A survey published by Malta Today last Sunday indicates that 59 per cent of electors are in favour of divorce legislation, or let us say, not against it. This percentage tallies with some other figures I have seen, and is consistent with the upward trend in the numbers of those who are pro, or rather, those who are not anti.
Yet the party-political aspect of that survey doesn’t quite square, and the report itself suggests that we should approach it with caution because the sample size is too small to extrapolate with any significance. It suggests that Labour Party supporters are overwhelmingly in favour of divorce legislation but Nationalist Party supporters are not.
At the same time, it indicates that anti-divorce sentiment is highest among those whose education stopped at primary level: socio-economic group DE, electors who in their vast majority vote Labour. It also suggests that support for divorce legislation is highest among those with a tertiary level of education: electors who have so far tended to vote Nationalist.
Unless there has been some massive swing and shift in voting patterns, with DE voters crowding behind the Nationalist Party and those who have been to university flocking behind Labour, those percentages, as the survey report itself has warned, just cannot be taken at face value.
The Labour Party has, for the last three decades at least, been manifestly right wing and conservative in every respect except its attitude towards social services, which is left wing. Its right-wing conservative stance was at its most aggressively evident during the run-up to the EU membership referendum. At that point, the Malta Labour Party could well have ceased to call itself socialist.
The irony is that because it is still socialist on paper and uses the word ‘Labour’ as a name if not as a description, its MEPs sit in the European Parliament with Europe’s socialists, who come from political parties with an approach that couldn’t possibly diverge more deeply from that of the Malta Labour Party and, more pertinently, the people who vote for it.
Curiously, the gradual shift in Labour’s policies and approach is the result of market forces at work, even though this might not be immediately apparent because people – still more politicians who have convinced themselves that they are all about policies and principles – tend not to think of politics in terms of the market, or of demand and supply.
The beliefs of those who typically vote Labour are now the antithesis of progressive politics. Here I do not include the distinctive stream of those older people who vote Labour now for the same reasons they did in 1970 and 1976, having failed to notice that the party has steadily changed into something completely different and that it is backward-looking and conservative rather than progressive – just as they failed to notice that Dom Mintoff’s idea of progressive politics was needlessly destructive and ultimately failed to achieve what the post-1987 government achieved instead. Those people still vote Labour because they think it is progressive, enlightened and socialist. They need to sit down and think, and ultimately let go of their prejudice against the Nationalist Party and the belief that it, too, remains what it was in the 1960s. If it were, I sure as hell wouldn’t be voting for it – just as nobody in either my paternal or maternal family did back then.
As for the rest of Labour’s electorate, their beliefs are a sort of Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from all over the political spectrum: a full welfare state but low taxation; private enterprise and access to all the delights of a free market, open borders and brimming shop-shelves but with price control, state inference, and the nationalisation of banks and utilities; the belief that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that families of five people can live comfortably and pay all their bills on a single gross annual income (the father’s – the mother must be able to choose to stay at home, as is her ‘right’) of €14,000 a year coupled with the other belief that families who can live comfortably and pay all their bills must be ‘up to something nefarious’ rather than working hard and using their initiative; the championing of nationhood and Catholicism, saints and fireworks, as a means of identity; the refusal to speak or learn English because ‘Maltese is our language’ with a burgeoning fixation on the internet and escalating pressure on the government to provide jobs for people who can’t communicate properly; xenophobia and dislike of all foreigners, but some foreigners more than others, with rapidly increasing demand for the many and varied things that foreigners produce and sell to us; opposition to EU membership with exploitation of open borders in driving lorry-loads of detergents and alcohol from Sicily to Malta; racism; suspicion of and contempt for Jews, Muslims and Protestants – you get the picture. Yes, racism and contempt for religions other than Catholicism are widespread across the electorate, but the point is that you cannot call yourself progressive and think like that.
How does support for divorce fit into this sort of extreme traditionalism? You tell me. The reality is that Adrian Vassallo and Marlene Pullicino are the true face of the Labour electorate (bar that stream of older electors I mentioned earlier) whose sentiments are remarkably similar to those of America’s Deep South.
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