The will of the one-third

Giuseppe Mifsud Bonnici must be joking when he equates entrenching the institution of the Ombudsman with the anti-abortion laws. To be clear, I am against both - I, for one, already said what I had to say against the whole business of entrenchment in the latter case and simply felt it pointless to repeat myself. The same arguments apply for both, though I think entrenching the anti-abortion laws is a more serious matter. He illustrates the difference when he suggests how he would formulate the appropriate constitutional amendment, a formulation that is patently controversial, an expression of his own moral bias, never mind how many people share it.

Prof. Mifsud Bonnici, in fact, argues that this is the right time to entrench because the climate among the legislators is a favourable one and because there is almost unanimous agreement that abortion is morally wrong. If those are the criteria, and we are in the entrenchment mood, why stop there, why not, as one correspondent suggested in the sister paper to The Times, also entrench provisions against same sex marriages and divorce, for instance? Well, perhaps divorce would be a bit more tricky because the opposition to it is not so great as it once was! But imagine if, say, two or three decades ago when the climate was different, some other similarly enlightened Parliament, responding to an anti-divorce movement of the time equally sure of its moral ground, entrenched anti-divorce laws in our Constitution.

Imagine what that would mean for us today. It would mean that any retraction now could be blocked by a mere one-third of our members of Parliament. Prof. Mifsud Bonnici may not think that this would be such a bad thing. But this is what I mean when I describe entrenchment as anti-democratic, and this is the argument against it, not some other.

Recently, an unnamed "spokesman" for the prime minister made the same argument as Prof. Mifsud Bonnici to defend the political legitimacy of entrenchment. May I remind him or her, whoever it may be, 1) that the measure to entrench was not in the manifesto of the Nationalist Party before the last election (or in the Labour Party's for that matter), 2) that she or he should not confuse an overwhelming anti-abortion sentiment with agreement on any entrenchment measure, which is a different issue, and 3) that the number of signatures gathered by the pro-entrenchment lobby falls very, very far short of signifying a national consensus. To do that the government needs a referendum.

Let me say something brief now about Tony Mifsud's article Democracy vs Life (April 13). I do not "juggle with concepts", I try to be precise in my thinking, and not to be deflected by red herrings - the red herring here is to turn the issue into a moral argument about abortion which, as I have written many times, it is not. Even less is it about my personal views on the matter - as he correctly says I have already aired them elsewhere on television and in the press. On the moral front he declares himself "pro-life", on the political front he more or less confirmed the usual contempt for democracy shown by the pro-entrenchment lobby, but the one is related to the other only in a fundamentalist outlook.

In a democracy a slim majority is as legitimate as a large one. It expresses "the will of the people" just as much for political purposes. It gives parties who win it the right and the power to govern. Elections have been won and lost with slim majorities. A slim majority is not, therefore, something to treat with contempt. Entrenchment, on the other hand, ensures, to repeat myself, that a minority of one-third can impose its will on the majority, and that, for the umpteenth time, is antithetical to democracy.

I have no comment to make about his claim that "tiny Malta" is "wiser than the rest" - I'm not sure "the rest" would regard such arrogance so kindly.