Baked potatoes with butter? Better buy an oven first

What is it with all these culinary references all of a sudden? First it was “hot knives through butter” – but we can’t talk about that one without getting stewed… I mean, sued – and now this: allowing immigrants the right to vote in local council elections would be “like deciding to bake a dish of potatoes and then eating them before they are cooked”.

Um. Well, you can sort of see what President Marie-Louise Colerio-Preca was driving at with that wonderfully sophisticated analogy. But I feel I ought to point out that some people out here – starting with myself – don’t actually know how long potatoes should be baked in an oven before being eaten. Unlike certain YouTube celebrities, I do not have “potato blood in my veins”.

If I ever decided to bake a dish of potatoes – hey, you never know, stranger things have happened – the great likelihood is that I would, in fact, end up eating them either hopelessly undercooked, or carbonised to atoms. That is why, as a rule, I tend to go for a bag of frozen chips instead: something with clear and simple instructions on the packet, so that even twits like me can get it right.

I am, in fact, ignorant about the finer culinary arts; and I don’t mind admitting it. The word is not always offensive, you know. Very often it is a simple statement of fact: I do not know (this or that), therefore I am ignorant (about this or that).

But ignorance is a knife that slices through butter in different directions. Just as I have no clue how to bake the perfect patata fil-forn, there is increasing evidence that a great formless swathe of people do not know how to cook up a functioning democracy, either.

In fact our own home-cooked version of this political model remains half-baked and largely indigestible to this day. Several vital ingredients are still missing from the recipe, and both culinary references above illustrate this point with graphic precision.

Sandro Micallef, the sports journalist responsible for the aforementioned butter quip (pictured), threatened legal action against a website for reporting what he actually said (in the words he actually uttered). He seems to think that ‘quoting public figures’ is a crime in this country: completely overlooking the fact that satire is part of the wider recipe that results in an ingredient called ‘freedom of speech’… without which, the dish called ‘democracy’ cannot even be served.

This view also overlooks voluminous case history on the same subject. The European Court of Human Rights has variously ruled that freedom of expression also includes the right to offend. This is from Handyside vs UK: '[Freedom of expression] is applicable not only to 'information' or 'ideas' that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the state or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no democratic society.'

Allow me to repeat that last part: without which there is no democratic society.

Still, let’s be fair. If I don’t know the first thing about baking potatoes, Micallef is perfectly entitled not to know that the law actually exists to defend free expression, and not to suppress it. The trouble, however, is that Maltese law itself seems to share Micallef’s ignorance of this detail. It affords people with virtually unlimited opportunities to silence their own critics in the media… at the state’s expense, please note… specifically on such spurious grounds.

And Micallef is hardly the only one to have resorted (or threatened to resort) to this measure. Politicians from both sides have a tiresomely repetitive habit of responding to media criticism in exactly the same way. This newspaper has been pummelled by libel suits filed by members of a parliament that supposedly exists to serve the interests of democracy. The entire Nationalist Party executive once filed separate libel suits on the same day, in response to an editorial which – just like the bit of butter that made Sandro bitter – made them look ridiculous.

So long as the law allows people the indulgence of suing people who poke fun at them, you can only expect people to do precisely that. It is the law that is at fault here, not only the people who abuse it. And who is responsible for the law? Do, da, dum – the same people who seem to think of themselves as purveyors of democracy. And who have spent decades resisting pressure from the Council of Europe to remove criminal libel from the statute books.

This takes us out of the butter and into mashed potatoes. The second culinary tip of the day (concerning potatoes and how to bake them) came in the context of an individual proposal to grant immigrants the right to vote and contest local elections. President Coleiro Preca seems to think that to grant this right now would be to speed up the democratic evolutionary process at a pace that is too fast to cope with. To be fair, she does have a point.

Ultimately, things like enfranchisement and emancipation depend on a framework procedure whereby one’s existence as a demographic subset of the population is actually accepted. Before talking about giving people the right to vote, there needs to be at least a process whereby such people are naturalised as either fully-fledged Maltese citizens, or persons enjoying temporary or permanent residency. And there have to be conditions in place for any such status to be granted.

In the case of Malta’s irregular immigrant community, there is no such process in place beyond asylum procedures handled by the UN’s refugee commission, and citizenship through marriage (or against payment, which is obviously not going to be the case with asylum seekers).

So until these things are introduced, there is precious little point in arguing about the right to local council (or parliamentary) representation.

This is probably why Aditus, the NGO which took so much flak for its pains, actually proposed not just the inclusion of asylum seekers on the electoral register, but an entire immigration policy that also provides for a framework in which the situation of these people is rationalised through some form of recognised status.

Herein lies the rub. Having such a policy in place is also part of the wider democracy recipe. The whole point of our own particular brand of the democratic model – a system based on parliamentary representation – depends for its existence and justification on having free and fair representation in parliament.

Like freedom of speech, it is not an optional ingredient that can be discarded without affecting the flavour too much. Take away the right of all sectors of society to at least have the opportunity of political representation, and de facto what remains cannot be considered a democracy at all.

Yet long before Aditus came out with an immigration policy that proposes granting free and fair representation to an unrepresented segment of the population, Malta’s political system had already thrown out the representation ingredient with the rest of the potato peel. And just like the issue with criminal libel, both parties have spent decades studiously avoiding calls for electoral reform.

It is an open secret that Malta’s electoral system does not allow for free and fair representation in parliament at all. In the 2008 elections, Alternattiva's 3,810 first-count votes failed to secure a single seat in parliament. Yet a difference of just 1,580 votes between the PN and PL (i.e. less than half AD’s tally) translated into an additional five seats for the PN.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Malta is the only country in Europe where you have to be physically present on the island to vote in an election. Never mind that we joined the EU in 2004, and are supposed to have enjoyed European freedom of movement for 10 whole years now: the only way our growing overseas expat community can vote in their own country’s general elections is by actually flying over here for the weekend… very often at the taxpayers’ expense.

Once they get here they will be scrutinised by the two parties’ central intelligence agencies to determine whether they’d been away for longer than the stipulated 18 months… again, wilfully ignoring the fact that, in the context of EU membership, there can be no such restrictions on time spent in another EU member state… and (where applicable) try to strike them from the electoral register in order to deprive these citizens of their right to vote.

Yes, you heard right: the same two parties which are the only ones technically able to be represented in parliament under the present rules – and which are therefore directly responsible for the same rules that maintain the status quo – routinely try to strip people of the single most basic fundamental right that constitutes a ‘democracy’ in the first place. And if you try and even so much laugh at them for it, they are legally permitted (by the same laws they control) to also strip you of your right to free speech.

And President Marie-Louise Coleiro thinks the potatoes are a little undercooked, does she? Need a few more minutes on max in the oven, do they? Hm. Naturally, I am the wrong person to ask, but as far as I’m concerned those potatoes haven’t yet been picked out of their fields… still less washed, peeled, chopped, sprinkled with rosemary and thrust into the oven on a bed of onions.

In fact, we haven’t even got round to buying the frigging oven yet…