When I criticised our president for planning ‘missionary work’ in Peru – put that in context and imagine somebody else’s head of state coming to Malta for missionary work, with all its patronising implications and diplomatic stresses – Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando rushed to his Facebook wall to upload the archaic and undemocratic law which says that those who criticise the head of state should be prosecuted

T he police should take action against DCG, he screamed on his wall, in Maltese so that the sort of friends he has now would properly understand (and still they didn’t).

Scratch this man and you get an authoritarian bigot and petty despot, whose idea of civil liberties begins and ends with the divorce legislation he needed for himself and with gay marriage which he thinks will make him ‘cool’. Perhaps in the circles in which he moves, cool people are those who insist that the police arrest, interrogate and prosecute journalists who criticise the head of state, after which they are imprisoned by judgement of the court. In the circles in which I move, that makes you a bit of a freak or a pariah. But there you go. I’ve always said that Jeffrey’s instincts are Labour, which has long been the wrong sort of right-wing.

His Facebook friends, who have scant concept of the notions which underpin democracy and civil liberties beyond Mintoff’s decriminalisation of sodomy, for which the avowed friend of the world’s dictators had his own reasons and those had nothing to do with the civil liberties he despised, roared with approval. A few even justified the law on the grounds that respect for the head of state must be legally imposed through fear of imprisonment. A couple even joined Jeffrey’s chorus that the law is the law and I shouldn’t think I am ‘above it’.

How idiotic. These are the champions of civil liberties in Malta? Jeffrey and his Mintoffian friends need to have it pointed out to them that true liberals – and face it, you don’t even have to be a liberal but just somebody who likes living in the democratic ‘west’ – will oppose a law that belongs in the world’s worst regimes and call on parliament to have it repealed. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is a legislator. If he wishes to prove how democratic and liberal he is, then he should start by bringing before parliament a motion to have any law repealed which allows for police action against and imprisonment of journalists and others who exercise freedom of expression.

These include the aforementioned law against criticising the head of state, and more particularly, the law on criminal libel. There is a civil law which deals with the latter, and in contemporary Europe, politicians and other public figures should not be using the police to act against those who have criticised them. They have nothing to lose if their complaint turns out to be frivolous and unjustified, but the very act of bringing in the police to prosecute your critics constitutes a completely unacceptable form of harassment. Civil Liberties Jeff clearly does not think so.

Try to imagine London’s Metropolitan Police arresting and prosecuting the Sex Pistols back in the 1970s, when they shot to fame with a punk anthem called God Save the Queen (“she ain’t no human being”). Britain’s head of state has been mocked on every comedy show imaginable, lampooned in cartoons, magazines and newspapers, and been the subject of urine-soaked ‘works of art’.

All of this would doubtless make Civil Liberties Jeff very uncomfortable. But then I can’t imagine him, as a British MP, demanding on his Facebook wall the prosecution of one of the umpteen columnists who say the Queen shouldn’t have done this or that. He’d know better than to do it, if only to avoid the mockery he himself would then be subjected to. But Jeffrey operates in Malta, where his new constituency of Mintoffjani is just as bigoted and authoritarian as he is.

Right now in Spain, the head of state is under heavy fire in all the newspapers for going big-game hunting in Botswana as his people starve, so to speak. The newspapers found out only when he broke his hip and had to be flown back for surgery. Spain has a long, long history of fascism and even a real dictator called General Franco, but what do you know, the Spanish are allowed to criticise their head of state (now) and I can’t see any MPs calling for newspaper writers to be imprisoned for doing so. But then I don’t speak Spanish, so I might have missed something.

Back home, I imagine Jeffrey thinks it will do absolute wonders for George Abela’s reputation if the police prosecute me for criticising his choices. That’s the little, smoggy world he lives in now.