The nascent Maltese welfare state : developments in social policy, 1920-1930

Abstract

A couple of years ago, the centenary of the Sette Giugno uprising was marked from all quarters. A one-ounce silver coin issued by the Central Bank of Malta to mark the occasion depicts a row of soldiers aiming their rifles and bayonets at an orderly row of protestors in top hats (Central Bank of Malta, 2019). A flurry of publications in Maltese and English, as well as documentaries, were produced on a scale that no other historical anniversary in Malta has probably induced until now. Indeed, even the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Anġlu Farrugia, made reference—during his 2019 speech to commemorate the centenary—to a report drafted by then-governor Lord Plumer, who had written about the “unrest” among and “grievances” of local dockyard workers with respect to their English colleagues, who were ‘kept separate’ from them and received, unlike the Maltese, extra remuneration in the form of a “colonial allowance” (Department of Information, 2019). There was no question that upheaval had been a long time coming. Rationale for this Study, Salience to Social Policy, and the Research Gap: The Sette Giugno story still manages to rouse raw emotion on all sides, and with good reason. It is also a convenient historical point which marks the start of the decade during which government policies affecting a great swathe of people were drawn up and implemented, culminating in the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1929. The milieu on which this study focuses is vital in the way it showcases, as Midgley and Piachaud argue, that this same, sometimes benighted, British imperialism was in part responsible for creating “an enduring trajectory that continues to affect current social welfare policies and practices” (Midgely and Piachaud, 2011, p. 5). While this will be unpacked in later chapters, it is important to note at this stage the equally vital importance of Gerald Strickland in this regard, who, as Secretary to the Government and later Prime Minister, was oftentimes pivotal in getting social policies off the ground, despite incessant obstruction by other parties in the Legislative Assembly; this whilst also having been prescient with regard to some key matters decades before. 1 The need for a historic social policy overview between 1920—that is, in the immediate wake of the Sette Giugno events—to 1930 is that of serving to bring together an analysis of policies that is accessible to students of social policy history through close reference to primary sources of the period that have a wealth of both technical and observational knowledge contained within them. As such, they showcase not only the actual facts on the ground concerning social policy issues as various as food production and supplies, the teething troubles of the budding education system, and the disparate yearly inflows and outflows of migration (among others), but also what colonial government and public officials felt were the chief concerns and issues that needed to be tackled by the successive administrations of the period. These concerns never really changed in nature but rather in their level of priority. This is an aspect of twentieth-century Maltese history which is nowhere near as well-researched or attested for (at least in academic monographs) as much as Malta’s constitutional or military history, for example. Even in a mammoth book such as Frendo’s Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean, which covers the 1912-1946 period over the span of 872 pages, one need only look at the titles of most of the 22 chapters therein to realise that their main focus is political and cultural, with almost all of the crucial elements of social policy just being the backdrop against which the wider power-struggle realpolitik played out (Frendo, 2012). One possible reason for this is simply that human memory only goes so far; that is to say, whereas it is not that unlikely to remember something as violently determinative as the Sette Giugno event, with all the mythologizing and controversy that goes with it, it is far less likely that something like the aforementioned Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1929 will make it into the nation’s collective memory. The collective memory is far likelier to recall social policy changes that occurred within its lifetime. This is one possible explanation for the research gap, and this dissertation hopes, in part, to at least provide a compensatory reference point. [...]