Prudence? This is not a Jane Austen novel.

This is my newspaper column, published in The Malta Independent today.

The immaturity of Maltese democracy has been painfully illustrated over the last few weeks by the miserable shortcomings of our politicians in the Libyan crisis, and by the failure of most of the rest of us to object.

Quite to the contrary, many have applauded the undemocratic behaviour of those politicians, because it has saved them from the onerous burden of having to think about Libya and perhaps even reach some conclusions of their own.

Electors have been told that their political leaders are cooperating and so they needn’t concern themselves with anything more, because of ‘prudence’. Instead of decrying this patronising insult, they applaud the ‘grown-up’ way in which Dr Gonzi and Dr Muscat say exactly the same things at exactly the same time. They don’t stop to consider the fact that they, the electorate, have been written out of the equation and that it is clear by now that what Dr Gonzi and Dr Muscat are doing is not cooperating but colluding.

The prime minister has not made a statement to parliament about Libya. Parliament, which spent 29 hours debating the hot and thorny issue of a referendum question in an apparent parallel universe even as Libya burned, spent not one hour on Libya. Even as the UN Security Council geared up to vote on a resolution for military action, Malta’s parliament voted on what it would prefer the referendum question to be.

It was the most extraordinary form of displacement activity, so much a matter of having moved through the looking-glass that one almost expected, when the vote was done, the Queen of Hearts to emerge from the parliament bar with a tray of her famous tarts and a panicked white rabbit in tow.

There are many in Malta who are contemptuous of true democracy, or who fail to understand its implications, if some of the shocking things I have read over the last couple of weeks are anything to go on. But to the rest of us, it seemed obvious that in the three days leading to the UN Security Council vote, parliament should not have debated a referendum question, but the extent of Malta’s involvement in UN-mandated military action, and the implications of the UN resolution in general.

The prime minister, who delivered his most impassioned speech since 2008 on the subject of whether a man should be permitted by the state to divorce his wife for a younger woman, had little to say on the subject of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya and military invention, and even that little had to be prised out of him with red-hot tongs.

The prime minister has moved from briefing the leader of the Opposition to plotting with him in putting up a brick wall of defiant silence in the face of even the merest request for information or debate. The two of them together have effectively shut down parliament’s essential function, in times like this, to talk about what matters. What matters now is Libya and the extent of Malta’s voluntary and involuntary involvement.

I cannot help wondering how Eddie Fenech Adami, had he been prime minister or leader of the Opposition, would have handled the situation. I suspect he would have done what he did as leader of the Opposition in 1986, when he put aside his expected reply to the Budget Speech and said in parliament that the budget was irrelevant when one man had been shot dead by political opponents and democracy lay in tatters.

Members of the government, including Karmenu Vella who has been engaged to write the Labour Party’s vision for 2013 to 2018, leaped out of their seats and ran across the floor of the house to intimidate him. Karmenu Vella, still in parliament 25 years on, is more than happy to have his current party leader – for he has seen out Dom Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant, and Joseph Muscat is his fourth – refuse to engage on the subject of Libya. There is too much to compromise and embarrass him and the party he has served since its earliest days of embroilment with Muammar Gaddafi.

Nor, for that matter, can I see Dr Fenech Adami failing to address the nation immediately after the UN Security Council vote, communicating Malta’s position and intentions in a clear and concise manner which did not leave him exposed to accusations of fudged thinking, dubious integrity, cowardice and appeasement.

Though our electoral system is different, the Maltese parliament is modelled on the House of Commons in that it is designed to expose the decisions of politicians to scrutiny within the house itself, and thereby to the scrutiny of the nation. MPs should be in no doubt that they speak for their constituents, who put them there as delegates and to whom they are answerable. But our MPs have begun to think that they represent only themselves and their ‘feelings’.

When challenged about their stance in the Libya crisis, both government and Opposition politicians have taken to talking with a certain degree of smugness, as though they are the only ones in the know while the rest of us don’t know what we are talking about. “You say what you do because you don’t know what we know.”

This is appalling. It is only because Maltese democracy is as yet so poorly developed that we not only tolerate this sort of behaviour but actually think it is the right thing for the government and even the Opposition to boast of secrets being kept from the electorate and of decisions taken without the need to justify or explain them under the full glare of public scrutiny.

As the Libyan crisis developed, the prime minister should have made a statement to the house, followed by questions and then a debate. In his refusal to do so, the proper function of the Opposition would be to hold him to account and demand all of this. But because the Opposition has seen fit to collude with the government, it has failed in that proper function and let down the country.

As a result, there has been no statement to the house, no questions by MPs and no debate on the subject of Libya. Neither the government nor the Opposition has any interest in speaking about the subject – that much has long been obvious – and every interest in not exposing their views and behaviour to that level of scrutiny. To serve their own interests, they are not serving the public.

Having successfully shut down the proper functioning of parliament, Dr Gonzi and Dr Muscat have colluded to hamper that other essential tool of democracy, the proper functioning of the press. They have aligned themselves against the media with foolish and undemocratic talk of ‘prudence’, which suggests that the least said in situations like this, the better, and that those who insist on facts, information and discussion are somehow madly disloyal and unpatriotic.

Let’s leave aside the usual problems with literal translation, and the fact that prudenti does not translate in this context as ‘prudence’, a word used in idiomatic English for matters to do with thrift and the careful management of money matters. Prudenti would here translate as ‘cautious’ or ‘circumspect’, but that doesn’t sound quite as good to our politicians who, given their unhappy lack of familiarity with the language, apparently prefer to have their approach described with the name of an 18th-century womanly virtue, Prudence, that has long gone the way of its bedfellow, Chastity.

Had there been a parliamentary debate, and had the leader of the Opposition not been so keen to collaborate with the prime minister on shutting everyone up about Libya, then the prime minister would not have been able to behave as he has done.

Before the UN Security Council vote, Dr Gonzi said that Malta would not be used as a military base because it is neutral. After the UN Security Council vote, which did away with the neutrality excuse, he said that Malta “would not allow itself to be used as a military base” regardless of the resolution, that he had received no such requests, and that even if he were to receive any “the answer would be the same: that Malta will not allow itself to be used as a military base.”

Then his foreign minister spoke to Sky News to say that Malta will not get involved “because it is militarily neutral” and “the smallest sovereign state closest to Libya” (translation: we’re running scared).

In the flood of opprobrium which followed, the prime minister must have understood how badly he had miscalculated the Maltese ‘reverence’ for neutrality and desire to keep our heads down, and just how churlish his statement sounded to those of us who never rooted for Dom Mintoff and who don’t have that kind of mentality.

It didn’t help his stance, either, when Eddie Fenech Adami made it plain on Sunday that he thinks Malta should cooperate if a specific request is made by the coalition forces to have the island used as a military base.

Dr Gonzi immediately backtracked on neutrality and his blanket, all-encompassing refusal. He said that the real reason he won’t allow Malta to be used as a military base is not neutrality but the fact that we have one airport and we can’t run the risk of interruption to civilian flights. He also said that he doesn’t think there is a particular need for Malta to offer its airport because there are so many others available in the area, but should particular circumstances require it, he would reconsider.

So why didn’t the prime minister say so in the first place? He didn’t say so because parliament hadn’t forced him to explain himself at the outset, but in the end, the press, a few words by Dr Fenech Adami and the many members of the public who communicated to him their dismay forced him to do so.

Yet Dr Gonzi appears not to have understood the real reason why so many people want Malta to be directly involved in getting rid of Gaddafi: not jingosim, but catharsis. We want to have a part in Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall because Muammar Gaddafi played a part in blighting Malta.

Parliament must hold a proper debate on Libya, and both the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition must speak clearly about where they stand. They have to remember that it is not about them. It is about us. Democracy and our constitution require them to provide us with the opportunity to hold them to account about the true extent of their embroilment with Gaddafi’s regime, the purposes of their recent visits to Muammar Gaddafi (Joseph Muscat in August, returning on Gaddafi’s private plane, and Lawrence Gonzi and Tonio Borg last month), any financial relationship between the Gaddafi regime and either of the political parties, the freezing of regime assets in Malta, whether the government plans to begin talking to the National Council in Benghazi and stop talking to representatives of the Gaddafi regime any time soon, how and in what circumstances Malta might be involved in naval intervention through its harbour given that it has ruled out the airport, and our level of involvement in the mammoth humanitarian exercise Catherine Ashton talked about last Monday.

Instead, both Dr Gonzi and Dr Muscat, with the support of all their MPs and the collaboration of certain sectors of the media, have decided to collude in pretending that nothing is happening and that what is happening does not concern us. That is not caution, but the reverse. And it is certainly not ‘prudence’. It is deceit.