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.

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.

“ 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.

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.

For sure some kind of ‘sub-category’, Kevvy. Go figure what I’m thinking.

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.).

“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.]

And who’s party has been in bed with the GWU since dawn of time? ghidilna, il- lejborist/a

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.