Pursuit of Burkean representation

A year ago, the Speaker of the Indian Parliament instituted the Hiren Mukerjee Memorial Lecture, an annual event that takes place in the Parliament's main hall. The first lecturer was Amartya Sen, Nobel economics laureate, who addressed The Demands Of Justice. The second memorial lecture will be given, in early December, by another Nobel laureate, the Bangladeshi pioneer in micro-finance, Muhammad Yunus.

Prof. Sen's lecture constituted a sharp criticism of India's quiet tolerance of chronic hunger (even though the country has abolished famines). The name of a published shortened version, What Should Keep Us Awake At Night, evokes something of the tone of his performance.

To spare you the bated breath, let me announce immediately that, yes, I think it would be a good thing if the Speaker of the Maltese Parliament instituted an annual event like this; in which members of Parliament listened to a distinguished lecturer who addressed some aspect of justice and political responsibility that touches the nerve (in both senses of that word) of globalised Malta.

My proposal that Malta's parliamentarians need a good lecture in their own House at least once a year is not guided by the current fad of running our parliamentarians down. Quite the reverse. I'm trying to find a way of, so to speak, running them up.

Such an annual event would retrieve an aspect of the House of Representatives that many representatives themselves seem keen on burying, if they are aware of it at all.

In following the saga of commentary and self-explanation concerning the government backbenchers, I have been struck by what the politicians themselves confuse and ignore. (Note: I am not commenting on their actions - it is not clear enough to me whether their behaviour is extraordinary, or simply a normalisation of Maltese politics, where backbenchers behave like other backbenchers elsewhere. I am commenting on their explanations.)

Certain MPs have invoked the fact that they are not just members of a political party but also "representatives" of the people or, at least, of their district. Fine; a proper distinction. However, three different kinds of representation are conflated.

One is to represent people with a specific mandate, where in principle there is very little room for the representative to manoeuvre.

Another is to convey not a specific view but a point of view, a perspective: Our Parliament privileges the perspectives of geographic representation (as distinct, say, from gender, age, or profession).

Finally, one can be a trusted representative not because one is counted as a loyal messenger but because voters deem that politician able to discern their true interests, and represent them, better than they could themselves.

This would be the case not only with complex legislative issues (such as rent reform), on which an ordinary person cannot be expected to have an articulate view (although their interests are at stake), but also with issues to do with ultimate values, where a politician may well decide that he (or she) represents his constituents better, and more truly, by flying against their explicit opinion of the moment (say, on capital punishment).

One champion of this last kind of representation was Edmund Burke.

To this day, the kind of deliberative politician able and ready to argue with constituents over what their true interests are is sometimes called a Burkean representative.

In parliamentary practice, all three kinds of representation come into play.

The ability to maintain a creative tension between the three is the mark of the great parliamentarian.

And if we are lacking great parliamentarians today, it is because, in a populist age, too few are ready to take on the responsibility of Burkean representation.

Back to the annual lecture. It is my hope that such an annual event would both signal this function of Parliament as well as keep MPs alive to some of the issues that a pluralist, deliberative legislator needs to address today.

Hiren Mukerjee, after whom the Indian Parliament's memorial lecture is named, was a prominent member of the Communist Party of India, a parliamentarian admired for his fine oratory and wide culture, who died in 2004 aged 96. The praise showered on him after his death suggests that his name was selected to capture the spirit of the annual event because it represents the flowering of a modern critical conscience and a golden age of Indian parliamentarianism; a conscience held to encompass both the heart of a national cultural sensibility as well as the voice urging its radical reform.

No doubt, should the Maltese Parliament decide to institute its own memorial lecture, there will be several candidate names put forward to personify its spirit. But each would have to reckon with one name in particular. Given its power to invoke a literally self-sacrificing dedication to deliberative justice in an elected assembly and a readiness to argue till the last breath against ruthless organised power, any candidate name would have to be measured against that of Sir Ugo Mifsud.

ranierfsadni@europe.com