A dithering and undecisive PN

Last Tuesday Nationalist Party MPs failed to show up to a parliamentary Consideration of Bills committee to discuss extending the arrest period allowed without a formal charge. As a result, the chairman, Michael Farrugia, had to suspend the session.

The Committee was to discuss a government plan to allow police to detain certain criminal suspects for a maximum of 102 hours instead of the current maximum of 48 hours.

Justice Minister Jonathan Attard alleged that the PN is split on how to respond to the government proposal saying that ‘the Opposition informed us that there was internal disagreement within the party on the issue’, fuelling speculation about the party being split on the issue. He described the Opposition as being ‘inconsistent and mediocre’.

PN whip Robert Cutajar claimed later that the government had ‘verbally agreed to postpone the committee meeting’ while the Committee chair, Michael Farrugia, said none of the PN committee members had ever requested to postpone the meeting.

Changing the maximum allowable period of arrests without a formal charge in court requires a change in the constitution, and therefore the proposed amendments must be backed by the Opposition if they are to become law.

But PN MPs Joe Giglio, Mario de Marco and Carm Mifsud Bonnici have already spoken against the proposal describing it as ‘excessive’.

The constitutional provision is meant to limit the power of the police so that they cannot arbitrarily arrest people and leave them rotting in a prison cell. Obviously, it is a very important safeguard afforded to Maltese citizens to protect them from police abuse. The proposed amendment therefore means an increase in police powers, even though such increases would have to be approved by a magistrate, according to the circumstances of the case.

In days gone by, the police used to release arrested citizens when the 48 hours elapse and subsequently they would arrest them again for another 48 hours. Sometimes the time between the release and the subsequent arrest would only be a few minutes! This practice was declared unconstitutional by the courts.

There are good arguments in favour of the government’s proposal but there are also good arguments against it. The PN is, perhaps, caught in a quandry.

But dithering is no option.

Just when according to the polls, the government has drastically lost support, the PN manages to depict itself as just a rudderless group of people who cannot agree about anything. No wonder that the PN still cannot gain ground.

This is the result of weak leadership. Good political leaders always avoid their party being seen as dithering on some issue or other. People cannot respect and support a party that dithers in this way. They want strong leadership.

During the Fenech Adami years, the PN used to claim that it was a broad church that understands the hopes of different citizens with different backgrounds and interests. Admittedly, all of them were galvanised into action together because the end of the Mintoff era was a common objective. Internal disagreements were tackled ably by the leader and decisions on the party’s stand were taken collectively by the parliamentray group or the party executive, in the short time that circumstances allowed.

Not all decisions were necessarily the right ones, but the party never came across as dithering and undecisive.

This is what is happening today.

While the current administration is continually losing approval, the voters who are abandoning Labour do not know whom to turn to, even when the so-called duopoly has been the basic political situation in Malta for so long.

The PN should be spurred to understand this basic need for strong leadership. Bernard Grech says that his background is one where compromise is paramount. But for a political leader, being strong and determined cannot be disdained.

For the PN, the road back to winning more support implies more internal discipline on what and how MPs say when they express their thoughts, quick immediate responses to government proposals, and the promise of a better experience of life with the party in power.

Instead it keeps dithering about many issues that crop up.

Italian food tradition

Giorgia Meloni’s government has backed a bill that would ban laboratory-produced meat and other synthetic foods, highlighting Italian food heritage and health protection. If the proposals go through, breaking the ban would attract fines of up to €60,000.

Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a Meloni colleague, who runs the rebranded ministry for agriculture and food sovereignty, spoke of the importance of Italy's food tradition. The farmers' lobby praised the move.

Agriculture lobbies have collected half a million signatures in recent months calling for protection of ‘natural food vs synthetic food’, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is among those who have signed.

The proposed bill came hard on the heels of a series of government decrees banning the use of flour derived from insects such as crickets and locusts in pizza or pasta. Ministers have cited Italy's prized Mediterranean diet as their motivation for both measures.

Mr Lollobrigida: ‘Laboratory products do not guarantee quality, well-being and the protection of the Italian food and wine culture and tradition, to which part of our tradition is linked.’

The proposals, that have been approved by ministers seek to ban synthetic foods produced from animal cells without killing the animal, and would apply to lab-produced fish and synthetic milk too.

Last November, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared cell-cultured chicken for human consumption after "careful evaluation". In 2020 Singapore gave regulatory approval for lab-grown chicken meat to be used in nuggets.

So far no approval has been authorised within the European Union, but within the European Commission it has been suggested that cell-based agriculture such as cultured meat "could be considered as a promising and innovative solution... for healthy and environmentally friendly food systems".

Paolo Zanetti, the head of dairy industry group ‘Assolatte’, praised the government's decision. He told financial newspaper ‘Il Sole 24 Ore’ that milk producers were facing a paradox. On the one hand his colleagues were being asked to invest in making their product more environmentally friendly; while on the other ‘investors with no scruples’ were promoting a product that was anything but natural ‘under the pretext of protecting the environment’.