Open House

For 400 years, while Britain spread its empire round the world, admission to the Mother of Parliaments was confined to inhabitants of the British Isles. Last week, in a historic shift, the House of Commons adopted a plan to make the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta an integral part of the United Kingdom, entitled to elect three members to the House of Commons.

If any misgivings were felt, few were expressed. Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd and his opposition member on the Labor bench, Nye Bevan, joined in mutual self-congratulation. The fact was that in deciding to accept Malta, everyone was all too conscious of unhappy events in another Mediterranean colony, Cyprus. Malta's 320,000 inhabitants are completely dependent on Britain for their economy, i.e., the Royal Navy, their foreign policy and defense. And, in contrast to Cyprus, thousands of Maltese demonstrated recently by waving Union Jacks and crying, "Long live England!"

Malta is too small to become a commonwealth. Its 39-year-old Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, a Laborite, cannily won British support with hints that independence might be the only alternative. In a referendum in February Mintoff secured a majority for integration, among those Maltese who voted. But the sizable number of abstentions reflected the opposition of Archbishop Michael Gonzi, a powerful voice in Roman Catholic Malta, who feared that integration might limit the church's influence over the island's education, religion and family life (Britain proposes that church-state relations be handled by Malta's own Parliament, which will continue to govern local affairs after integration).

If and when the three Maltese take their places at Westminster, how will the issues that concern Britain weigh with them, and vice versa? Confessed one M.P.: "For a number of years, maybe quite a few, there would be inevitably a sense of unreality about the functions they would discharge as members of this House." No one seemed anxious to discuss the possibility of applications from 20 other British colonies. Gambia, a small British outpost in West Africa, has already announced that it, too, would like to send representatives to Westminster.

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