Numbers and noises
A survey published by Malta Today last Sunday indicates that 59% of electors are in favour of divorce legislation, or let us say, not against it.
This percentage tallies with some other figures I have seen, and it is consistent with the upward trend in the numbers of those who are pro, or rather, those who are not anti.
Yet the party-political aspect of that survey doesn’t quite square; the report itself suggests that we should approach it with caution because the sample size is too small to extrapolate with any significance.
It suggests that Labour Party supporters are overwhelmingly in favour of divorce legislation but Nationalist Party supporters are not.
At the same time, it indicates that anti-divorce sentiment is highest among those whose education stopped at primary level: socio-economic group DE, electors who in their vast majority vote Labour.
It also suggests that support for divorce legislation is highest among those with a tertiary level of education: electors who have so far tended to vote Nationalist.
Unless there has been some massive swing and shift in voting patterns, with DE voters crowding behind the Nationalist Party and those who have been to university flocking behind Labour, those percentages, as the survey report itself has warned, just cannot be taken at face value.
The Labour Party has for the last three decades at least been manifestly right-wing and conservative in every respect except its attitude towards social services, which is left-wing. Its right-wing conservative stance was at its most aggressively evident during the run-up to the EU membership referendum. At that point, the Malta Labour Party could well have ceased to call itself socialist.
The irony is that because it is still socialist on paper and uses the word ‘Labour’ as a name if not as a description, its MEPs sit in the European Parliament with Europe’s socialists, who come from political parties with an approach that couldn’t possibly diverge more deeply from that of the Malta Labour Party and, more pertinently, the people who vote for it.
Curiously, the gradual shift in Labour’s policies and approach is the result of market forces at work, even though this might not be immediately apparent because people – still more politicians who have convinced themselves that they are all about policies and principles – tend not to think of politics in terms of the market, or of demand and supply.
The beliefs of those who typically vote Labour are now the antithesis of progressive politics. Here I do not include the distinctive stream of those older people who vote Labour now for the same reasons they did in 1970 and 1976, having failed to notice that the party has steadily changed into something completely different and that it is backward-looking and conservative rather than progressive – just as they failed to notice that Dom Mintoff’s idea of progressive politics was needlessly destructive and ultimately failed to achieve what the post-1987 government achieved instead.
Those people still vote Labour because they think it is progressive, enlightened and socialist. They need to sit down and think, and ultimately let go of their prejudice against the Nationalist Party and the belief that it, too, remains what it was in the 1960s. If it were, I sure as hell wouldn’t be voting for it – just as nobody in either my paternal or maternal family did back then.
As for the rest of Labour’s electorate, their beliefs are a sort of Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from all over the political spectrum: a full welfare state but low taxation; private enterprise and access to all the delights of a free market, open borders and brimming shop-shelves but with price control, state inference, and the nationalisation of banks and utilities; the belief that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that families of five people can live comfortably and pay all their bills on a single gross annual income (the father’s – the mother must be able to choose to stay at home, as is her ‘right’) of €14,000 a year coupled with the other belief that families who can live comfortably and pay all their bills must be ‘up to something nefarious’ rather than working hard and using their initiative; the championing of nationhood and Catholicism, saints and fireworks, as a means of identity; the refusal to speak or learn English because ‘Maltese is our language’ with a burgeoning fixation on the internet and escalating pressure on the government to provide jobs for people who can’t communicate properly; xenophobia and dislike of all foreigners, but some foreigners more than others, with rapidly increasing demand for the many and varied things that foreigners produce and sell to us; opposition to EU membership with exploitation of open borders in driving lorry-loads of detergents and alcohol from Sicily to Malta; racism; suspicion of and contempt for Jews, Muslims and Protestants – you get the picture.
Yes, racism and contempt for religions other than Catholicism are widespread across the electorate, but the point is that you cannot call yourself progressive and think like that.
How does support for divorce fit into this sort of extreme traditionalism? You tell me. The reality is that Adrian Vassallo and Marlene Pullicino are the true face of the Labour electorate (bar that stream of older electors I mentioned earlier) whose sentiments are remarkably similar to those of America’s Deep South.
This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday.
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Mhux bhall-poll tad-Dive, ghax dak qed juri sa issa 60% kontra id-divorzju.
“It also suggests that support for divorce legislation is highest among those with a tertiary level of education .“
Actually this is an inaccurate statement.
[Daphne – It is not an inaccurate statement. That is exactly what the survey result suggests. Whether the survey result itself is inaccurate is another matter. I trust you are not an example of somebody with tertiary-level education who cannot read and understand a simple sentence.]
Many people who have a high level of education – and precisely because they have a high level of education – do not base their anti- divorce stance on articles they read about in The Cosmopolitan or some such like mag but on well researched and unbiased articles which depict a far more complex reality and far- reaching consequences for society as a whole.
The erudite English judge who spoke at a conference in Malta last year about the need to prevent such a situation as exists in Britain from arising in Malta did so precisely because of his long experience in handling divorce cases.
[Daphne – He can’t have been particularly erudite if he failed to grasp the fact that marriages break up aplenty in Malta, and that divorce is what happens when marriages have broken up already. I trust nobody briefed the erudite judge about the situation here. People who don’t live here just cannot understand the distinction we make between divorce and separation. They somehow believe that because we have no divorce then spouses are not permitted to leave each other. This is commonsense. If spouses are permitted to leave each other, then they should be permitted to divorce.]
Marriages do break up in Malta but not to the extent that you have 2 out of 3 or even 1 out of 3 marriages failing as they do in other societies. That is when arguably the situation would have to be regulated by a divorce law.
When the vast majority of marriages succeed – as they do in Malta- then the situation cannot be as dire as it is being depicted to be.
It doesn`t follow that if spouses are permitted to separate and leave each other then they should be permitted to divorce.
Divorce is a dismemberment of the family unit, a total disowning of one`s erstwhile husband or wife whereas separation is often ,though not always, a temporary difficult situation in a family where the spouses are still bound to each other and precisely cannot marry another.
Separations do not always occur because of infidelity and hence marriages can sometimes be salvaged and even when they do occur because of infidelity, the dalliance or liaison formed with somebody else may be just that, a passing fancy.
Yes spouses CAN leave each other if they separated. But these pogguti dont want it that way, they want their cake and they want to eat it too. They wont accept the unsavoury title of POGGUTI, they want it legally nice. Divorced. Still poggutti they will remain in the eyes of their fellow countrymen. And divorce will never make it in Malta. Thiose who bring the excuse that divorce is for the rich, can say it again. Divorce will remain for those well off, but for the workers it will never be an option even if they are atheists. Divorce works against women and children. Not against the man. And at the end of the day it will be the lawyers who will benefit most from divorce cases.
Hey Daphne, you forgot ‘hunting’ (aka slaughter of all creatures that fly . . . and several that don’t) together with the saints and fireworks in the bit about ‘identity . . .
If the PN presents itself as a party against divorce at the 2013 general elections, it will be more anachronistic than the Labour Party when it presented itself against the EU in 2003.
Times are changing – fast.
If there is one party who, across the years, has made us increasingly look like a country of God-fearing southern American rednecks is the party you’re so much fond of. The same party which has been in bed with the church since the dawn of time. You are perfectly right in saying that Adrian Vassallo and Marlene Pullicino aren’t the perfect examples of progressive politicians but highlighting this fact whilst at the same time omitting completely the other side of the political spectrum which, as you know, has got truckloads of Adrian Vassallos and Marlene Pullicinos is not fair at all. Omission is lying in my book.
[Daphne – As your great leader but one used to say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Actions, not words, are what count. The bottom line is that it was Nationalist governments which worked for and achieved independence, EU membership, membership of the Eurozone and changed Malta for the better post-1987, turning the working class into the new middle class, while Labour either sat on its gas-bag or acted as a destructive and negative force. Bullshit walks.]
I just think both parties are hopelessly conservative. Labour as you rightly say is conservative but tries to sell itself as progressive. The PN on the other had is extremely conservative and makes no secret of it. However if at this moment in time the PN is definitely the more conservative of the 2 parties.
And who’s party has been in bed with the GWU since dawn of time? ghidilna, il- lejborist/a
Privately schooled teen in the 1980s, first-time voter in 1992, tertiary level of education, pro-EU (just to declare my obvious voting pattern determined by a rather pathetic lack of choice) checking in.
Oh I forgot, also pro-divorce legislation to be enacted by parliament.
Where does that leave me standing? Somewhere in the middle while I wait for irresponsible politicians, on both sides, to play a ruthless lose-not-a-vote game with the shattered marriages of their constituents at stake.
Hmm, let me see where I stand in Daphne’s kaleidoscope. It must be in the ‘older Labour voter’ section – those who failed to see destruction written on Mintoff’s face… Or perhaps a sub-category, since the divergence I see is much larger than Daphne’s paint job.
For sure some kind of ‘sub-category’, Kevvy. Go figure what I’m thinking.
Yes, but the Nationalist vote also includes many tens of thousands of voters from the Catholic lower-middle class of both the south and the geographical (as opposed to ‘social’) north. These people are probably more socially conservative than the working class, and certainly much more so than the Nationalist middle class which you’re probably more familiar with.
The working class, for its part, tends to be more conservative on immigration issues simply because they experience the issue more directly in their neighbourhoods and in competition for jobs etc., whereas the lower middle class and the middle class proper do not.
As for the parties and their identities, I think Labour is actually a pretty typical European post-socialist centre-left party, minus the intellectuals, whom it alienated during the Mintoff and KMB years, and with a smaller than usual ‘radical chic’ or ‘champagne socialist’ element.
PN seems to me to be very heterogenous, but I’d call it a big-tent non-socialist party that would probably be considered centre-right by most observers (slightly more conservative than Labour on social issues and considerably to the right of Labour on economic issues – taxes etc.).
“ The Nationalist vote also includes many tens of thousands of voters from the Catholic lower-middle class of both the south and the geographical (as opposed to ’social’) north.“
Well no, not exactly. The Nationalist core vote is also made up of the ` vecchia borghesia ` who are not exactly nouveau riche or petit – bourgeois . It`s embarrassing to have to say this- but there you are.
And many of them are also anti- divorce to the hilt.
A friend of mine is married to a British man who walked out on her some years ago. Because he is British he could file for a divorce there and once finalised, it will also be registered in Malta.
She is anti-divorce. She says that being a Catholic she will never apply for it and she accepts her situation and her destiny as they are, separated and abandoned by her husband as she hasn’t heard from him since the day he left.
This is her opinion and also her decision. But she has a choice. The UK would offer her the possibility to divorce. In Malta we have no choice. People should be given the right of choice. Those anti-divorce with marriage problems could imitate my friend, but those who would like to start a new life should be given all the possibilities. The state cannot oblige anyone to stay married in a broken marriage.