The Maltese idea of democracy is stuck with the popular vote and majority rule – in other words, it is restricted to parliamentary democracy in the narrowest sense of the word. We were having a discussion about this the other day and somebody said that when Mintoff was prime minister we had democracy. What he meant was that we voted once every five years and parliamentary elections were not suspended.

That’s not democracy. All the other elements that make for a democracy were missing, among them was respect for human rights and, possibly the most important of all because it is the ultimate check on anti-democratic behaviour, a free press. Malta is still not fully democratic because our understanding of true democracy is weak. This makes us accept behaviour and situations which, in the world’s most developed democracies, would be considered intolerable. You frequently hear people taking their first tentative steps at democratic thought by saying: “He has a right to his opinion.” They confuse the right to have an opinion with the right to express it – as though there are any laws or any thought police that can prevent a human being from having an opinion in the privacy of his own head.

Our view of what democracy means is so unsophisticated that we actually believe majority rule defines it in all situations. Yet there are cases in which majority rule is anti-democratic, because it flies in the face of the spirit of democracy. The most obvious example is this: you can’t hold a referendum in which the majority gets to decide about the fate of the minority. This is why a referendum on divorce law is essentially anti-democratic. People who will never be affected by divorce cast their vote against, directing the destiny of those who want it. Surprising, even a government minister has made the mistake of saying that the issue of divorce should be decided on the basis of majority rule, in a referendum.

In other words, if the majority doesn’t want divorce, then the minority can’t have it. This ignores the fundamental democratic principle of majority rule but minority rights. The majority can’t vote for all black people to live in ghettos, or for all Jews to wear yellow stars at all times. The argument that the majority should decide on divorce law would apply only if the divorce law were to be forcibly applicable to all, regardless of whether they want it or not. A good example of this is the referendum on membership of the European Union. EU membership affected all of us, so we were all asked to have our say on the matter. You can’t compare this with divorce. How dare anyone think that he has the right to a vote on whether his neighbour is able to get a divorce or not?

Majority rule does not mean the tyranny of the majority over an oppressed minority. A referendum on divorce is ridiculous, because we are not all going to be forced to divorce if the majority votes “Yes”, but we are all going to be prevented from divorcing if the majority says “No”. Can you see the problem here?

If you can’t, go and get yourself a democratic education, and forgive me if I seem rude, but this kind of talk really tries my nerves. And please don’t quote Ireland and its divorce referendum at me. Ireland? Ireland was even more religiously oppressed than Malta. Think of Gozo in 1950, up the backwardness quotient, and there you have Ireland before it entered the modern age and became the place where everyone wants to be and where all the money is going.

Call a referendum in which the majority decides whether the minority should be able to divorce, and you might as well call a referendum on whether we want to go to the expense and bother of having easy access to public areas for a couple of wheelchair-bound people. Fortunately, we have laws and regulations to guard against that kind of behaviour, but strangely, there are people around who insist that each of us has the right to decide whether our neighbours have the right to divorce.

And not just our neighbours, but people we don’t know from Adam. My abiding horror in the EU referendum was the thought of mouth-breathers whose knuckles scrape the ground deciding whether I would become an EU citizen and worse, whether my children would be trapped for life on this rock or not. I had nightmares in which I was forcing them to tick the “Yes” box (there’s democracy in action for you). I rationalised it by saying that just as these content-to-live-in-a-jam-jar-forever people were deciding on my life and my sons’ lives, I was deciding on theirs, and they probably didn’t like it either.

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There are two polemical issues which crystallise the zeitgeist and the government’s failure to pick it up: one is divorce, and the other is bird-shooting. In the first, the government is on the side of fundamentalism rather than civil liberties. In the second, it seeks to pacify the shooters rather than the general population, which would prefer to look at birds while they are alive. In doing so, it tolerates threats of violence, and incitement towards acts of mob aggression. Maybe it tells itself that these are just words. Oh, really? That’s strange, coming from people who lived, as I did, through acts of rampaging mob violence incited by mere words. I don’t have to go through the list again, just point out that this mentality and even these people still exist.

This intolerance of free speech, of other people’s views and of basic civil liberties is what gives Malta that feel of the village rather than the nation. These people are allowed to dominate and to dictate the national agenda. It is insufferable. In the absence of any government action – the Home Affairs Ministry appears to be too busy worrying about transsexual marriage and plastic foetuses – BirdLife has taken legal steps to force the police to act against those who are using the shooter’s lobby web-based forum to promote violence. BirdLife’s executive director Tolga Temuge – it takes a foreigner from one of the more civilised parts of Europe to remind us – said that violence should never be tolerated in a civilised society. He reminded us that free speech cannot be divorced from accountability.

These are some samples of what you can get on the forum. “I’m sure that, like me, you other enthusiasts are prepared to do everything – so if need be, let’s trigger off panic, let’s fight, so we can show people that we too have rights.” “We need to agree and then we’ll explode; we will destroy buildings like an earthquake.” Another enlightened individual went on-line to admonish his colleagues by telling them not to use bombs or vandalism for now, but to use them at the right time and to aim at “whoever deserves it”.

“This kind of talk by the hunters has been accepted for far too long in Malta,” Mr Temuge said. “No other group in Maltese society is allowed to force the rest of society into submitting and acquiescing to their demands.” Well, there is another group, actually, and that’s the religious right. The difference is that they don’t use violence to get their way, because they have their representatives sitting right there in the cabinet of government.

Hunters say they have the right to shoot birds because birds are public property. Well, that’s precisely why they shouldn’t be able to shoot them, because they’re public property and the rest of us have rights over them too. We want them to stay alive, so that they can carry on breeding and we can get a chance to look at them sometimes when they’re not bloodied carcasses.

If only the government paid as much attention to us as it does to them.