Of course it is a matter of conscience

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 21 April 2016, 11:26 Last update: about 11 years ago

The government has won a confidence vote in parliament, by voting overwhelmingly for itself. But what really matters in this scenario is whether Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri – who should not be left out of the equation – have the confidence of the people. At this stage, I think we can safely say that they don’t.

It is true that they have the confidence of the usual suspects, who can always be trusted to wave the flag and break a lance for the Labour Party even if it is infested with criminals and led by a weirdo like Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici or a taciturn and uncivil eccentric in a wig like Alfred Sant. You always have to bear in mind that 45% of the electorate voted for the unbalanced and off-the-wall Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici to return as prime minister and replace Eddie Fenech Adami in the general election of 1992, despite the fact that in the intervening five years many of us had learned for the first time in our lives what normality is. But those 45% consciously and deliberately made a choice to return to the abnormality which had culminated in that final year of horror in 1986 – a year of extreme material deprivation, mass unemployment, economic stagnation, public shootings, bombs, deaths, mass protests, oppression, intimidation and fear.

That is Maltese society and you can’t ignore it: a welter of the ignorant (and that includes the educated) and of those who are European only in name and at law. Those people have since raised, in their homes and families, more generations of electors – and you can bet that they have raised them in their own image. These new generations are immeasurably better off materially than their parents were, and might have had a university education or some kind of higher training. They will be the sort to travel and go to Bali (and tell everybody about it), and they spend their time uploading image-building posts on Facebook and flashing about town. But their values and their disorganised political thinking, their complete inability to reason like a contemporary European (and I don’t mean gay marriage or enlightened attitudes towards homosexuality, but the all-defining freedoms that have nothing to do with sex) will be identical to that of the parents who raised them.

Those who make a conscious decision to break away from the rubbish thinking and irrational reasoning with which they grew up are few and far between, and it’s not just because they are intelligent and educated. There are plenty of people on the Labour benches in parliament who are intelligent and educated, but whose political reasoning is tribal, primeval, irrational, and more akin to religious belief than to rational analysis.

Yet the support of those people is not enough in a democratic environment outside elections. Having even 50% of the electorate rabidly on your side is no defence when you know that the other 50% are not indifferent or mildly opposed but angry, fed-up and sickened. And that is roughly where we are now, the most recent opinion surveys having borne this out. Yet, the standard core vote is sticking by Muscat, Mizzi and Schembri even if the people in those groups understand that what the trio have done and what they are still doing is wrong. Then there are those who don’t think that what they are up to is wrong, and who don’t even think they are up to anything at all, but who still feel that ‘something should be done’ for the sake of the Labour Party, as distinct from propriety and common decency. In other words, that Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri should be flung overboard to save the ship, the captain and the rest of the officers and crew. But then everybody else is either flabbergasted at their brass neck in staying on, or so fed up of hearing about one scandal after another that they are blocking out the noise and just counting down the months until they can vote them out.

Now Marlene Farrugia has proposed a vote of no confidence in Konrad Mizzi. She had spoken at first about bringing the same motion for a vote against Keith Schembri too, but it’s not clear what has become of that idea since. Can parliament vote against the Prime Minister’s chief of staff? I’m not yet clear on that either. What we do know for certain, because yesterday the Prime Minister deigned to stop and speak to the waiting press instead of rushing past with a couple of sarcastic remarks, is that Labour MPs will have to vote with the whip on this – that is, in favour of Konrad Mizzi. He is not going to allow a free vote, he said, because this is “not a matter of conscience”.

Not a matter of conscience? I’d say that a matter of conscience is exactly what it is. It is quite obvious that it is the conscience-free members of the Labour parliamentary group who are backing the Prime Minister, his chief of staff and his favourite cabinet minister on the matter of secret companies in Panama and secret trusts in New Zealand. It is individuals with no conscience who, a few days after taking their oath of office, acted to set up carefully concealed offshore companies for what can only be ill-gotten gains still to be hidden from the authorities and the public in Malta. And it is a prime minister with no conscience who can’t distinguish between right and wrong on this matter and who is waiting to assess public opinion (or so he claims).

It is individuals with a conscience, on the other hand, who object to that kind of dreadful behaviour and who don’t claim that if it’s legal, then it’s acceptable. Adultery is legal, but it is clearly a matter of conscience and I don’t think there are many people who would claim that it is acceptable on the basis that it is no longer a crime.

Individuals with no conscience, on the other hand, say of Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s actions, and of Joseph Muscat’s inaction: “I would have done the same. I don’t think they did anything wrong. My only objection is that they have caused trouble for the Labour Party and the government, but I’m going to project my anger onto the people who broke the story and revealed the details instead, and blame them. Because that’s more convenient all round.”