This is not about VIP seats

Some friends and I this morning approached the Parliament building to ask to be allowed to follow from the Stranger’s Gallery the debate about the Daphne Caruana Galizia inquiry report.

We did not seriously expect to be allowed in. Yesterday we wrote to the Speaker to ask him for passes and he got the Clerk of the House to write back to us to tell us we won’t be allowed inside because of covid restrictions. We protested in writing after that and even filed a judicial protest in the evening but no one was going to hear our complaints.

This morning we found metal barricades and a platoon of police officers ready to stand in our way. I walked into the City some minutes before 9 am, alone, crossing the bridge over to City Gate. At the sight of me, police officers went on their radios, turned on their bodycams, rushed to attention on their various observation posts throughout the square.

It must be my criminal record of serial violence, the deadly weapons I was carrying, and the murderous intent written all over my face, that made them so concerned about my arrival. For the record, because alas we live in a country where metaphors are as rare as geysers, I have no criminal record, I was not carrying weapons, and the only thing written on my face was ‘I’m too old, too fat, and too hungry for this shit’. But there it is.

Eventually, when we did ask to be allowed in, the police officers on duty, with varying degrees of politeness depending on what prejudices coursed in their veins, blocked our way and told us we would not be allowed in “because the Stranger’s Gallery is closed”.

The covid excuse is rubbish. And we know that for a number of reasons.

First, the outright ban on anyone visiting the Stranger’s Gallery had been handed down when the country was in lockdown. You couldn’t go to church or to a cinema or to a restaurant, so it made sense that you couldn’t go to Parliament either. Churches, cinemas, and restaurants have since re-opened. Granted, there are restrictions and we would respect seating, masking, and distancing restrictions in the Stranger’s Gallery had there been any. A ban is disproportionate.

Second, the Speaker himself has only recently invited people to sit at the Stranger’s Gallery. When former MPs died and the Chamber paid tributes to them, family members were invited to follow the debate in the Gallery. Covid does not make exceptions according to what is being discussed in Parliament. Why should the Speaker?

Third, Repubblika activists have been banned from the Stranger’s Gallery since before covid was a twinkle in the eye of some exotic animal in provincial China. In November and December 2019 we made two attempts to follow debates from the Gallery that were discussing matters of interest to us. Both times we were blocked for no reason whatsoever.

Anġlu Farrugia and government MPs do not want us to follow the debates in Parliament because they don’t want to see us look at them.

The Stranger’s Gallery is not some decorative component, a nice to have, like a ballroom in a fancy hotel. All Parliaments in the world have one and the reason is symbolic but no less significant for that. Deputies are meant to be doing the people’s work so people have a right to see what is going on. Being allowed to watch it on TV is not the point. On TV they don’t see us watch them.

I sat in the Stranger’s Gallery of the House of Commons, both chambers of the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Cornwall Country Council, the Reichstag, the Senate of the United States.

When democracies fail, the viewing galleries of their Parliaments are shut down or burnt down.

When the Germans decided to re-use the Reichstag in Berlin 60 years after it had been gutted in a fire started by Adolf Hitler’s brown shirts, they decided to replace the roof with a transparent dome with an internal passerelle on which non-Parliamentarians could walk. Citizens in Germany stand on the heads of their Parliamentarians. The post-fascist symbolism is striking.

In Malta, our Parliament has been turned into a fortress that blocks out the people for whom it is supposed to work. For wanting to see what is going on inside, we are treated with suspicion. We become a presumed threat that must be prevented from even stepping inside. Like those silly cops rushing about Valletta because little old me had just stepped into it, Parliament goes in lockdown to prevent the people from sitting down and look unhappy at their complicit, corruption-ridden, murderer-harbouring MPs.

That’s when this stops being unimportant. Today Parliament debated an inquiry report that found the State responsible for the killing of a journalist. The State convicted many of those people sitting in Parliament of failing us all, undermining our democracy, taking our country away from us, and gifting it to criminals and corrupt bastards instead.

On their shoulders now is the responsibility to start the healing and that healing means giving our country back to us. And the first thing they do? They lock us out of Parliament so we can’t even see how they plan to do that.

We have no choice then but to drag ourselves down Republic Street and argue our case in court hoping there is one institution left in the country that will hear us when even our Parliament is so comically scared of us it won’t even let us take a peek inside. Instead of starting the healing, they throw at us another reason to argue.

I may be too old, too fat, and too hungry for this shit. But I am not yet too jaded to hope our country can really heal. So here we are fighting a little bit more.