No doubt in the spirit of diversity, Opposition MP Edwin Vassallo has pigeonholed Joseph Muscat and Simon Busuttil together as “totalitarian” for not allowing a free vote on the same-sex marriage bill. The Opposition and the government side of the House had to vote with the party whip – both for the bill, as it happens. But Mr Vassallo discovered the moral conscience which calls out to some individuals only when matters of sex or gender are involved, failing to prick them into kicking up a fuss about, say, thieving politicians, and declared that he would vote against it, in defiance of the whip.

You would think, from Mr Vassallo’s use of the word ‘totalitarian’, that he is new to parliament and the concept of the whip, that he has never understood the Westminster parliamentary system. If the government leader and the Opposition leader were to allow a free vote on every bill or motion that comes before the House, the system would be reduced to a shambles. The concept of the government and of the Opposition, in parliament, springs from the whip itself: that is, from the understanding that there is to be a bloc vote, and that both government and Opposition know where their members stand and how they will vote. Disciplinary action for those who defy the whip is, in the House of Commons on which the Maltese system is modelled, extremely strict.

The Opposition has not said, so far, how Mr Vassallo will be disciplined, but given that same-sex marriage was in the Nationalist Party’s electoral programme, something should certainly be done about him because not only has he defied the whip, but he has gone against an electoral pledge made by the party on whose ticket he was then happy to acquire his seat in parliament.

Now the Prime Minister has leapt in, on the basis that he is unable to see a pot without stirring it. What sort of principles do those Opposition MPs have, he said nastily yesterday, if they can vote in favour of a law with which they do not agree? Principles. Yes, principles – the leader of the Panama Gang is talking about principles. If he is not in severe denial, then the rest of the country is for giving his talk of principles any consideration at all. This is the most unprincipled man to sit in the seat of government in living memory, and yet he takes the moral high ground and preaches to the rest of us about principles.

It should be tragic, but at this stage I prefer to laugh at the willful blindness of those who refuse to see that there is only one way in which this trajectory of corruption, in which a few people in power have turned the country into their own personal business enterprise, can end. Right now, they’re entrenching, which means that prising them out of power is going to be well nigh impossible for the foreseeable future, and this also means that what happens in between is not going to be at all pretty, especially if key people are keener on dining out with Labour than fighting it.

It’s amazing the way the Labour Party brings out the worst characteristics in Maltese people and Maltese social culture, or maybe the Labour Party is just a magnet for what was there in the first place, and then when they get into power all the ugliness explodes. The greed, the materialism, the aesthetic horrors, the Jersey Shore mentality, the boat-car-watch-flett-qmis-tad-ditta-forsi-xi-tigra-ukoll ghastliness of it all just comes screaming out unhindered. And the aim of those who don’t have as much money is to be exactly like that too. Those are the Maltese aspirations: flus, flus, flus, fletts, bowts u izjed flus. That and moving around in packs of other Maltese people, even when travelling, to protect themselves from the effects of ‘abroad’. Then the Prime Minister who encourages all this and who is the epitome of it, the hero of the Maltese kuntrattur and sleazy operator, talks about principles.

In any case, his spiteful jibe about whether Opposition MPs have principles, because some of them are against the same-sex marriage law but voted for it, is completely misplaced. Support for and opposition to same-sex marriage knows no party boundaries. There are probably more MPs on his side of the House who oppose it but who voted for it all the same. Lack of principles would start with standing for election on an electoral programme that includes same-sex marriage when you are against it. So I would say that it is Edwin Vassallo who is unprincipled in that respect. Once you have stood for election on XYZ programme, you are in duty bound to carry it through. It is anything else that would be unprincipled.

If the Opposition had voted against the bill, the Prime Minister would have gone to town with his nastiness and spite, enjoying every minute. Because they foxed him by voting in favour, he has tried this other tack instead, questioning their principles. The only principles which anybody should be questioning are those of a man who doesn’t really give a monkey’s about same-sex marriage or whether two men marry each other (Dr Muscat’s propaganda never features two women), but who cynically uses the matter to manipulate situations to his advantage.

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