Word: mintoffs
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Malta: Negotiations are under way with Maltese Premier Dom Mintoff, who surprisingly wants to get closer to Britain, hopes to see Malta integrated as closely as Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom itself. A little flattered, a little uncertain, the British want to be doubly sure that most Maltese feel the same way as their young Premier...
Malta is too small to become a commonwealth. Its 39-year-old Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, a Laborite, cannily won British support with hints that independence might be the only alternative. In a referendum in February Mintoff secured a majority for integration, among those Maltese who voted. But the sizable number of abstentions reflected the opposition of Archbishop Michael Gonzi, a powerful voice in Roman Catholic Malta, who feared that integration might limit the church's influence over the island's education, religion and family life (Britain proposes that church-state relations be handled by Malta...
...existence of NATO was a reminder that the days of British naval supremacy, and possibly dockyards, were over. Politically-minded Maltese talked of revolution and self-government, but a better idea came up: Why not put a clove hitch in the British umbilical? Last week Maltese Prime Minister Dom Mintoff and a delegation of Maltese went to London for a round-table conference with a group from the Mother of Parliaments, and put the idea to the British M.P.s in specific terms: make Malta an integral part of the United Kingdom (like Northern Ireland...
...Mintoff proposed that Malta have elected representatives in the British Parliament, pay taxes on the British scale and share welfare state benefits. He also wanted economic integration-but this to come gradually over 15 or 20 years. With Mintoff sat a delegation of his political opposition, who also had come to the conference to lobby for a closer tie 'to Britain ; they preferred complete self-government within the Commonwealth...
Faced with the startling notion of accepting a distant relative as an intimate member of the family proper, Britain has tried to allay Malta's demands with a vague plan for government through the Home Office instead of the Colonial Office, but Mintoff will not be fobbed off. "We are prepared to accept all the facts that you accept here in Britain-taxation and all the rest," he told officials last week, "but we can no longer be just a naval base. We are a mature people who want our full constitutional rights, and you cannot treat...