Doing the (dis)honourable thing

On Monday, Parliament's select committee for the codification of laws heard a remarkable proposal for a Constitutional amendment that would specify exactly when, how and under what specific circumstances an individual Cabinet minister would be expected to 'assume responsibility' for whatever takes place on his or her watch.

Ostensibly, the intention behind this proposal - suggested by the Dean of the University of Malta's faculty of Law - appears genuine enough. Clearly, parliament is responding to a very evident lacuna in our political make-up, whereby government ministers seem to always somehow succeed in wriggling out of their obligations in this regard.

However, a serious miscalculation appears to have been made. For the lacuna itself is not strictly speaking legal in nature. On the contrary, it is a cultural void that needs to be filled... and history is full of very good reasons why national legislation is arguably the worst tool at any government's disposal, when it comes to inculcating things like 'culture'.

Ironically, it was committee chairman Franco Debono who rightly pointed out that ministerial responsibility, in Malta, was 'only a matter of convention' and that there were no provisos written into the Constitution.

He was entirely correct, but then went on to erroneously interpret this as an oversight on the part of Maltese law. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being a sin of omission, the lack of any such legislation is deliberate, common to all serious democracies, and serves a very clear, direct and important purpose without which the entire notion of 'individual responsibility' would be meaningless.

Traditionally, the act of tendering one's resignation (as a public office-holder) has always been referred as doing "the honourable thing". This because the decision is invariably understood to have been taken as a private initiative: implying, in other words, that a personal choice will have been made by the public official concerned.

One example from the UK (sadly there are very few local examples to choose from) should illustrate the point. In 2004, former Home Secretary David Blunkett resigned from the Cabinet after an investigation into allegations that he had abused his position by 'fast-tracking' a Visa application for a former family nanny.

Significantly, no evidence ever emerged directly linking the minister to the case. All the same, however, Blunkett resigned from Tony Blair's Cabinet, citing that 'questions about his honesty and integrity' were damaging government.

Blunkett's decision was therefore not forced upon him by any law of the land. It was a purely personal decision, taken (presumably) for the good of the government that he represented at the time.

Had the situation been any different, and British law contained provisos of the kind being discussed locally, there would have been no personal decision involved at all. On the contrary, Blunkett's 'resignation' - which incidentally would have to be redefined as a 'dismissal' - would not have smacked of any personal integrity or honour.

For what 'honour' can there possibly be, in reluctantly doing something only because one is forced to do so by law... and therefore never really having an option in the first place?

In practice, then, the proposal currently before the House will not only fail to inculcate a culture of political responsibility among government ministers; but it will actually remove all notions of individual responsibility from the picture entirely.

This in turn raises another, rather sinister aspect to the same proposal... which to be fair was probably very far from Prof. Kevin Aquilina's mind when he drew up the individual law as submitted to parliament on Monday.

The specific trouble with the legislation on offer (without going into too much detail) is that it actually creates more loopholes and caveats whereby a resignation can be avoided, than specific circumstances under which it would be warranted or expected.

As such, in practice it is likely to make ministerial resignations much, much rarer than they already are... while furnishing under-performing ministers with a plethora of legalistic reasons to retain their posts in spite of their shortcomings.

One example alone should suffice to illustrate this point: the proposed legislation specifies that a minister can 'accept responsibility without resigning'. We are left to guess what form of penalty, if any, the minister in question would have paid for the so-called 'responsibility' that he or she will have theoretically 'accepted' under such circumstances.

One can also justifiably question whether the same line of reasoning will percolate down the entire chain of command of the public service... until we reach a point where civil servants all cheerfully acknowledge their own responsibility for any given faux pas, without actually facing any consequences.

This is clearly not an initiative that will encourage (still less engender) a culture of political responsibility in our country. On the contrary: it is little more than a recipe for political dilettantism, and as such will result in the very opposite of the system of 'meritocracy' MPs like Franco Debono have constantly demanded for the past four years.