The government yesterday survived what very well could have been a treacherous, at the very least, vote in Parliament on the Opposition’s motion against the highly controversial salary increments for MPs and Cabinet, coming as it did hot on the heels of its surprise ‘defeat’ at the referendum polls.

The government’s one-seat majority, which is as slim as they come after 2008’s neck and neck general election, was put to a considerable challenge.

And the governing side of the House apparently only scraped through after the Prime Minister tabled amendments to the effect that Parliament’s Select Committee would thrash out the honoraria issue by taking the British House of Commons’ approach as a point of reference.

This apparently convinced one of the government’s more outspoken MPs, who this week has given mixed messages on his voting intentions, to change his mind and toe the party line after all.

We will not know what the Opposition’s next move would have been, had the vote gone the other way, but one thing is for certain: the government would have been forced into some dire straits indeed had it lost yesterday’s vote so soon after having ‘lost’ the divorce referendum that it ill-advisedly, from a political perspective, chose to involve itself in.

But quite irrespective of the outcome of yesterday’s vote, both sides of the House have been selective and disingenuous with the truth on the thorny issue, and the issue has embarrassed MPs on both sides of the House. A comedy of errors, as it has been described elsewhere, is an appropriate assessment.

The government, whether it was truly a victim of circumstances or not in terms of the timings of things, can rightly be accused of having kept the matter under wraps. But if that was indeed the case, one has to question the wisdom of such a move.

At some point in time, the facts, the cold hard numbers of the matter, were bound to have come out and it is difficult to believe that the government would have been as foolish as to have believed that those numbers would never have surfaced, or that it could contain the damage, which only increases with the passage of time in this case, once the facts did surface.

This brings us to the Opposition side of the story. Every speaker during yesterday’s session made reference to an article this newspaper had carried back in January, which showed that at least two veteran Labour MPs knew full well of the rises before they had become the issue that they did. We will not belabour the issue by repeating what we have already reported but the comments were retrieved from official Parliamentary transcripts and are beyond argumentation.

Frankly, the whole thing is rotten and it shows that, instead of levelling with the people, both parties prefer playing games with the electorate that they court - not just at election time but, also, more subtly, throughout the five-year legislatures.

The timing of the increases in both MPs’ as well as Cabinet’s salaries was poor. The decision had been taken just after the 2008 general election, when the Nationalist Party had made the then impending recession a central electoral argument – in that the government’s ‘proven sound fiscal policy’ was the only way forward in the troubled times ahead that were being forecast.

With hindsight it would have been far more advisable to have approved the raises, waited out the recession and, once it passed, and then and only then, implement them – and implement both MPs’ and Cabinet’s salary increases in tandem.

Then again, hindsight is always 20/20. Even had it been done that way, it could still very well have caused ripples, but the issue certainly would not have become the tidal wave that it grew into.

The argument that ministers deserve the same treatment as other MPs who, similarly, have government jobs certainly holds water. Why shouldn’t a government employee, in this case a minister or parliamentary secretary, have the same remuneration conditions as an MP in that they receive a parliamentary salary as well as their full time public sector wage.

In terms of earnings, the raises we are speaking of are an awful lot to most people. But it also has to be acknowledged, and here one must put aside their feelings on the performance of the current government since the salary issue pertains to this and all future governments, ministers are the people that we entrust to run the country and if these are not to be well remunerated individuals, then, it must be asked, who is?

Moreover, ministers, generally speaking, are highly qualified people who could earn far more in the private sector and if any government is to attract the best people to serve in Cabinet, it must make those positions as close to being worth their while as possible, from a monetary aspect.

Discussions will now go to Parliament’s Select Committee which will determine a way forward on the issue, based on practices on the British House of Commons.

That discussion should prove interesting but one thing is for certain: following yesterday’s vote, now more than ever, the honoraria, irrespective of the preposterous way things were handled from the outset, should be honoured.