The Nationalist Party decision to stay out of the spring hunting referendum campaign spells the end to any hope that we will ever get rid of those hunters holding our countryside to ransom. Without political support, the abrogative referendum will not get through. The hunters will have their way and they will celebrate loudly come next spring.

It is naïve to think that in ‘keeping politics out’ people will be free to vote as they please. The issue is totally political because Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s credibility is at stake. It is only by politicising the issue, polarising it to bring the vote out, would there have been any hope of getting rid of hunting in spring. The PN has seen the signs. Hunting is ingrained in our blood, like a genetic disease. The case is lost.

PN leader Simon Busuttil did what he was expected to do. He stuck to his word, stuck to the derogation obtained by his party in government, and said he would be voting to keep spring hunting, just like Muscat. As for his party, they get a free vote. Any other option was unrealistic.

The average PN voter differs immensely from the average Labourite and education has a lot to do with it. While Muscat can declare his personal opinion on spring hunting, knowing full well his supporters would come out and blindly vote as he does, Busuttil can never hope for the same treatment. The odds are the Nationalists who would bother to cast their referendum vote at all, would be voting differently from their party leader.

The home truth that emerged last weekend after the PN announcement is that this country is still as isolated, myopic, paranoid and self-centred as ever before.

Membership of the European Union has effectively changed nothing. There is no civic sense, no true awareness of the environment, of the need to protect flora and fauna, and of belonging to that wider world beyond the shores of an island we ruined by over-development.

When push comes to shove, we have no principles, no education and no civic spirit to fall back upon. That is why Labour thrives so well and continues to do so. That is why Muscat has won this round of elections already. He speaks for the majority who couldn’t care less for bird shooting, so long as there are flowers to colour our roundabouts, tarmac on our roads, flashy hotels and shopping malls along our coastlines and convenient parking, everywhere. That’s their definition of environment.

As for those who should know better, we only expect them to let the country down again because, you know, you don’t mess with Labour.

The Prime Minister is continuing with his scam that Labour’s promise of spring hunting was a “personal” commitment he made and not an integral part of his party’s electoral programme, to which all Labour must abide.

“Everyone knows my position,” he cockily said on television. “I always believed in spring hunting… I said what I believed in… I gave my word before the election.”

So did every member of his Labour executive, including Labour deputy leader Toni Abela who endorsed Labour’s manifesto promising spring hunting. He was on the radio explaining his position.

This Alternattiva Demokratika founder who lives in Rabat, a hunting stronghold if there ever was one, has a fascinating habit of qualifying everything he says to the point that in the end you feel like he said nothing at all.

Asked directly if he will be voting against spring hunting on Andrew Azzopardi’s Ghandi xi Ngħid, this fascinating Labour specimen began with: “Let me tell you something…”

When push comes to shove, we have no principles, no education and no civic spirit to fall back upon. That is why Labour thrives so well and continues to do so

He never really answered. The environment was sacrosanct for him, he declared, which is why he had made a fuss over development next to Ta’ Ħagrat Temples in Mġarr. Heritage has as much to do with the environment as roundabouts, but that point escaped Abela, who must have thought he was addressing the average Labour crowd.

Taking a wild guess at what he appeared to say (media reports were conflicting), it seems the deputy Labour leader would have voted against spring hunting if the rest of Europe did the same. The reason, he told us, is that he can’t stand it that Malta, being so small, has to be more European than the rest of Europe, and more Catholic than the Pope.

Of course, he is appealing to average Labour myopic thinking, by pretending the spring ban is being imposed by the EU and is not the result of a referendum initiated by local, conscientious people who want to enjoy the countryside and save birds.

For Abela, the referendum amounts to “discrimination” against Malta and he pompously claimed it was a matter of national pride for him.

Abela’s position eerily harks back to Mintoffian-style pseudo-nationalism from Labour’s Golden Years: the ‘us and them’ syndrome, the result of a national inferiority complex that Mintoff exploited. And we had hoped we have progressed.

Labour’s campaign, because Labour is clearly campaigning in this referendum, is a rerun of the EU referendum, only this time the stakes are not so high, except for the poor birds. Which is why Labour’s covert campaign will succeed.

Lawyer Anna Mallia was introduced as an “opinionist” on Reno Bugeja’s Dissett discussion programme on PBS, but she sounded more like a housewife barking outside a village grocery store. She thinks very much like Abela.

For Mallia, the referendum is a dangerous precedent because you can’t just go around collecting signatures to stop someone from doing something they like to do.

“Who am I to tell you not to hunt?” she rhetorically asked.

Thousands actually have just told hunters exactly that, to stop their terrible habit. But that is not what gets under Mallia’s skin. What she doesn’t like is these “foreign environmentalists” coming to tell us what to do in our own country. These foreigners even occupy seats in our courtrooms, like they are telling our magistrates we’re checking out what sentences you’re dishing out.

“Do we go and do that in their country?” opinionist Mallia asked.

Well, actually you can, if you are prepared to venture outside your village square and take an Air Malta plane to one of those big European countries that keep bullying us into submission.

Mallia warned: This time it’s the hunters’ turn, next time it could be that we would be banning eating rabbits or chicken.

So, thanks to Mallia we now know why the referendum will not get through. Our fenkata nights might be next to go, maybe even the Mnarja festival.

Under Labour, this country has truly gone to the hunting dogs. No one expected the PN leader to pull a kamikaze stunt for a country that does not think beyond the village square. There are those who are disappointed at his stand, but he is being realistic. This country still needs to grow up.

The likes of lawyer Mallia and Labour deputy leader Abela speak for a people that votes Labour and unfortunately, they are in a majority.

This is a country still obsessed with its isolation, with its village festa, the fireworks, the horse racing, with driving loud cars with tinted glass and spoilers, with a way of life that pretends to be progressive and European but is in fact regressive and destructive, especially when there is a populist government that caters exactly for that very ignorance that brought it to office with such bewildering success.

April 11 will very likely be a sad day for all of us and the bird massacre that shall follow in the countryside come spring will put this country to shame, one more time.

It will leave a lot of well-meaning people very disillusioned.

Let us hope that they will not lose hope but stay here, on this godforsaken island, to fight another day.