Watch it, both of you!

Alfred Sant has told us to "watch it" when referring, among other things, to electoral reform. Surely he must know that the Maltese electorate has been patiently doing this for the last quarter of a century.

To be precise, ever since December 1981 when a perverse electoral result put Labour in government having obtained 49 per cent of the valid votes cast, and the Nationalist Party in Opposition even though it had obtained 51 per cent.

The MLP had remained in power in defiance of this national call for a change for five years and five months. No genuine effort was made to rectify this undemocratic anomaly until the murder of Raymond Caruana on December 5, 1986, and the imposed solution included other unrelated amendments to the Constitution.

This history shows that the credentials of the MLP in the drawing up of electoral boundaries, and finding solutions to perverse electoral results, are rather suspect.

However, I have no desire to hide the fact that the perverse electoral result in 1996, this time hitting adversely the MLP - the third perverse result in four successive elections - is a very disquieting feature of our electoral system, and for this we can only blame the two political parties who are responsible for the legislation that we have, and the composition of the Electoral Commission. We shall be watching the debate in Parliament on Gozo as one electoral district with great interest.

Are we unreasonable to expect political parties to show enough maturity to abandon the old tactics of seeking to dictate the pace and content of negotiations to suit their interests rather than those of the nation? Insisting that the long overdue electoral reforms should not be implemented until after the elections in 2008 is not encouraging at all.