I still remember a heated discussion I had with an old friend just before the last election. She was getting ready to vote one of the small parties because she was disgusted by the corruption of Muscat’s government and still shuddered at the thought of Lawrence Gonzi’s ministers getting back into power.

I gave her the usual spiel about how a vote for a Green candidate has the effective consequence of denying a vote to the only party with a realistic chance of beating Labour out of power, the PN.

Whether I or she likes it or not, the numerical and inescapable fundamentals of the way our first count votes are counted towards giving a single party an automatic Parliamentary majority and of the way our political culture yields 98% of valid votes returned to two parties only, still mean that it is absolutely true that there is no viable way of reducing the majority Labour enjoys (not to mention the nearly unimaginable prospect of unseating them from government) except giving a number 1 vote to a PN candidate.

There was something else from that conversation five years ago that stayed with me all this time. That telling people to vote PN because voting for anyone else amounts to voting Labour is a condescending, bullying argument. It sounds like something Squealer from Animal Farm would say to warn the farm animals not to complain about anything they perceive going wrong under the pigs’ administration because the only alternative would be the old human farmer. And no one wants him.

The PN will make its own arguments, positive ones, why anyone disgusted with corruption over the last years should vote for it. They will argue that their record shows nothing like what Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela have to show for themselves. And they will argue that blaming them for not legislating enough to prevent what Labour has done over the last few years is unfair, given that Labour did not hesitate to break laws that do exist in any case, never mind laws the need for which hadn’t yet been imagined.

Even small parties have positive arguments to make for themselves. The PN certainly has a better record than the PL, but it is not unblemished. The record of the smaller parties is spotless and starched, partly because they have never been in power and partly because the people in those parties have chosen to belong to small parties declining any opportunity for power when as individuals, they could have had careers in mainstream political parties and have their chance to be corrupt.

Indeed, the thing that best speaks for smaller parties and individual candidates like the positively heroic Arnold Cassola is the fact that their activists have always and consistently chosen principle over opportunity.

No mainstream party can make that claim for all their candidates.

But independent and small-party candidates cannot win. If polling for the PN is dishearteningly behind Labour, polling for small parties does not make for a statistical blip. The double whammy of an electoral system that suits the incumbents and the preference of almost every single voter not to stray from red or blue, has kept them there.

It is a supreme irony that voters have the means and power to change that. No matter the disadvantages inherent in the system, voters can choose where to put their pencils on ballot day and nothing stops them from voting for small parties. And yet they don’t do it.

Now, I should qualify my feelings about that. The rabid neo-Nazis of Norman Lowell and David Muscat are also a small party and in European elections where stakes are lower, they have managed to persuade people to vote for them. Small is no guarantee of moral purity. In the neo-Nazi’s case their moral depravity is thankfully unappealing to most voters. Sadly sensible, honest, and sound people in small parties who gave up career and ambition in exchange of principle, the environment, social justice, and causes that should belong to all and but for them are consistently promoted by none also prove unappealing to most voters.

For the last five years I’ve remembered being told I was a bully for attempting to browbeat someone into choosing to vote for a party they did not like (the PN) rather than a small party they liked much better (say, the AD), to achieve the higher objective of getting a party they wanted unseated (the PL) to lose enough votes to cut it down to size.

The fact is, even now, I have nothing more appealing to suggest. If you think Labour should not be in government come Easter, you know just what you need to do.