Unseasonal wishes

Parliament rose for a month-long Christmas recess on Wednesday. As is customary, each side wished the other a Happy Christmas, followed by the Speaker rattling off a list of the House’s ‘achievements’ — something I have always considered rather untimely.

Anyway, that was that — some feeble attempts at well-wishing by a former deputy leader from the Opposition side and an MP surely misreported by name on the government side (Deborah Schembri).

But the cherry on the cake was the previous day’s sitting, which was so rowdy it must have drowned out all the Christmas carols in Republic Street.

It came after a long series of votes taken in the House that condensed the votes accumulated over the long Budget debates into just one senseless session of doors being shut and reopened and members voting getting the same result time and again — enough to put anybody off parliamentary democracy.

Anyway, there was a debate on a motion put forward by Chris Said, which proposed a commission made up of three respected judges to examine all the allegations made by Daphne Caruana Galizia on her blog. Apart from the question of whether this motion had any chance of being approved (it didn’t), it was soon pointed out by members of the government that among those accused by the late journalist was Dr Said’s former competitor in the PN leadership race and now party leader Adrian Delia.

What Dr Said expected to attain through his motion is unclear. What it actually attained was a session replete with angry speeches and unparliamentary expressions. Edwin Vassallo characterized the arguments from the government side as ‘BS’, and was forced by the Speaker to withdraw that term. There was an angry exchange between Glenn Beddingfield and Beppe Fenech Adami. Chris Fearne, followed by others, claimed that Dr Said’s real intention was to undermine his own party leader.

The government came up with a counter-motion that hollowed out Dr Said’s and replaced it with a counter-motion praising the government and the forces of law and order.

But what, in my opinion, took the cake was a short speech by Dr Delia (who absent for nearly the whole sitting), in which he said he supported Dr Said’s motion. I ask myself if he would have done so had there been any real chance of it being passed by the House. He was magnanimous because he knew liamentary minority.

If Dr Said intended (and I doubt he did) to highlight the disarray in which the Opposition finds itself, he succeeded brilliantly.

That was how the House of Representatives rounded off its year, beyond the Speaker’s list of attainments. That was also how political Malta bade farewell to 2017 — a year which began with the Presidency of the European Council and ended with the brutal murder of the country’s most widelyread journalist. The shouting and catcalling in the House last Tuesday exemplified the worst of our political class.

As I was preparing to write this column, I chanced upon my article a year ago, in which I contrasted the words of peace and concord in the Christmas celebrations outside the House and the mayhem (as I called it) inside. So it has become almost traditional with us, at least these past few years.

But death is death is death. All the political bickering which seems almost seasonal should fall silent when death occurs. That no such thing has happened shows that our real situation is far worse than we care to admit.