Our demolished civil service

Donald Trump claimed he would make America “great again” (did he mean a return to the slavery period?) but is doing his best to reduce it to the level of a tin-pot dictatorship. London’s The Economist suggests Boris Johnson’s Westminster executive is going back 50 years in central concentration of power with an arrogance which may push Scotland to independence. The “greats” are turning into “minnows” in front of our very eyes.

In Malta, we inherited a civil service from colonial times which prided itself on recruitment of quality personnel and which did its best to carry out its public service independently of party politics. 

The Mintoff regime, however, “demolished” that civil service and transferred all power in the hands of ministers and their secretaries (if not also their drivers). The Muscat/Abela strategy has been the appointment of a large number of “persons of trust”, permanently filing away the notion of an independent civil service into the history annals of Maltese administration.

Liberal democracy requires devolution of power. Central concentration of power is parliamentary dictatorship and we’re learning how this has lined a few pockets with plenty of loot.

Albert Cilia-Vincenti – Attard

Xagħra street chaos

So Friday evening, a guy knocked on the door of my house in Xagħra since he could not get his articulated lorry (construction cowboys) past my car...

So why do I have to move my car from in front of my house because he is incapable of reversing his crane up the road when a modicum of intelligence would say drive down the road to Calypso roundabout and come up, facing the right way?

Kevin Hodkin – Xagħra

Abortion misinformation

I must take this paper to task for publishing the misinformation expounded by Klaus Vella Bardon (‘Killing of the weak’, November 14). The readers should know that abortion was practised on a regular basis among the poor, slaves as well as royal classes in Rome.

Because of the influence of Stoicism, which did not view the foetus as a person, the Romans did not punish abortion as homicide. Incidentally, neither does Maltese law. Although still excessive in my view, the penalty for abortion in Malta is four years in jail.

In the first century CE, Emperor Augustus saw the low birth rate as a threat to the defence and sustainability of the Roman state. But circa 300 years earlier, Aristotle had initially encouraged abortion because he feared population explosion, although he later realised that the Roman population was declining. To claim that the collapse of Christianity is due to a culture of decadence is far-fetched, to say the least.

Vella Bardon claims that people are losing their jobs at the University if they debate against abortion. Poppycock. If anything, it is quite the opposite. I have heard reports of lecturers vilifying students for daring to share their pro-choice views. However, I must also state I personally have never been censored by anyone at the University of Malta for my pro-choice position.

Oversimplifying and even warping facts to meet one’s preconceived ideas is typical of anti-choice voices.

However, if there is one thing we can agree on, it is that the pro-choice movement in Malta is intensifying in strength.

Women are not tools for reproduction. Their bodily autonomy cannot be sacrificed for what people like Vella Bardon see as the greater good. Indeed, he would do well to reflect on the fact that the way he sees things, and what he considers right or wrong, do not necessarily apply to everyone in all situations.

Isabel Stabile – St Julian’s

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