Tomorrow Parliament starts to debate a divorce Bill. This will demand from its members an open mind and a dispassionate approach that are not often evident in the House. They will be required to pay no heed to those who have written about what is fast becoming the Divine Right of ‘the democratic imperative’ and to show up idiosyncratic clauses in the Bill for what they are; demonstrably absurd.
The democratic imperative that some have been attempting to bully Members of Parliament with, is no imperative at all. By definition, democracy does not demand unanimity; only dictatorships, totalitarian governments and now, it seems, local strands of narcissistic liberalism insist on that perilous collectivity.
In this particular case, if the democratic imperative means anything, it must reflect the wish and will of all the voters who answered the referendum question.
To deny this is to place in question the lawful existence of an opposition in Parliament. This body exists because it represents a swathe of voters who prefer its policies to those of the party elected to govern. Oppositionists to divorce have a right to their disagreement being echoed in Parliament. Those who argue otherwise need to persuade us why their attitude is not dangerously illiberal.
So, from tomorrow until a conclusion is reached by members in the House, one must hope that all coercive tactics will be put aside to allow MPs to discuss, in all serenity, a matter of the greatest importance: marriage and the family. The break-up of a marriage means the break-up of a family and the break-up of families is doubtless a contributing factor to the disintegration of society, which, our Western friends are discovering, is leading to a fatal state of disrepair.
We are pointing in the direction of an increasingly daunting social prospect, a pointer that Western civilisation is losing its way – in the interest of freedom, of course, but self-interest before all else; so that the party which freely takes a vow, probably the only truly free vow, to love and honour, can tear it up to take another to love and honour another. If the Bill passes in its current form, it will disregard anything and everything apart from the man or woman who decides that he or she has had enough.
“The disintegration of rational society”, Chesterton observed a century ago, “started in the drift from the hearth and the family; the solution must be a drift back.”
Here, if Parliament wishes to discuss the law in a manner that befits the subject, is the challenge; here, the parameters within which the debate needs to be conducted; here where the drift back can have its starting point. Members should nobly consider whether, with marriage on the ropes in the enlightened West, Malta can so work things out that this freedom of choice encourages the freedom to choose well.
Air Malta pilots plan to strike
Before that, they will hold a protest march in Valletta. They should take great care; public opinion is against anybody in denial, in this case, resistance to a situation demanding a sober assessment of where Air Malta is (nowhere great), what its financial wherewithal shows (bankruptcy) and the burden this places on taxpayers.
The red ink in its accounts can no more be disregarded than the idea of substantial government funds to keep a bloated airline airborne can be regarded.
Public opinion was similarly against the hundreds of millions of euros that went down the dockyard drain before this government grasped what had for so long been a poisoned chalice and staunched the flow of funds to what was anything but an enterprise. By 1996, then Labour leader Alfred Sant, after winning the general election that year, saw the economic unacceptability of a horrendously failed concern.
Air Malta, as its name implies, is a lighter problem but it, too, is on the verge of a crash-landing unless changes are taken on board.
The new chairman, Louis Farrugia, already has enough on his plate as chairman of the Farsons Group of Companies – an appointment relinquished recently by Bryan Gera after a very successful 16-year stint (and an additional 15 years before that, as a director of the group). I understand that Farrugia is still chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority and a director of God knows how many companies.
It is a credit to his civic sense of duty – and a measure of it – that he agreed to take over at such a critical time. His task, with CEO Peter Davies, is to implement a restructuring programme to prevent disaster in a critical component of the island’s economy. Little doubt that this programme will mean a great deal of pain for 500 employees.
The challenge is enormous. Not only is there the need to alleviate some of that pain – through early retirement, redundancy offers and, for those who do not take up these up, re-allocation via the excellent offices of ETC. There is the urgency to create a newer, leaner, more efficient Air Malta carrying more cargo, more passengers more efficiently to more profitable destinations.
This task is not for the faint-hearted. Its successful completion requires calm and intelligent minds. The bottom line is that 1,300 employees are engaged in doing what can be done by 800.
Muddled media
Chunks of the media are going through an orgy of contradictions. Let me select one that could be dismissed as impish if it were not so seriously espoused. I mean the accusation that the party in government has given up on dialogue and is rent by internal divisions. Half truths are worse than lies.
Certainly there are differences of opinion, even on matters of substance. But it is as true that that there is much openness as was demonstrated at the recent general conference. There was much criticism and self-criticism and, at the same time, agreement as to the way forward.
Whether one agrees with the luminosity of the way forward is something else again; but the party, with such remarkable success in so many fields, has shown itself open to discussion.
Do we witness so much freedom of speech within the official ranks of the opposition, listened to so many different opinions?
Chunks of the media prefer to see disunity where there is disagreement, not the same thing; a fractious bust-up when factious attitudes surface. What do a self-regarding media prefer, to see a strong exchange of opinions, or a sheepish toeing of the line, which they then criticise anyway?
Naturally, there are proponents of the two-fingered approach and self-promotion in the Nationalist Party and government. Those who exercised this will discover it can boomerang terribly with the electorate.
Arrivals and departures
Today the Arriva project gets into gear. There is nobody, except the rare somebody lacking in imagination, nobody who does not look forward to enjoy the new look of our public transport system.
The old system was fairly lousy, unfairly ill-disciplined in its operations, lacking a sense of service for its clients. And transport was a loose term that included discomfort, irregularity and schedules that did not ferry commuters directly from A to B but invariably via C, Valletta. This added half-an-hour to a journey from, say, Rabat to Sliema.
All that will change today. There will be teething troubles, I am certain. But the reformation will, I am equally sure, attract many converts to the smart, air-conditioned public transport now on offer.
At a price, naturally. Some complaints about cost have already been noised but car travel will continue to cost far more.
Car-owners may now happily leave their mini, sleek sedan, four-wheel-drive at home, or, judging from the limited parking space available to a quarter-of-a-million vehicles, thereabouts. It will be quite extraordinary and an entire plumage in Arriva’s hat if courtesy becomes the name of the new game; if bus drivers are as well turned out as the company’s brochures have led us to believe; if they lock into their bus lane and stop where they oughta when taking on and disgorging travellers; if their bus is kept sparkling clean even after a rain-drenched, mud-splattering day; if the system is as punctual as we are told it will be; if we really bid farewell to exhaust emissions that once vaporised anybody past whom buses swept.
Feathers in our hat, too, if we bid temporary farewell to our cars to go from A to B when the transport system now on offer can get us to our destination comfortable seated in air-conditioned luxury.
But will we? Or will we cling to past habits even when a good alternative is available as it has not been in the past?
If all these things come to pass, and there is no reason why they should not, then Arriva, Malta Transport, Austin Gatt and all those who worked out schedules and things, should take a bow.
Arriva may even receive absolution for its arrogant lapse over the Bisazza Street tantrum it threw. All is forgiven.
Was God tempted to be an atheist?
‘When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross; the cry which confessed that God was forsaken by God... (Nay, the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god.
‘They will only find one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.’ (From GKC’s Orthodoxy),