The day after the last general election three years ago, the government announced that Malta had joined Nato’s Partnership for Peace (PfP). Despite the controversial nature of this decision, there was no debate in Parliament about it and there had been no prior declaration of the intention to join PfP in the Nationalist Party’s manifesto.

Soon after this, still flushed with electoral victory, the Cabinet decided to award all Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries a hefty pay increase. Again, the decision was not debated in Parliament nor, remarkably, was any formal public announcement made about the pay rises.

Let me make it plain at the outset that I support Malta’s membership of PfP. It is to Malta’s advantage to belong to it. And while I personally do not begrudge ministers the salary levels they have awarded themselves – they are not high by private sector standards and most ministers work incredibly hard – the hole-in-the-corner fashion in which both these significant changes were introduced, and their timing – in the case of the salary increases at a time when ordinary families were being compelled to bear the costs of swingeing increases in their water and electricity charges – were deplorable.

More importantly, however, what these two actions have in common is the way that Parliament was bypassed on two extremely sensitive issues. They demonstrate an unhealthy disdain for Parliament, which may hold lessons for what is now going on in the House of Representatives in the wake of the referendum on divorce; and which all who care about our parliamentary democracy hope will not be repeated. The government appears to have form in ignoring its duty towards Parliament and the people it purports to represent.

The decisive outcome of the referendum in favour of introducing divorce legislation is in danger of exposing the party in power to the charge of abdicating its responsibilities to Parliament and to the sovereign will of the people who elected them. In a fit of moral cowardice, the government decided to opt out of the decision on divorce legislation and instead to unburden it onto the shoulders of the electorate. It also took a calculated political decision – which backfired spectacularly – to back the power of the Maltese Church to swing the electorate in favour of a negative result.

The excuse at the time was that this was an issue which had not been in any electoral manifesto – even though this did not stop the government introducing PfP, or the substantial ministerial pay increases; or, indeed, the City Gate project for that matter (a decision which I also support, incidentally). One could go on.

Yet now, having received a clear mandate to introduce divorce, a sizeable rump of Members of Parliament seem inclined to renege on their commitment to let the people decide. This rump of mainly Nationalist Ministers and Members of Parliament pleads conscience. But is that any longer a justified, or justifiable, position to take? Or is it that some of our Members of Parliament – and sadly one distinguished former President of Malta – take the same view of conscience and justice as Pontius Pilate, that these are malleable concepts dependent on which side of the argument you find it convenient to adopt?

I would argue that while there may be personal religious reasons – which I respect − for not wishing to use the legal remedy of divorce for one’s self, there is no moral basis for advocating that there should not be a law introduced to permit some people who wish to be divorced to avail themselves of the civil right to have their marriage dissolved. This is essentially and overwhelmingly an issue of civil rights, justice, fairness and compassion in our society, not a moral issue.

This said, I concede that, other things being equal, there may be a perfectly respectable argument for saying that – even despite the common-sense view that this is not by any stretch a moral issue − if an individual member’s conscience is troubled by the introduction of divorce legislation he may abstain from voting. But that argument pre-supposes that MPs are performing the role for which they have been elected: that is, to debate and enact legislation for the good governance of all the people of Malta and, most pertinently, that this is done without first asking the people to take responsibility for making the decision.

On this particular issue, Members of Parliament decided in their collective wisdom – led by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, and with the connivance of the Opposition – to abdicate their legislative responsibilities and to dump the decision on the lap of the electors. There was no question of consciences being pricked here, just a desire to wash their hands of their responsibilities in the face of a difficult decision with political consequences they could not confidently foresee.

The electorate has spoken – loud and clear. By (in Maltese terms) a massively clear majority, the people of Malta have told their Members of Parliament that they want to see the introduction of divorce legislation on the lines drawn up in the joint Nationalist and Labour Private Members’ Bill.

The key question which MPs now have a duty to confront, therefore, is whether their unanimous choice to abdicate the responsibilities for which they were elected to Parliament in favour of surrendering the decision to the country at large any longer allows them to plead personal conscience as an excuse for going against the sovereign, democratic will of the people. It is patently clear that by asking the people to decide the issue it becomes one not of conscience (if it ever were) but overridingly of whether or not the commitment of Members of Parliament to the very essence of democracy – that the will of the majority, by whatever margin, shall prevail – should be respected.

This, as President Emeritus Fenech Adami will vividly recall, is what he fought for following the general election some 30 years ago. If the people are not to feel that, in a phrase used in a different context almost a century ago, they are like “lions led by donkeys”, the moral duty and responsibility of this rump of mostly Nationalist Members of Parliament should be clear. And for the Prime Minister even clearer. Having invited the people to make the decision, they have surrendered the luxury of having a choice. Personal conscience must now give way to the democratic imperative, and their own conscience as Christian Democrats – as well as their instincts for political survival − should surely tell them so.