The increasingly vocal call for a referendum on the issue of divorce, in the wake of the Prime Minister’s statement that he would let the people decide the matter, was followed by stony silence from the pro-divorce Leader of the Opposition. He has yet to comment officially on the matter.

He certainly cannot claim the idea of holding a referendum to be his or his party’s since Joseph Muscat has committed himself fully to present a “private member’s Bill” after the next general election. In doing so, he is hardly disguising an obvious electoral ploy to win votes to get himself elected Prime Minister while earning himself the unique distinction of becoming the first PM to present a private member’s Bill before Parliament.

In reality he has not even allowed the issue to be brought before the executive organs of the Labour Party, as happened in the Nationalist Party a couple of weeks ago.

If consistency has any meaning to the Leader of the Opposition, then this stony silence can only mean that he will do what both Dom Mintoff did for the Independence Constitution and Alfred Sant for the EU referendum, and state very clearly that for him, as for Labour over the past 45 years, the referendum is not an acceptable means of deciding national non-partisan issues.

Dr Muscat, after all, would only be true to his political past in doing so since he was at the forefront of the “no” vote against the EU and then of the MLP campaign to discredit the obvious victory of the “yes” vote. Labour had made it more than abundantly clear that for them the referendum was worthless and that the general election subsequent to the EU referendum would decide the issue. Never have Drs Sant and Muscat stated that the democratic way of overturning the verdict at a referendum should be by means of another referendum.

All of this is extremely unfortunate for our democracy.

The electorate is increasingly becoming weary of the political strategies and party in-fighting which the divorce question is generating. In the private member’s Bill introduced by Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, many get a whiff of the continuing internal feud between him and the Nationalist Party.

However, once Dr Pullicino Orlando wants posterity to remember him as the Maltese version of Henry VIII, and once Dr Muscat has the ambition to show his predecessor how to win elections on the back of non-partisan issues, well then allow me as one elector to tell them both in their face, extremely loud and clear, that neither they nor any of the other 69 MPs are to vote on my behalf on an issue which at the end of the day concerns me and each and every member of my family. They should have had the democratic decency to declare themselves at the time of the electoral campaign and not afterwards.

How many of the MPs forming the present Parliament had opened their mouth on the issue of divorce during the last electoral campaign? Certainly not Dr Pullicino Orlando. He had other issues also of a personal but more mundane nature to ward off. The MPs’ political instinct for survival kept their mouths stitched on divorce while openly avowing their respective electoral manifestos which proclaimed the sanctity of the family.

If political honesty still exists in the wave of political opportunism and party in-fighting fuelling the so-called divorce debate, and since Dr Muscat has chosen to decide the matter at the next election, then, at least, each and every MP should openly declare that he or she will not vote on divorce during this legislature and that, during the next electoral campaign, they will say how they intend to vote in the next legislature. This would leave it up to voters to select those MPs closest to their thinking on divorce from the respective parties.

Wouldn’t a referendum be more logical?

I must insist that the rules governing the referendum need to be brought up to date, defining the minimum quorum of voters necessary for it to be valid and laying down the requisite of an absolute majority for it to be approved. This to avoid the likes of Dr Muscat rubbishing it later by stating that the voters who had died immediately prior to the poll should be added to the “nos”, abstentions and what-else-have-you, to suit his ultimate political strategy of winning the next election.