The backing the Prime Minister obtained from his parliamentary group in yesterday’s vote on a Labour-presented Private Member’s Bill should not delude anyone.
He had Jesmond Mugliett seconding his amendment and he had JPO telling The Times on Wednesday that he had intended to vote against the Opposition’s motion.
Then, according to his own words in Parliament yesterday, JPO had, going into the debate yesterday, intended to vote for the Opposition motion but Dr Gonzi’s defence had ‘persuaded him’ to vote against the Opposition motion in the end.
The nearer one gets to the party’s top levels, the more acrimonious the relations have become since the divorce referendum. Those who supported the No camp, far more numerous in the party than those who supported the Yes camp, still cannot understand how the No camp lost.
They still consider themselves, based on their religious convictions, to have been in the right. And though they accept that the Yes side has won, they come up with a lot of reasons why they should not be forced to vote Yes when their conscience tells them to vote No when the issue comes up before the House.
On the other hand, those who supported the Yes side still hold that the party had no call to oppose the divorce bill, especially when this can be used by people who are not Catholics or by those who were not married in the Catholic Church. For divorce is not, for instance, like abortion, where human life is at stake.
They tell of central committee meetings that included a lot of shouting and where their voices were not adequately heard.
The coming party conference will undoubtedly see many appeals for harmony and joint purpose to rule once again inside the party, but I fear the damage has been done.
Many of those who supported the Yes side are bitter, very bitter, about the way in which Dr Gonzi has been leading the party. They feel that whatever his other merits – such as keeping the economy afloat at a time of world crisis, and so on – he has been uncharacteristically weak on the divorce issue and has allowed his personal religious convictions to lead him to take a stand which was not shared by the whole party, as is shown by the results. Where another leader would have been, perhaps, diplomatic and nuanced, he was forcefully against and led from the front, even if he personally kept out of sight during the campaign.
But even those who supported the No side can be bitter about Dr Gonzi’s leadership. These claim that he should have nipped rebellion in the bud, instead of allowing it room to fester and grow until it led JPO to trip government and Parliament by ramming through the divorce motion in a joint action with the entire Opposition parliamentary group. A real leader, they say, would not have allowed that, and you can even get them to declare that they have more respect for Dr Alfred Sant for standing up to Dom Mintoff than they have respect for Dr Gonzi for having allowed this on his watch.
There have also been some skirmishes between people in the party who were for a No vote and people also in the party who supported the Yes vote. The party has split up into chalk and cheese.
On the one hand, this or similar splits can be traced back throughout the party’s history back to the Mizzian – Panzavecchian split, the Borg Olivier – Ganado split, the Centre-Right against the Centro Sinistra split, etc.
On the other hand, it is common for many political parties to have splits emerging at particular moments in time – the Eurosceptics inside the British Conservative Party, the Clause IV hardliners in the British Labour Party, and so on.
Historically, the party always came together, either when it was in Opposition facing a formidable opponent such as Dom Mintoff, or when it had a clear goal in mind, such as Independence and EU accession. This is the first time in recent history where the party has split internally, when it had neither to spend time in Opposition nor a common vision but was divided on an issue of principle, an issue involving people’s attitude to religion.
Over the past years, the party’s dual personality, or dual cores, worked side by side together. The referendum campaign has put them on opposing sides and their bitter feelings are still there, as anyone scratching the surface can see.
The Yes side still feel they are the outcasts in the party and no longer feel really comfortable inside it. They still feel they have been emarginated by a Dr Gonzi happy to surround himself with people who see things the way he does. This is where Dr Gonzi’s catholic approach has been more evident by its absence than his Catholic approach.
At the same time, however, Dr Gonzi has been singularly weak with his own fractious backbenchers to the point where time and again he has risked the stability of his government when facing a vote in the House.
It is not easy now to try and heal the breach, or an attempt to get the party to back its leader or battle-ready for the election. The first hurdle to be overcome is not the coming party conference but the far more tricky passage of the divorce bill through the House. Only when that is over can the party and its leadership try to mend fences and come up with what the party will present to the country at election time.
As I said last week, it will not be the party presenting a token gay or pro-divorce candidate or two that will mend fences with party supporters who voted for divorce and have become disenchanted with the party. More than the party insiders, the party base, the supporters who only feel this way at election time are far more disenchanted with the party’s top leaders than would appear possible.
The soonest the divorce issue is decided and consigned to history, the more the party can focus on regrouping and coming up with a plan for the next decade or so to offer people, and to be as different as possible to anything that a canny Labour Party can offer by softening its hard edges and inching towards centre ground.
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