Travel broadens the mind, they say, and few need to have their minds broadened more than people who live on a couple of tiny islands hanging somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia – except perhaps for those who live in small redneck communities in America’s deep south.

The government should be encouraging Maltese people to travel more and more, as part of its educational policy. Education is not just what you get by sitting down in a classroom or lecture hall. Instead, the government has taken the other route of taxing Maltese travellers, with a departure tax of Lm20 each to be paid each time we leave the country by air. Had we any other means of leaving – by driving along a motorway to the next border, or by catching a train – this might make some kind of perverted sense. But we’re trapped on these islands. We have no choice but to take a flight out, unless we wish to take the complicated, convoluted and extremely time-consuming route of hopping onto a catamaran to Sicily or a ferry to Italy, and then driving right up the peninsula and on to wherever we want to go. It looks like we’re being punished for travelling, or for being capricious enough to take the luxury of a holiday. Fortunately, we now have the Pope to back us up: vacationing is almost a necessity, he told the press last week.

And as always, this tax will hit hardest at those who are already struggling. Most Maltese families do not travel together at all. Trips en famille, which are the norm for our better-off European neighbours, rarely happen here or if they do, it’s once or twice, and that’s it. I know many, many families who never travel together because of the cost, and they come from different kinds of backgrounds. If they do travel with the kids, it’s to budget destinations which serve the purpose of a break from reality but not much else. Not many Maltese people can justify parting with a couple of thousand pounds for a week's decent holiday without an accompanying tour group, for four or five people.

That Lm20 departure tax is added to a myriad of other taxes to be paid when we fly out of the country with a sigh of relief, leaving the political bickering and the petty-mindedness behind for a week or two (oh that horrible moment when I set foot on the return flight and the steward smilingly hands me the Maltese newspapers!). Buy an air ticket, and you'll find that you’re paying a straight Lm40 in taxes and charges, so that for a Lm40 flight to Catania you have to write out a cheque for Lm80. Travel as a family of five, and you're paying Lm200 in taxes and charges on flights alone. This is not to be sniffed at, when you consider that for many such families, Lm200 is the food budget for a month, though it requires miracle-making talents on a par with the biblical tale of the loaves and the fishes.

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As with so many other things, people confuse issues. We don’t get access to any cheap flights, they say. It’s not fair. Look at all those offers they get in Britain, Italy, Germany and France – no wonder they travel so often. And it’s doubly unfair because they can actually drive out of their countries, even if the British do need to cross the channel. The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of cheap flights on offer in Malta. But these cheap flights cannot be sold without tacking on the taxes and charges, whereupon they cease to be cheap. Even a Lm30 return air fare (a very good price) will cease to look quite as tantalising when taxes raise it to Lm70.

It’s not the airlines that are to blame for our costly airfares; it’s the government-imposed taxes. Even if the airlines go mad and start giving away their seats for Lm5, you’ll still have to pay Lm45 to get on the plane.

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What is truly unforgivable about this is that those of us who have a Maltese passport have to pay the airport departure tax, but all others do not. Our own country is penalising us for being its citizens. There is another incidence of this at the university, where if you are a Maltese citizen you need an additional entry requirement that all others can get away without: Maltese MATSEC. That, too, is an injustice that should be done away with – either the Maltese MATSEC should be an entry requirement for all, regardless of nationality, or it should be an entry requirement for nobody. And before the sniping begins, may I point out that, unlike some others who shall go unmentioned, I’m not attempting to change the rules to suit my offspring. I don’t need to, given that they all have that qualification tucked under their belt already. But the injustice of the situation does not escape me, nor does the fact that it is obliging too many youngsters to jump through hoops and forcing the university to reject extremely bright people who can’t speak Maltese – perhaps because of being raised elsewhere or by a non-Maltese mother – simply because they have a Maltese passport, while accepting mediocre individuals whose Maltese MATSEC puts them ahead, in the university’s eyes, of their far more intelligent contemporaries. Our university should be snatching up bright people who can speak fluent English, and not mediocre people who can speak fluent Maltese. That much should be obvious, but bongo-bashing ethnic pride gets in the way, unfortunately.

We really like to punish our own, don’t we? The disparity between entry requirements for Maltese and non-Maltese at the university gets the support of the national pride brigade who see it as giving the language its proper place – when if they really had national pride they would see that it is wrong to place more burdens on Maltese people, in their own country, than are placed on non-Maltese. Sitting and passing the Maltese MATSEC cannot be described as anything other than a burden, and for many it is a great burden, even for fluent mother-tongue speakers. You only have to look at the pass rate to see that, and this for a language that they will not use for writing or reading once they go through those university gates. One day we will be grown-up enough to look at this matter through a pragmatic lens, and understand that what a university needs most are bright people who can communicate well in the language of tuition. At the moment, most lecturers will tell you that the essays they are obliged to read are so poorly written that they often find themselves marking the grammar and spelling, and correcting literal translations from Maltese into English.

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The Eurobarometer survey has told us that support for EU membership has dropped to 40 per cent in Malta. Excuse me, but so what? Malta is part of the European Union now, and whether we’re for or against is completely irrelevant. We might as well be for or against independence from Britain or for or against becoming a republic. Surveying support for EU membership at this stage is neither here nor there. The sulkers can sulk for ever; the grumblers can carry on doing so. Meanwhile, EU membership is a fact of life that’s not going to change, so why waste time talking about it? Of course people are disgruntled. There are manifold economic difficulties that are causing a great deal of consternation, and it’s obvious that those were going to be blamed on the EU by a great swathe of the population. But who’s to say that it wouldn’t have been equally bad or even worse right now if we had not voted in favour of membership? There would have been tremendous uncertainty and a whole raft of problems with no solutions in sight. If you think that’s a description of the current scenario, dedicate a moment to contemplating the alternative: prime minister Sant and Colditz in the Mediterranean.

The young and the educated are those least in doubt as to whether membership has been a good thing so far. They’re spreading their wings and flapping them free and wide. Had the vote gone the other way, all they would have had to look forward is a life behind bars, so to speak.

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It’s the single issues within membership that are important now, and not whether we want to be members or not. It’s a little late in the day to be talking about that. For example, are we for or against the introduction of the euro to replace our lira? According to the same survey, it’s looking good: 50 per cent are for the euro, 40 per cent are against, and 10 per cent don’t have an opinion about it (yet). This tells us that we never formed a relationship of love and loyalty with our ‘lira’, which over the past 30-odd years did not achieve any symbolic significance. Compare the haste with which we are prepared to trade it for the euro, with the staunch reluctance of the British to swap their beloved pound. I have to say that I won’t miss this ‘lira’ one bit. I’m not one of those people who call it a ‘lira’ when speaking English, anyway; I think that’s so affected. It’s mainly tourists who do it. I’ve noticed that most Maltese still say pound when speaking English – and so it should be. They both mean the same thing: a weight term to describe a certain quantity of silver, so translating lira to pound is perfectly correct. When the Maltese currency was the pound, it was already called a lira in Maltese.

So we want the euro but we don’t want EU membership. It’s not as odd as it sounds. We like being in the swing of things and feeling international and engaged with the mainstream. We just don’t like the responsibilities and obligations that brings with it.

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The transition to democratic thinking is long and arduous, and constrained by cultural history. We’re still struggling with our own shortcomings in Malta, where we put up with all sorts and accept it fatalistically as our lot, though we’re slowly getting there. Look at Russia, though, which has been subjected to autocratic rule all the way back through recorded time. Now there they have some real struggles with the concept of democracy, which is completely new to them. At least in Malta we were exposed to the fundamentals of democracy through contact with Britain (proximity to Italy hardly helped – it gave us support for fascism). Some of the goings-on in Russia are truly mind-boggling – you wonder how Vladimir Putin gets away with much of what he does, including changes to election rules that will cripple much of the opposition. But there’s an explanation, and you’ll find it in a survey – where else. One in two Russians thinks that Russia can get along fine without any opposition parties. No, they don’t even begin to understand what democracy is all about, do they? Well, it’s early days yet. And I really shouldn’t point fingers like that. After all, 20 years ago the Maltese government thought Malta could get along without an opposition, too, and it found the support of almost half the electorate when it said so repeatedly. Great strides forward have been made, indeed.