Pilate had it easy compared to Simon

Judging by his speech at a campaign rally last night, PN leader Simon Busuttil intends to set a new record for spontaneous political combustion. You could almost hear the collectively slap of a thousand facepalms, as the following headline got circulated online yesterday:  
‘Busuttil: ‘Politicians should keep away from spring hunting controversy’’.
Reading the article only made it worse: “…the PN’s position was to have a limited and controlled season. However [Busuttil] argued that in the wake of 40,000 signatures gathered to force an abrogative referendum, political parties have to bow their head to the will of the people.”
At a superficial glance, the logic is quite simply breathtaking. So the PN does have a position on spring hunting, we are told – it favours a ‘limited and controlled season’ – but because there is a petition underway, the PN will henceforth keep its position to itself. It will ‘bow its head to the will of the people’.
Naturally, I am as relieved as the next person that Simon Busuttil will respect the result of a referendum. I would have thought something so utterly self-evident – what choice does he have, but to accept a constitutionally sanctioned popular vote? – would literally go without saying. But let’s be fair: others have defecated on referendum results in the recent past; so all in all it’s good that Simon assures us he won’t do the same.
If that is even what he meant. The trouble is we don’t yet know if there will be a referendum. Those signatures have yet to be verified, and that could take up to three months. Meanwhile there is plenty of time for the PN to take up a position on the issue… even if, later, it may have to bow to the verdict of a future referendum on the same issue.
What Simon Busuttil evidently meant, then (and this will explain the collective face-palming) is that he will bow out of the discussion before the referendum campaign has even begun. The simple fact that some people want a referendum, on its own, is apparently enough to make the PN retreat into a corner and say nothing at all. He will, in brief, simply duck the entire issue and hope it will go away on its own.
In a sense, I suppose we should all be relieved. For one thing, we have all discovered how very easy it is to simply shut a political party up on any given issue. All you need to do is start a petition to collect signatures for an abrogative referendum… and hey presto! Political parties suddenly can no longer express any opinion on the issue at all. They just quietly bow out of the discussion, and leave us all to slog it out for ourselves.
At which point, you do have to ask yourself why we even have such things as political parties to begin with. Is this how it works in the rest of the European Union: you know, the same EU that we joined after a referendum in 2004… before which the PN did nothing but shout its opinion on the issue right until voting day?
Let’s just pick one of the 27 member states – say, the United Kingdom – and put it to the test. At present there is talk of two referendums in the offing in the UK. The first is about Scottish independence, and it will be held next September. The second – still to be confirmed, and much depends on the interim general election – will be on whether the UK (with or without Scotland) remains a member of the European Union.
By Busuttil’s reasoning, British political parties should simply ‘bow out’ of the discussion, and leave the people take the decision independently (ahem) of political interference. Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond should therefore not campaign for his own country’s independence from the UK. And the rest of Britain’s political milieu should likewise keep its trap shut until after the vote is taken… in both the Scottish referendum, and another one on the political future of Britain itself.
After all, political parties have absolutely no business to be trying to sway public opinion ahead of a (political) decision, to be taken by a (political) popular vote. And never mind that the traditional definition of a political party will argue the clean opposite – i.e., if a political party is not going to try and influence public opinion, what the heck is it doing in politics in the first place? – Simon Busuttil insists that referendums, by definition, should serve as instant bouncers to kick political parties out of the decision-making process altogether.  
Well, I need hardly add that that is not what’s happening in the UK right now. And if any political leader in that country – David Cameron, Ed Milliband, even Nick Clegg – were to suggest erecting a wall of political omerta’ on the issue, he or she would simply be laughed out of office altogether.
But Busuttil’s statement is remarkable for another reason. It also exposes the sheer extent of the quandary the PN (and, to a lesser extent, Labour) finds itself in on this one issue alone.
Up to a point I can’t really blame the PN for failing to take a clear stand on spring hunting. In practical terms it doesn’t have much of a choice. The Nationalist Party has traditionally always backed the hunters to the hilt on this issue: fighting their cause in Europe, and always taking the hunters’ side even against a sizeable chunk of its own support-base. Failure to do so now – when support is more sorely needed than ever before – would open the PN to accusations of flip-flopping.
In fact these accusations are already flying left, right and centre… and unlike other flying things they haven’t so far been shot down. Hunters feel betrayed by the fact that the PN will not openly support them now. Anti-spring hunting activists are likewise disappointed, only for the opposite reason. For the second time in the space of a few weeks, Busuttil has managed to antagonise both sides in a heated national debate.
This is entirely consistent with how the PN has always handled this issue. Before 2004, Busuttil himself – then former MiC chairman, and of a slightly different opinion to the one he expressed recently about politicians not taking sides before referendums – had assured the hunting confraternity that their cherished ‘delizzju’ would not be threatened by EU membership. In the same capacity, he also indirectly contributed to the negotiations that each year secure a derogation to permit spring hunting under Article 9 of the Birds directive.
He knew then, and still knows now, that it was a position that would set his party on a collision course with the electorate. And he must surely have known that when the bubble finally burst, his party would lose on both fronts. His only remaining option, then, was to try and pre-emptively limit the damage by washing his hands of the issue as best he could.
Unsurprisingly I counted some dozen comparisons to Pontius Pilate in the comments section below the article. It is, I would say, an apt comparison… but probably for different reasons than those intended.
Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the fate of Jesus Christ, yes; but largely because he wasn’t really interested. This was (to him) a minor internal religious issue, of the kind Roman governors were generally instructed (from Rome) not to interfere with at all.
According to the Gospels, Pilate initially could not understand what the fuss was even about. “I see no guilt in this man,” he emerges to say after his first encounter with Christ. And like Busuttil’s statement about the referendum, is a remarkably naïve thing for a Roman governor to say under the circumstances. Obviously there were forces at work behind the scenes which wanted Christ dead… otherwise they wouldn’t have woken Pilate late at night on the eve of the feast of Passover, and forced him to convene a trial. Whether Christ was actually guilty of any crime was really quite irrelevant at that point… and as a politician Pilate would surely have immediately noted this.
Yet it was only when the political implications of failing to appease the High Priests were finally brought to his attention (i.e., ‘Caesar will be displeased’) that he consented – rather reluctantly, if the Gospels are indeed truth – to have Christ executed. This is where he famously washed his hands. Whether he did this literally or not is unclear, but the message is pretty damn unequivocal… which is probably why the image has reverberated across the centuries. ‘This is your battle, not mine. I refuse to take responsibility for a situation that is none of my business, and over which I have no control.’
Pilate’s hand-washing was not, strictly speaking, an outright abdication of responsibility. It was more a recognition that the decision was simply no longer in his hands… his way of saying ‘I have no responsibility to abdicate’.
Busuttil’s situation is almost identical, except for one detail. Unlike Pilate, he was himself one of the architects of the situation that now engulfs the Nationalist Party. His responsibility is not so easily washed away.