It is disturbing to see that both political leaders are behaving as though the referendum never happened. They say they will not use the party Whip for a Yes vote on the divorce Bill. It makes me wonder why they bothered with a referendum at all, if they plan to ignore the result. Their specious reasoning can be tested by taking it to its logical extreme.
If MPs have the right to vote No or abstain, then it follows that all of them can exercise that right, and if they do, what then? It is fatuous of the political leaders to claim that they will ensure sufficient numbers vote Yes to make the Bill law. That only serves to underscore the fact that voting No is at odds with democracy – particularly given that the prime minister apparently plans to lead by example in voting No or abstaining.
Before the referendum, both political leaders committed themselves to giving their MPs a free vote, but that applied only in a situation where there was no referendum. Now that there has been a referendum, the party leaders cannot give their MPs a free vote because this amounts to telling them that they are permitted to ignore the will of the people. Worse still, they have more or less told their MPs: “Look here, I’m giving you a free vote but make damned sure that you work things out with the other side of the House so that enough of you vote Yes because otherwise we’re screwed.”
As with the parliamentary debate about Libya, that never was because both government and Opposition colluded on silence and called it prudence, so we are about to see once more the collapse of the primary function of the Opposition, which is to hold the government to account. Immediately the prime minister announced that he would allow his MPs to vote freely on the divorce Bill, and that he wasn’t sure what he would do himself, the Opposition should have pounced and denounced his anti-democratic behaviour. Instead, they mimicked it.
The Opposition cannot hold the prime minister and his government to account on this one, because it is held hostage by its own anti-democratic past. Despite a clear majority in favour of EU membership in the last referendum but one, Labour voted against the EU accession treaty and its leader added abstentions to the No vote and announced that his Partnership had won. His successor, who was then his assistant, had no shame in saying that it took him a good five years, most of them spent in Brussels as an MEP, to see that the Yes vote had a clear majority. With such a disgraceful past, Joseph Muscat and his Opposition are not in a position to say anything when the prime minister and his MPs fail to vote Yes.
This is how badly we are served by our representatives. But the root of the problem is that their understanding of parliamentary democracy is so poor that they don’t see themselves as our representatives at all. God knows how they translate the word ‘deputat’ (the people’s deputy or delegate) but it is certainly not in any way that assumes their function as the delegate of their constituents.
If we were to adopt the British parliament’s way of addressing and describing MPs as ‘the honourable member for Wolverhampton’ or ‘the honourable member for Stowe’, this might force them to remember why and on whose behalf they sit in parliament. But instead of the ‘honourable member for Mosta’ we have ‘l-onorevoli Edwin Vassallo’ and so they think their conscience is the primary issue here.
Let’s be clear about it. Any MP who thinks that a vote for divorce legislation transgresses his conscience has but one choice: To decide that voting against the will of the people upsets his conscience more than voting for divorce legislation, or to resign his seat and clear the way for the election of another member in his stead. As things stand, their conscience clearly does not tell them to pack up and go. Instead it tells them to have their cake and eat it, while wiping their collective mouth on our ballot sheets.
I am shocked to the core to hear that the prime minister is considering voting No or abstaining. He is, for heaven’s sake, the prime minister. He, of all people, cannot vote against the will of the people. Nor can he abstain. The first makes him anti-democratic and the second makes him ridiculous. He commits political hara-kiri either way, and the two-year struggle to a terrible beating at the polls will seem endless. For years he criticised Alfred Sant for ignoring the will of the people as expressed in the referendum on EU membership, and now he plans to lower himself to that same level and do the same thing. If he cannot bring himself to rubber-stamp divorce legislation based on a decision already taken by those he governs, then the only option open to him is to resign his seat. Quite frankly, given how adamant he was that Malta did not want divorce legislation and would not have it, he should have resigned the minute the result was out.
It is not enough for him to say that he will ensure that the Bill becomes law, so it doesn’t matter if he and others vote No or abstain. That is Jesuitical reasoning of the most craven sort, though I myself consider the terminology insulting to the Jesuit Order. What the prime minister is saying here is this: “I will make it happen but I will not be part of it.”
Yet by making it happen, he IS part of it. There is absolutely no consistency in his using his influence as party leader to ensure that some of his MPs vote Yes – doesn’t this go against his conscience? – while at the same time he votes No or abstains. The prime minister is, in effect, saying that he will get others on the government benches to do what he considers to be the dirty work.
The choice facing the prime minister is clear: Vote Yes or resign. That is what people of honour do when they have a problem with their conscience. They do not do what Pilate did, and which is what the prime minister is planning on doing. He doesn’t want divorce-blood on his hands, so he’s going to leave it to others on his benches to get blood on theirs.
What shocks me most of all is the apparent failure of both government and Opposition – with the exception of some MPs who were interviewed by reporters and who said that they would respect the will of the people – to understand their parliamentary function subsequent to a referendum. A referendum strips them of their decision-making function and leaves them purely with their legislative function. In other words, they have to vote to turn a Bill into law because electors cannot do that themselves. But they cannot take the decision themselves because the electorate has done that already directly, in the referendum. The function of MPs is now purely to rubber-stamp that decision. If they don’t want to do it, they know where the door is.
I have discovered over the last (upsetting) 48 hours that very many people cannot understand why MPs should not vote in any other way but Yes to this Bill. If parliament did not wish to lose its decision-making function, then it shouldn’t have called a referendum. We put our representatives in parliament to decide things on our behalf. We delegate them to take decisions for us. But when we take a decision ourselves, in a referendum, then we have taken the decision and so parliament may not decide again on our behalf.
Lots of people also seem to have trouble understanding that when voting after a referendum, MPs do not represent their constituencies. The result of a referendum is national. It is single and undivided. The fact that we voted district by district, and so have the numbers separately for all districts, does not mean that there was a referendum in every district. It is merely an accident of the manner in which we are organised to vote and of how the votes are counted. It does not mean that there was a ‘Gozo referendum’ in which 70% voted No and that Giovanna Debono, representing her kingdom, should vote No to the divorce Bill.
There was only one result in this referendum – Yes. The figures by district are irrelevant except for political market research. Those MPs who fail to understand this are in peril. All the Nationalist MPs have to do is look across the floor, where a bunch of people have been sitting in Opposition for 24 years bar a blip, to understand why if they vote No or abstain they will not be trusted again, and why we will lose all respect for them. The prime minister, especially, will never bounce back from any such decision.
If he wishes to die by his own sword, then he should not do the dishonourable thing and take his entire party with him, leaving his country at the mercy of the dreadful Joseph Muscat. He should do the honourable thing and leave.