Credentials

Finally Daphne, bocca Beck and la bella compagnia get a taste of their own medicine! They have been working for so long on convincing those moronic enough to be convinced that anyone opting for the Labour Party must be a moron, that when the "morons" answer them back in anything more than monosyllabic gibberish they are shocked! Mario Vella's "European credentials" (Talking Point, February 24) scandalised them. Why? Well he stated the view that, ironically, Alfred Sant's European credentials are better than Eddie Fenech Adami's.

Dr Vella points out that at first sight this may seem to contradict their respective positions on EU membership under the conditions agreed to by Dr Fenech Adami. He then goes on to argue that, upon reflection, there is no contradiction between Dr Sant's deeper and more nuanced understanding of Europe and his refusal to go along with membership at this point in time under the conditions agreed to by Dr Fenech Adami.

On the contrary, he says, Dr Fenech Adami's simplistic identification of Europe with the real Europe explains his "facile enthusiasm" for membership under the extremely ungenerous terms he obtained.

Yes, a less provincial politician, a truly European statesman, would not have been content with so little. Moreover, it takes someone with very little faith in the European vision to suggest, as many a PN spokesman has done in the past weeks, that if we do not join the European Union now under the stingy terms dictated by Brussels' bureaucrats, Europe will treat us like pariahs and strip us of the preferential access to the Community markets we have enjoyed since the coming into effect of the association agreemt in 1971. Only someone with a petty notion of Europe could believe this.

I.M. Beck assures your readers that he is "...not in the habit of making cheap racist cracks about Semitic sounding place names" (March 1). We have read him for long enough to know that he is capable of worse cheap cracks. Moreover, he has missed the point, or pretends he has. Dr Vella's humorous reference to Semitic place names was obviously intended to remind us that we are what we are and ought not to pretend we are not what we are. Which is probably beyond the grasp (or the will) of Daphne and Beck.