No, ratifying the European Constitutional Treaty does not jeopardise the Maltese Constitution, or our sovereignty, nor our Constitution’s emphasis (such as it is and such as the context in which it was inscribed) on neutrality and non-alignment.

But for the Maltese Parliament to ratify it this week, after a long or short debate, with the active participation of many MPs who want to speak or without many speeches, with a three-line whip and by means of a vocal vote or a secret vote, freely or through party pressure – will be an exercise in futility, another example of Malta’s traditional

a-synchronicity and an added dose of democratic deficit.

Will the MPs who will vote to ratify it at least tell the country they have read the Treaty, all those hundreds of pages, understood them and are in agreement? Or will they vote in favour of something they will not have read anyhow?

It will be an exercise in futility. No one in the EU now believes there is any life left in the Treaty. We even had the former deputy leader of the Labour Party telling a business breakfast recently that the Treaty, if not dead, is dying. Yet he was one of the first to argue at the Labour Party’s special conference on the need to ratify it. We have even seen the way analysts such as James Ker-Lindsay spoke about the ratification by the Parliament of Cyprus last Thursday, to see that the ratification by our Parliament will not make any difference to the Constitution, except to keep Malta in the EU’s good books.

Ratification may indeed be the duty of all those who took part in the Convention, and 11 member States have indeed done so. But then two of the three (only three) peoples who were consulted on it turned it down. The two were among the founding fathers of the EU. As a result, other member States decided to postpone their ratification or referendum. But not Malta.

This is another classic example of Malta’s famed a-synchronicity, how we never get things right at the right time. While all European countries have a decreasing birth rate, ours is on the increase. When everyone is hell bent on criticising the EU we are still star-charmed, and now we also have unanimity to show for that.

More, ratification especially if unanimous, will be an exercise in democratic deficit.

First: the people are not being consulted on such an important issue. There is a more than a reasonable probability that were such an issue to be subjected to a referendum, it would not get a majority of votes in favour, even if the two parties were in favour.

The fact that two of the three countries where the people were consulted turned the treaty down is no argument to try and ratify it by means of a Parliament, only half of which can reasonably claim it was elected to put Malta in the EU (although it was never elected to be weak and submissive to each and any EU whim). And not even this half can claim, except fallaciously, that it was elected to ratify the Constitutional Treaty when the Convention itself had barely begun at the time of the election, nor could one foresee its outcome.

Surely what the No votes in France and The Netherlands show is that one very important problem in the EU is its long-standing democratic deficit, where people do not feel they are being consulted – a deficit which has led to the present crisis. So now we, Maltese, instead of reducing the democratic deficit, we widen it.

There is a deeper level of democratic deficit – if the Maltese Parliament were to heed the wish expressed by the President of the Republic himself (at the US embassy on Tuesday) that the vote ratifying the Treaty be a unanimous one, how then will those Maltese – one or a thousand – who disagree with ratification feel they are represented in Parliament? Isn’t it the essence of democracy that every person feels he or she is represented on the legislative level? Or is consensus now more important than democratic representation?

We had only one party out of the two in our House of Representatives, which carried out a consultation process prior to deciding on the ratification issue. The other party did not even feel the need for this sort of consultation.

But if, as expected, the Labour delegates agree to the ratification of the Treaty, how and who will represent those inside the party who disagreed? And who will represent those PN supporters who disagree? Not forgetting the uncommitted who disagree?

Let the Treaty be ratified, if the internal reasons of the two parties so demand, but at the very least, let the vote not be unanimous, not given on the nod. Let the MPs be European enough to feel able to show they are in Parliament not as representatives of a party or in expectation of higher office, but as representatives of the people. Let the five MPs in the Labour Group who voted against the ratification proposal in the parliamentary group be allowed to register their vote against. And similarly let any Nationalist MP who wants to do the same, register his negative vote. Does this kind of courage still exist in our House of Representatives, or was Dom Mintoff the last one to be so mad?