Meilaq publishes KMB’s final missive on ‘EU’s sins’

Former trade unionist Sammy Meilaq has authored a new set of memoirs focusing on his militancy alongside former Labour prime ministers Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in the eurosceptic organisation Front Maltin Inqumu.

Meilaq’s book – ‘L-Aħħar Testment ta’ Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici – Dnubiet u Profeziji’ – published on the 11th anniversary from the death of Mintoff on 20 August, collects ideas on the political thought of Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici on the European Union, and Malta’s international relations.

“It’s not a historical chronicle of the organization,” Meilaq says. “It considers how things currently are at local, European and global level, and how they could and ought to develop in the future.”

Meilaq’s work delivers, as expected, a treatment of what he calls the EU’s “non-democratic centralisation” in decision-making, accusing the entity of abandoning its founding fathers’ pursuit of peace, and instead adopting neoliberal policies that have made poverty endemic and widened the chasm between the haves and have-nots.

Meilaq elaborates on Mintoff’s and Mifsud Bonnici’s criticism of Malta’s EU accession treaty, and the “undignified” role the island has played in the EU over the last two decades by not steering Brussels away “from the nefarious path of militarism, neo-liberalism and undemocratic centralism.”

He criticises Malta’s role in supporting British, American and French interventionism in Libya in 2011, and is also critical of the Labour Party’s “submissive attitude” to EU decisions, “making it an accomplice to the sins of this institution.”

With a foreword from the late Mifsud Bonnici in what could be his last public statement, the book carries the former prime minister’s own disquisition on the Russian war in Ukraine, of which he still accuses the EU of failing to mediate for a diplomatic solution. The final chapter is a critical epilogue penned by lecturer Michael Grech on the book itself.

The book will be on sale from most bookshops.