Oh dear! What a mess the Mother Country (mine) is in. Twelve years of Conservative government ending with first, Boris, and now Liz Truss, who stepped down on Thursday afternoon.
Opinion polls show Labour to have an increasing massive lead over the Tories and to anyone who reads the UK papers that will be no surprise. Does it mean that, if a general election were called tomorrow, Labour would get in? I am not sure.
The truth is that the Ordinary Joe is also worried about the prospect of the current opposition being in power. The only thing Labour has going for it at the moment is that it isn’t the Tory party.
Is there an alternative? Well, there are Liberal Democrats and the Greens. All of them get votes if they put a candidate up – not because anybody believes for a moment that they’ll get elected and form a government but solely because they don’t want to vote for either of the two main parties. Their votes are simply protest votes against the status quo.
Nobody (I use that term loosely) wants the Tories to remain in power but nobody (ditto) trusts Labour, a party whose candidates refuse to define the word ‘woman’, other than ‘anybody who says they are one’. The usual definition is simply ‘adult female’ but, in Labour-speak, it could also include any male person who ‘self-identifies’ as female and expects the rest of us to identify him the same way so that he can, by right, use women’s changing rooms, women’s toilets and, if accused of rape, and the verdict goes against him, be entitled to serve his sentence in a women’s prison.
Our Ordinary Joe may be a lifelong Labour voter but he isn’t going to vote for that sort of caper.
What’s any of this got to do with Malta? Well, it’s the ‘third party’ option. Here you have ADPD and other small parties and your only reason for voting for them may be because you have had enough of PL but can’t bring yourself to vote for PN. I have been living here long enough to understand that.
What a mess the Mother Country (mine) is in- Revel Barker
It’s a dilemma from which I, as a long-term resident, taxpayer and contributor to the economy, am relieved. Maltese politicians will not allow expats the vote because they don’t know how the expats would cast it. They expect, probably rightly, that it would be against whichever party was currently in government.
But, here’s the thing: suppose all of you who do have the vote and who are fed up with the current lot but who don’t think the opposition would be any better voted in favour of an agreeable third party.
It’s not my place to tell you which to vote for and I can’t say which I would favour (if I had the privilege of having to decide) and, anyway, I don’t know any more about the alternative parties’ policies than I know about PN’s. (Which is to say: nothing.)
Wanting more cycle lanes or a monorail above Sliema is not, I believe, an electoral likelihood, any more than a tunnel to Gozo (supported by both major parties) is a vote-getter.
But what may surprise you is that, in an English by-election in June, a sufficient number of people voted Liberal Democrat to get their guy elected to parliament in a traditional Conservative seat.
It may be the start of a movement… The Liberal Democrats could not expect sufficient successes to form a government. Not yet, anyhow. But there could be a big enough number to control one, simply by not allowing the winning party to have an overall majority in parliament.
And who knows what might happen after that? People might start rating the Liberal Democrats as the ‘sensible party’ and it might – I say might – get more votes next time and even more after that. Until, eventually… Well, funnier things have happened in politics. And I can dream, can’t I?
Revel Barker is a former Fleet Street reporter and a long-term resident of Gozo.