Joining Club Med

This week: I’m on holiday in Malta, so here’s an interesting thing about Malta. Also: a map showing realistic prospects for more cross-Channel trains; and some more notes on England’s empty homes.

Forgive the impertinence, but: I’m on holiday¹, having boarded a plane to the Med at some truly horrific hour Wednesday morning. That means this week’s edition will be slightly shorter than normal, and also there is a very real chance that by the time you are reading it I will have fallen asleep on a sun lounger somewhere with a book on my face and first degree burns everywhere else. Even if I do manage to avoid that fate, I am, at time of writing, blissfully unaware of today’s news in politics or anywhere else. So let’s talk about my destination instead.

Malta is not unusual in having once been a part of the British Empire: that is a dubious honour claimed by 65 other countries, almost exactly 1 in 3 of every country on earth. Where Malta is unusual, though, is in having voted to join the United Kingdom. In a constitutional referendum held in March 1956, the island voted, by 77% to 23%, to become the fifth constituent country of the UK. Had the plan been implemented, it would have had three seats in the House of Commons, with defence, foreign and (in the long run) fiscal affairs run from Westminster, but other areas of policy managed by the local parliament. It sounds a lot like the situation in Scotland today.

An extremely rough polygon of Malta, imposed on the London area to show that it’s really not very big at all. I’ll be staying roughly round Bow. Image: TheTrueSize.com.

The referendum passed by a pretty impressive margin, with over three to one voting in favour – so why didn’t it happen? One reason was that those numbers are not quite so compelling as they at first look. The Labour government of Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, which governed Malta at the time, was a firm advocate of the plans. But the main opposition parties, the Nationalist and Constitutional parties, were not, for a variety of reasons, ranging from not wanting to be a mere appendage of Britain to an utter distrust of socialism.

Another barrier was Maltese fear of what joining a broadly protestant country would mean for the local Catholic Church. The local archbishop was unsuccessful in his demands for a postponement of the vote, but did get his revenge: no less reputable a source than the Daily Mail reported that rural priests were denying peasants absolution from sin unless they promised to vote no. At any rate, although the measure passed, turnout was a slightly pathetic 59%. This was not thought high enough to proceed.

Even if it had been, there was limited enthusiasm back in Britain. As part of the integration plan, Mintoff was demanding “economic equivalence”: active investment to raise local wages and living standards to those back in the UK. That would have meant spending money on the island at almost exactly the point when the Suez crisis had suddenly made it a whole lot less strategically valuable, and when the British government didn’t feel like it had enough cash anyway. (How times change.)

Colonial secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd outlined other British concerns. One was the risk of creating two tiers of MPs (a problem raised, but ultimately ignored, during the Scottish and Welsh devolution debates of the 1990s). Another was the “possibility of colonial precedents being created”:

“I know that some hon. Members, who would be disposed to approach this problem of Malta sympathetically, ask themselves and me, whether Malta is, in fact, sui generis; can we make a case for Malta without it being followed by many other places which may lack what we all know to be the attributes of our Parliament, the homogeneity of our Parliament, the same background, interests, duties and responsibilities?”

In 1956, Britain still had extensive colonies, in Africa, the Caribbean and beyond. If you think very hard, you might just be able to crack that code.

So, with Britain unenthusiastic, Malta divided and the turnout low, the referendum result was quietly ignored. Does it have to be full integration? asked the British government. Wouldn’t a status more akin to that of the Channel Islands be sufficient? It would not. Eight years later, Malta would opt for a more traditional route to independence from the British Empire, of becoming a sovereign state within the Commonwealth. Other territories (Gibraltar, Bermuda) were also sometimes considered for incorporation into the UK, in a similar manner to France’s overseas departments; but ultimately none came so close.

Incidentally, while no other countries have voted to join the UK, several have voted not to leave it. Bermuda voted to remain a British Overseas territory in 1997, by 73.6% to 25.7% in 1995. Pretty convincing – until you put it alongside the similar referendums in Gibraltar in 2002 (99%/1%) and the Falklands in 2003 (99.8%/0.02%), both of which reported the kind of numbers that’d make Kim Jong Un blush and ask if maybe we shouldn’t tone things down a little. Then there were the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland (55%/45%), and a 1973 one about whether Northern Ireland should join the Republic (1%/99%, although the main thing those last numbers tell us is how successful the nationalist community’s boycott was).

All in all, it’s a pretty impressive record! Just as long as you ignore the 65 countries that enthusiastically declared their independence and don’t think too much about what might happen in future.

Map of the Week: Some Places Cross-Channel Trains Won’t Go

Another week, another round of breathless headlines about the exciting new train routes that could one day make use of the Channel Tunnel. This time, it was the turn of existing operator Eurostar to put out a press release, about its ambitions to run trains from London to Frankfurt (5hrs) or Geneva (5hrs20).

I remain, as I wrote for the Guardian back in April when Trenitalia threw its hat into the ring, a little cynical about all this. A lot of companies have expressed interest in running to a lot of different new destinations. But Eurostar, the only company that’s ever run any actual trains, has actually reduced the destinations it serves since the pandemic, having pulled back to its core services (Paris and Brussels) plus Amsterdam.² The end of direct trains from London to Marseille will never not make me sad.

The reason for much of this is that there are actually boring practical barriers to expanding cross-Channel services. Some of them are about the shortage of tunnel-ready trains; many are about the lack of capacity to process international passengers at London St Pancras. But a big one is the difficulty of making stations on the continent ready for services through the tunnel. There needs to be space for both passport and security checks (the former is open to a political solution, however unlikely; the latter is not), plus platforms that can be physically isolated from the rest of the station.

This is where today’s map comes in. Jon Worth – a rail commentator whose work I made extensive use of when researching the above Guardian piece – has been travelling the European rail network to research a project called #CrossChannelRail. As part of that, he’s visited 60 stations in half a dozen countries to work out which could be refitted for services through the tunnel. This map is the result: