A fitting monument for Labour’s authoritarianism

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6 responses to “A fitting monument for Labour’s authoritarianism”

1. 

   Gerald Lapira

   June 20, 2023

   For those who wish to look up and research the KMB years (which I remember clearly with Labour thugs banging at our school doors) this statue should serve as a reminder for posterity – never ever trust a politician.

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   1. 

      Banquo

      June 20, 2023

      Saying that you should never ever trust a politician is unfair to the politicians who genuinely have their constituents’ interests at heart and work hard to get good results for them (they do exist). It is also unhelpful because it marks out all politicians as equally bad and unworthy of our vote, yet some politicians are clearly better than others, and we have to vote for someone. Politicians will govern over us whether we trust them or not.

      How about ‘trust, but verify’ as a slogan?

      Reply
2. 

   Banquo

   June 20, 2023

   Labour?s thuggery, violence and illiberalism during the KMB years should be denounced without question. However, can we stop making a fuss about the fact that Labour governed ?without a majority?? Although they did not get a majority of overall votes in the 1981 election, they got a majority of what mattered in our electoral system: that of seats.

   It was a useful exaggeration for the Nationalist Party to label the election result ?perverse? and the government as ?illegitimate?, but the truth is that every electoral system has its oddities, advantages and disadvantages. In a system based on winning seats by winning districts, winning a seat by many votes rather than a few counts for nothing. All the extra votes won on that one seat will go to waste, electorally speaking. It is better to win lots of seats by a whisker than win just a few seats by huge margins.

   Winning by the rules of the game is perfectly legitimate and there is nothing perverse about it. The United Kingdom, from which Malta?s system was mostly copied, still has this electoral system. In 1951, the Conservative Party got 48% of the vote while Labour got 48.8% of the overall vote, yet it was the Conservatives who governed because they won more seats. This was not the only time this happened and it can happen again at the next British election. Nor is the UK the only country which has such a system. In India, the party with fewer votes can win more parliamentary seats.

   A travesty of democracy, one might assume, but Malta?s fix is not all it is cracked up to be. The reforms enacted in 1987 and in the 1990s to ensure that the political party with most overall votes is awarded extra seats to be able to govern if it does not win enough seats through the normal election, not only distorts the concept of having a fixed number of seats which one must win but, more importantly, dooms Malta to having one-party rule for evermore, even if political tastes change and the Maltese start electing ADPD, fringe or one-issue parties to parliament.

   Malta will never need a coalition government because a big party with a majority of votes from the whole country is constitutionally assured the number of seats needed to govern alone. That means that Maltese governments will always be largely stable (not a bad thing in itself), but it also means that the chances of a small party playing kingmaker, pushing a specific policy, or getting a government to make a compromise, are zero. The harsh reality is that, even if elected to parliament, small parties in Malta can only ever sit in opposition. Alternattiva Demokratika were aware that the electoral reforms being proposed in the 1980s by the two big parties would forever cut them out of government and had protested against them.

   Not quite a great victory for democracy, then, when you consider that compromise has been ruled out and that the voices of small but significant portions of the population can never be heard in government. A milder alternative to the ?corrective mechanism? adopted to prevent ?perverse results? could have been finding an easily verifiable formula that ensures periodical re-districting because of changes in demographics is fair, avoiding gerrymandering. This would still possibly result in a party winning more seats than votes, but, if everybody can agree that the districts are fair and the election is clean, then that?s just a possible but acceptable result that the game may throw up, and parties will alter their strategies to try and win seats by, for example, focusing more on local issues that matter to individual districts.

   If two big parties win the same number of seats and a third party is also elected, then one of the big parties will have to govern in coalition with the smaller party, or as a minority government in agreement with the smaller party. Coalitions and minority governments are found all over the world and not considered perverse.

   It was hostility to the opposition and the gerrymandering of districts that gave the 1981 election a foul odour, not the simple fact that the governing party won more seats than votes.

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3. 

   Monica

   June 20, 2023

   Yes, I agree! Lest anyone forgets! It should be a monument t of KMB on a massive truck surrounded with Drydocks tugs all with chains in their hands and him enticing others to join them before they went to attack the Curia! So vivid in our memories!

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4. 

   Government executives are as much responsible as politicians – Mark Camilleri

   June 20, 2023

   […] ?ammit is praising the government’s crass decision to place a monument of Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici next to ?or? Borg Olivier. And why wouldn’t he? The decision is political and Noel ?ammit […]

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5. 

   Revising history (supposedly) - The Maltese Herald

   July 30, 2025

   […] Labour Party mat very well try to rehabilitate Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici with its propaganda and monuments but in history we do have absolute truths. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici […]

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