The silence of the shepherds

Is divorce a matter of political principle for the Nationalist Party? No. If it were, Lawrence Gonzi should have resigned five minutes after the referendum result was announced. In addition, the party would not have granted a free vote to its MPs on the Bill in Parliament. Today, the PN’s anti-divorce position is as moribund as Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s CNI after Malta joined the EU.

Can an MP vote against the people’s will as expressed in a consultative referendum for reasons of conscience?

Possibly, but this is not the point now. What is certain is that those ministers and MPs who were going to do so should have had the decency to say so before the referendum. They did not.

Only a tiny number did. And an even tinier number of them said they would vote against the Bill, rather than abstain. The silence of the rest was even more dodgy, precisely because it was they who had agreed to decide the issue by referendum.

The reason behind this silence during the campaign was as cynical as it was transparent. They knew that revealing their intentions would have crashed the No campaign before it took off. Conscience is not elastic, to be stretched or contracted so it could be hidden from public view for electoral purposes.

Now why are certain parliamentarians conscientious objectors to divorce, as distinct from opposing it on routine political grounds? We don’t know because not a single one of them told us. I think I know why. Because for them faith and conscience are interchangeable. Faith does not just inspire their conscience. It is their conscience. Consequently, divorce is to be campaigned against, not discussed. It also explains why they harbour a quaint and mildly amusing sense of superiority over whoever does not have their “conscience”. Incidentally, Labour can hardly be intellectually smug on this front. Their caginess and opportunism on divorce, does not quite make them Kant’s brightest sparks.

Again, this undertow of making faith equivalent to conscience was hidden for the same cynical reason mentioned above. Had these ministers and MPs given a public account of their faith-based objection to divorce, the No campaign would have been a non-starter and the landslide would have been bigger.

There is another, equally vital, reason why ministers and PN parliamentarians had an obligation to come clean about their conscience from the start. They knew all along that it had a bearing on the stability of the government.

Rightly so, the Prime Minister immediately promised to implement the people’s decision. Will his Cabinet help him keep it? No it won’t.

A tally at the time of writing shows that a vast majority of them will vote against or abstain and no minister has declared that he will vote yes. Unsupported by his Cabinet, only parliamentary secretaries and backbenchers can now help the Prime Minister keep his promise. The latter are not even part of the government.

The Prime Minister’s own vote is all-important. If he votes against for reasons of conscience, he will have to resign because he is the captain of the ship of state and because it would be inconsistent with what he promised. If he abstains, I do not see how he could then turn to his parliamentary secretaries and backbenchers and ask them to vote yes, particularly in light of the free vote he himself has given them for reasons of conscience. In any case, if the people’s verdict should not sway an MP’s conscience, neither should the survival of a government. It is significant that the PN Whip who is in charge of backbench discipline will be voting yes.

I wouldn’t want to see my worst enemy in the prime ministerial shoes today, let alone one of the best to wear them in recent political history.