The italian man who went to malta youtube

For the next decade and more, Mintoff was Malta, though his parliamentary majority ranged from one to three. When Mintoff was returned to power in 1971, he annulled the defence agreement, dismissed the British governor-general and sacked his own police chief. The venerable archbishop of Malta, who in the 1940s had excommunicated anyone who voted Labour and denied burial in consecrated ground to party officials, mellowed towards Mintoff and lifted the excommunications. During this period, while growing increasingly anti-British and excluded from direct political power, Mintoff brought off another kind of political coup. The island was granted independence вЂ“ with a British governor-general вЂ“ in 1964. Mintoff's opponents won the elections and signed a new defence agreement, with Malta becoming a Nato base. With the increased Soviet presence in the Mediterranean over the next few years, Malta's international stock rose again, and in 1962 Britain restored the island's constitution.

Reports of the time are redolent of the pained disappointment at a man who simply did not understand the rules. The threat of closures of admiralty work on the dockyards was an obvious danger to the island's economy, and to Mintoff's supporters above all.Д«ut perhaps most significant was the diminutive (he was 5ft 5in) Mintoff's failure to show the proper deference to Britain: he was effectively labelled a liar by the Conservative colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, rebuked by the latter's opposite number, James Callaghan, and denounced for his bad manners by Callaghan's colleague Richard Crossman. Then, too, Malta's importance in British eyes fluctuated: when, as in the late 1950s, nuclear deterrence was seen as the main arm of defence, the island's significance was negligible. He was offered about a quarter of the sum, reflecting the island's much lower wage levels. The ostensible wrangling had been about the terms of integration: Mintoff insisted that the same level of social services should be introduced in Malta as pertained in Britain, since his government, earning the wrath of the island's prosperous classes, had introduced similar levels of taxation. Three years later an acrimonious Mintoff had resigned, swearing to fight for Malta's complete independence, and Britain had suspended the island's constitution. These aims were welcomed by Anthony Eden, then Conservative prime minister, and by the Labour leader, Clement Attlee. Mintoff was elected on the platform of integrating the island within the UK, with Maltese representation in the British parliament.

Malta's postwar constitution, granting the island self-government in everything but defence, foreign affairs and security, was popularly perceived as unjust. Over the next five years, he built up his faction within the Maltese Labour party, becoming its leader and then prime minister in 1955.

Soon after becoming his deputy, he quarrelled with the Maltese prime minister, Paul Boffa, and in 1949 resigned from the government. He had an impregnable power base in the General Workers' Union (which effectively controlled the dockyards), was personally charming, and was said to have the approval of Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, significant players in postwar colonial policy. Dominic вЂ“ always known simply as Dom вЂ“ went from architecture and engineering studies at the University of Malta to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, worked as a War Office-appointed garrison engineer in the Midlands (1941-43), and had just married a British admiral's daughter, Moyra de Vere Bentinck. Born in Cospicua, on the other side of the harbour from the capital of Valletta, he was one of nine children from a working-class family, and his father was a cook in the Royal Navy. There was at first no need for Britain to fear that the young Mintoff would pose a danger to its strategically vital base in the Mediterranean. These had been suppressed of necessity during the war, but by the time Mintoff became deputy prime minister in 1947, the upper classes were leaning towards Italy again. Though the entire island of Malta, whose population now numbers just over 400,000, had been awarded the George Cross in 1942 for its wartime courage, the indigenous hierarchy, fiercely Catholic, had strong pro-Italian sympathies. The country's socialist prime minister from 1955 to 19 to 1984, he was a thorn in the flesh of successive British governments, both Conservative and Labour, and never shied away from controversy at home. Dom Mintoff, who has died aged 96, was Malta's leading politician during the period when it moved from seeking integration with Britain to non-aligned independence as a republic.

The italian man who went to malta youtube