An EU-wide survey by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has shown results that are far from unexpected. Tolerance towards people from other races, religions and cultures increases with wealth and education. Poverty and ignorance breed intolerance. You might think that the harder one’s life, then the more sympathy one will have towards those who are worse off. Yet the opposite applies. Where resources are limited, or where they are perceived to be limited, the people of the place metaphorically gang up and guard “their” resources against outsiders. Malta is a case in point, as the survey shows. Those who argue most vociferously for the protection of our resources are quite frank about their motives. Now they are waxing hysterical about those washed up on our shores from North Africa. Two years ago, they were listening as the Labour Party warned them about the hordes who would invade us after we joined the EU (the hordes never invaded – and do you blame them?).

“We don’t want people coming here and taking our jobs,” they say. “We don’t want them to buy houses and flats that should be left for the Maltese.” Some even say: “We don’t want them to marry Maltese”, because nowadays, even potential mates are in rather short supply, as single men and women will tell you. Of course, all this will change, when we finally wake up to the fact that our resources are no longer restricted to what is contained within this tiny territory. Most of us have not yet realised that what was advertised two years ago, in the run-up to the referendum, has now come to pass. We now form part of a territory of 25 states, and 500 million people. We can walk out of here any time we want, and set up home anywhere else within that vast space. Those are our resources, and not just what we can see here, in Malta. After thinking tiny for generations, we now have to realign ourselves to the new reality.

Young people have already seen this, and are making plans to make fast tracks out of here. Those who think that the sole ambition of a young person is to buy and furnish a maisonette, and then to get married and stay in the same job for the next 30 years, really have to bring themselves up to speed with what is happening. The greatest problem this country will face over the next few years is not the toss-up between Alfred Sant and Lawrence Gonzi (and it doesn’t take much to choose between the two of them, if you sit down and think with your head inside of some other piece of your anatomy). It’s going to be the brain-drain. If I were 21, after seeing the leader of the opposition claim triumphal victory because there happened to be some local council elections in Lilliput, and then hearing the agonising soul-searching debates that followed, I would start applying for jobs elsewhere and making arrangements to leave on a permanent basis. How much more of this can a person take? There’s more to life than watching the same old leader of the opposition pop out of his box from time to time to crow about a fictitious victory, while conversation is dominated by a single topic: will he or will he not be prime minister in 2008? By then, he will probably have killed us all off through boredom.

As it is, all I can do is resign myself to the fact that I was born in 1964, instead of 1984, and try to blot out as much of it as possible. If the politicians are not careful, they will wake up one morning and find that they are preaching to a population made up entirely of the incapacitated, the old, the middle-aged, the untrained, and the uneducated. Everyone else will have scarpered, jamming the exit points in their frenzy to leave.

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It is not just ourselves who have not yet realised that we are no longer confined to barracks, so to speak. The political parties have not realised it, either. They continue to behave as though the people they preach to are their captive audience. They speak as though we are trapped in this little island, with no means of escape, forced to listen to them whether we like it or not. They don’t realise that they are frightening people away, boring them, making life tedious – and that the more tedious and intolerable life here becomes, the more likely it is that the bright and the talented (the people we most need to keep here) will leave. This is nothing new. It has happened throughout our history. Malta has always been a rock of few prospects. The scout sent by the Knights of St John, when they were forced to leave Rhodes, was horrified at what he found. “A barren rock,” he described it, “with primitive people living in African huts.” Well, the rock is no longer barren, but apart from that, his description largely stands.

Considering our shortcomings, we have done pretty well for ourselves, but there has always been a pressure valve that allowed people to escape when they had had enough, or when they couldn’t make the life they wanted for themselves in Malta. That valve was only closed tight in 1974. Over the past 30 years, we have been living on top of each other, pushing out the corners, trying to stretch our wings but hitting 50 others when we do so, succumbing to frustration and anger, unhappiness and a sense of lack of fulfilment – the feeling that we could have done so much more if we were not cooped up here. It couldn’t possibly have gone on forever. Thank God we joined the European Union. Now we have a safety valve again. People are now free to leave and, believe me, leave they will.

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In conversations about this subject, I am usually told in tones of confidence that the Maltese who leave “always come back”. No, they don’t. Very, very few return, and only when they can be sure of living a better life here than they were living elsewhere. Nobody swaps a high standard of living for a lower one. I don’t know who bred this myth of the Prodigal’s Return. Some five years ago, I had to work on research for a project that concerned people of Maltese origin who live anywhere but Malta. There are many, many tens of thousands of first and second generation Maltese all over the world. At the third generation, they are unquantifiable, because they no longer consider themselves Maltese. Neither do those of the second generation. They think of their parents as Maltese, but of themselves as Canadian, American, Australian, British, what have you. They haven’t come back, have they? Heaven forbid they should, because we would have nowhere to put them, and detention camps would not be an option. If they haven’t come back, it’s because they think they are better off where they are now, and they are probably right. Also, once you make a life somewhere, you make a life, and that’s it. I can’t see the point of emigrating to a country, and then seeing it only as a temporary stop on the circuitous route back “home”. If you’re going to live somewhere, you might as well think of that place as home, or you’re going to be in trouble.

The Maltese are, on the whole, not at all sentimental. We are a pragmatic bunch; we go where the money is, where the work is. We adapt; largely speaking we can fit in anywhere. In Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s landmark work, Millennium, we are described as the world’s most successful emigrants, because we are able to enter an alien culture and “disappear” into it.

That’s why we manage to do so much with so very little. And when we go away from Malta, we rarely look back. Of course, once we’re safely out of here and raking in the money on the other side of the globe, then we take the time to get a little bit nostalgic. We want news of Malta. We fake village feasts in Sunshine. We stick up pictures of Mintoff in Melbourne. Our Toronto sala features a large photograph of Mosta dome. We listen to Radio Malta over the internet. When a Maltese dignitary visits, we rush to greet him with flags and pastizzi. But then when we come to Malta to visit “the family”, we have to try hard to keep quiet about the inconveniences that we find so difficult to put up with. We grit our teeth at the roads, the dirt, the lack of efficiency, the rudeness of service-providers and shop assistants, the sloppy behaviour in restaurants – and we’re relieved to go back to wherever it is we came from. We suddenly realise that what we always thought of as ‘home’ is home no longer. Sydney is our home. Detroit is our home. Coventry is our home. Malta is just our mythical place of origin.

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Alternattiva Demokratika used to blame the lack of media publicity for their poor showing at the polls. They used to say that, with virtually no exposure in the newspapers, on radio and on television, they could not get their message across. Now they will have to find something or someone else to blame. Throughout the past year, the various exponents of Alternattiva Demokratika have received media coverage that was completely disproportionate to the political group’s popularity, and it might very well have backfired. People reacted as they would to having their friendly newspaper suddenly infiltrated by bible-bashing members of the Unitarian Church, or by a gay activist movement. It was just too much, and every little bit of it was unwanted.

On a daily basis, one could not open a newspaper without finding an Alternattiva viewpoint being rammed home down one’s throat. One was left with the distinct impression of being force-fed the views of Harry Vassallo and Claire Bonello, who between them appear to have colonised every newspaper in Malta, with the exception of those published by Independence Print. Dr Vassallo even has a column in l-orizzont, for heaven’s sake. And yet, and yet… what went wrong? They had all that free advertising, and still they didn’t sell their product.

I think that what is needed here is a good dose of realism. A third political party is always going to be like a third mobile phone service provider trying to force its way into the market between Vodafone and Go. When told that there are intimations of just such a third mobile telephony company, my instant reaction, which I have not tempered, was: “What on earth is the point?” People feel the same way about Alternattiva; they feel there is no point. What they do want, on the other hand, is a new, improved Labour Party and a washed-and-spruced-up Nationalist Party. They want what they have, dusted down and shaken up and made better. They don’t want to have to start again with something new. It’s too exhausting.

More to the point, people don’t see what Alternattiva can do that the big parties, with all their resources, can’t or won’t do. People are not bothered by ideals. The things that bother them most right now are the state of the roads, the high cost of living, the lack of job prospects, and the feeling that the economy is not just slowing down, but grinding to a halt. What can Alternattiva do about these things? Nothing. There’s another problem, too. Alternattiva has been around for roughly 15 years, but there are only two names and faces that the average person knows and can identify: Harry and Arnold. This does not bode well at all. The members of Alternattiva can persist in error, banging their heads against the wall in the hope that a crack might eventually appear, or they can keep their eyes on the ball, join the large parties, and help change them from within.