, Silvio, but it’s true, isn’t it? You like that whole strongman thing.]
Quite a broadside, Daphne.
You are right in part of what you say, but wrong in others. I’ll let you figure out for yourself which is which.
Where you are wrong is that “I admire strongman” – as a matter of fact I am also an admirer of strong women, and that is exactly why I consider myself as one of your admirers.
Lord Strickland could in fact speak Maltese – with an English accent, possibly sounding similar to the way Yana/Joan Mintoff Bland speaks.
[Daphne – Definitely not. Yana Bland affects a faux archaic rural accent when she speaks Maltese. Lord Strickland would have sounded like many of my friends.]
He chose to speak English while on offical buisness because that was the norm unless you backed the pro Italian lobby in which case you spoke Italian. Strickland himself would also converse in Italian at times.
He was partly Italian on his mother’s side, and he went to school in Italy for a few years as well.
Bar a 14-year period between 1903 and 1917, when he served as governor in the colonial service, Strickland lived, worked and had his main buisness interests in Malta making occasional long visits to England where he owned a London residence and a Castle in Westmorland. He also served as MP and then member of the House of Lords from 1926. But his main interest and base was Malta.
How interesting all this detailed information is! You’ve all put me off watching the film at the cinemas. I’m sure there’s more detail here, than anywhere else.
Mrs Bland’s list of priorities is impressive.
In 1978 she protested at the House of Commons in favour of the Gaddafi-sponsored IRA at a time when half the population in her native Malta were being systematically ground down under her father’s heel.
Joseph Muscat is an unmitigated fool to allow you to gradually hijack the party from under his very nose without him even noticing. He had better be careful lest he ends up victimized in the same manner his predecessor Boffa was, more then half a century ago by Yana’s dear daddy.
History does have this tedious habit of repeating itself.
Il-hdura u l-vomtu taghkom huwa inkredibbli! Mhux ta b’xejn li l-PN’ is going to the dogs’!
[Daphne – Well, at least it’s not going to the wild cats. The Mintoffs have got those.]