Long live Malta GC - Mark Anthony Falzon

Should we remove the George Cross from the Maltese flag? And how about Victoria, whose statue presides over the canopies in Republic Square? Should we relocate her to some kind of garden of forgetful remembrance, where she would be joined by a hundred equally relocated symbols of her empire?

Speaking for myself, these are the sort of questions I might resort to when counting sheep fails. Still, if the reaction to Charles Xuereb’s comments to this newspaper last Wednesday is anything to go by, my lack of enthusiasm appears not to be widely shared. So I’ll try.

Let me first get something out of the way. The argument that all symbols that are part of history ought to be retained doesn’t always work. The symbols of Nazi Germany, for example, were very much part of German (and world) history, but I can see why they were systematically destroyed in the denazification purge that followed the end of the war.

The case of Confederate monuments in the United States, while trickier, probably belongs to the same category. To many they symbolise white supremacy, and race relations are still an open wound across swathes of American society. Like Nazi symbols in the 1940s, they are part of a...