The party counts not the member

In my early 20s I was a raw student of the principles of political theory in a parliamentary democracy.

To my yet untutored mind in an English university I grappled with what the book was telling me. I came to begin to understand how the “Mother of Parliaments” handles situations. It was the beginning of the 1960s.

My own native country had had its right to elect its own Parliament withdrawn by the British raj. Malta was a colony then, only to regain a new Constitution in 1962.

Britain itself was gradually crawling out of a 1950s old school Tory Prime Minister message telling the people that “you have never had it so good”.

A subsequent Conservative leader of the party and the incumbent Prime Minister had a naïve outlook on politics and power by playing with and arranging matchsticks.

I was beginning to learn and accept the power of power. Political power especially. This was married inexorably with the strength of the power of the party in the political arena. The union is inseparable.

Someone had coined the phrase at the time that candidates, aspirants to positions when the party is in office, must be abundantly aware of the inalienable right of loyalty to the party and its corollary that “there is no salvation outside the party”.

Malta has been suckled on the milk that flows from Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster. Nothing has changed. Not in 1964, 1974, 1979 and thereafter after successive administrations of different colours and philosophies.

Not even the confrontational seating and positioning of the honourable members of the House of Representatives where government and opposition face each other instead of looking at the Speaker of the House. They give him sidelong glances while glaring at the opposite side.

So to come back to my opening theme. Where does the individual who has been elected under the banner of a particular political party come in? He is virtually not himself. He or she are not their own selves. They are representatives of the party and the voters who gave them their trust.

The individual member of Parliament is not elected to decide his/her own terms and conditions.

That is simply and solely and inexorably the right, the duty and the only prerogative of the banner under whose colours the individual enters Parliament, subject to the rules and regulations of the party of choice and the electoral manifesto.

This, of course, is the political theory in its holiest and holistic definition. What the rule book states. Like in everything else under the sun there will always be the errant ones who try to flout rules, however well intentioned they may be in their futile attempts.

I wish to recall the historic attempt in the 1970s when an elected member had asked Mr Speaker to leave the government bench and to sit in the middle of the House.

The stern but strong Labour Prime Minister and leader of the member’s “application” saw to it that rules are rules and nothing materialised of the “supplication”.

Some may call it the “tyranny of the party”, others label it by saying that “there is no salvation outside the party”.

The hard reality is that any member of Parliament of whatever colour does not sit in his/her own right. They belong to the party. Unless, of course, the MP will have been returned as an independent candidate.

The Malta Parliament has not experienced this situation for aeons.

The case rests here.