What happened in our Parliament over the past days and especially yesterday exhibit quite the wrong uses to which a House of Representatives can be put: instead of being the House of free speech, it has ended up as a place where the majority crushes the minority with no questions asked.

Documents that have been asked for remain undisclosed, and while the Opposition members spoke up against the Bill under examination, all it seemed to matter to the government was when will the vote be taken. When it was feared the Opposition was about to filibuster, the Prime Minister himself threatened to keep Parliament meeting even in August as long as the Bill is voted.

There was, to be sure, the ritualistic homage to the vote and all legal niceties were observed. But so were they in different countries and under different regimes: as long as the legal form was observed, the dictatorship could continue. So happened in East Europe under the Communists and so too, how fitting, happened in China after Tiananmen Square.

Meanwhile the regime rolled on, and over the Opposition.

The government had two aims in mind: to get the Bill passed and to get the parliamentary group to vote in favour.

This they did, or rather all but one did, without knowing what the Opposition and public opinion had been long asking for. This they did with the minimum of fuss and possibly with no questions asked. It would seem that none of the questions that seemed to have worried the Opposition worried the government MPs.

In this they were not alone. The affected workers themselves, as witness the meeting held for them by GWU, did not worry about the issues the Opposition had been clamouring about. The main thing, they said in unison, was that their jobs were secure.

Nor did the government MPs worry about selling two big chunks of a national corporation to two foreign governments. Nor do they seem to have worried about granting control over Malta’s energy to, not a foreign company, but to a foreign government, actually two of them. Nor do they seem to have worried about selling the BWSC plant to a company whose fortunes on the London Stock Exchange have led it to delist.

When the time came for them to vote, they did so with the minimum fuss. They even had the graciousness to offer a pairing agreement to those members of the Opposition who could not make it.

But for all the lack of fuss, the lack of soul-searching, the lack of questions, and for all the courtesy exhibited, the ultimate effect was and remains that of a bulldozer, a bulldozer appropriately in the Tiananmen style.