My colleague David Lindsay, a journalist on this newspaper, wrote a piece for the Sunday edition, in which he described how, while riding on bus number 13 after the Alleanza Nazzjonali Republikana’s rally in Valletta, he witnessed scenes straight out of Mississippi in the 1950s. Ten of those who had rallied behind ANR, mostly men in their 20s still high on the euphoria of what was said, proceeded to harass eight black people on the same bus. They chanted “Nigger! Nigger!”; they impersonated chimpanzees; they uttered profanities; and they made what Mr Lindsay described as: “a number of attempts at wit, in mixed English and Maltese, related to skin colour”.

When we hear these things described on documentaries about the separation of blacks from whites in America’s Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s, and about the political struggles of Martin Luther King, we feel disgusted and appalled – or at least, if we are decent, we do. How much more disgusted and appalled, then, we should be to know that our own people are behaving like this a full half-century later, that they are crawling back into their caves instead of coming out to see the light?

I have lost count of the number of times I heard the first line of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech – one of the most famous speeches in history – abused and misquoted by those who have no idea what he goes on to say after: “I have a dream…”. Perhaps one of our newspapers should download it from the internet and publish it, and do the same with its diametric opposite, the ‘rivers of blood’ speech delivered by Enoch Powell – so that our fellow Maltese may read it in the full understanding that Enoch Powell was referring to them, among other dark-skinned ‘colonials’, and stop admiring him for thinking of them as inferior.

Back on that number 13 bus, Mr Lindsay wrote, the majority of Maltese passengers were “visibly appalled and uncomfortable” with what was happening – though oddly, not one of them appears to have done the right thing of ticking them off. One should get involved in a situation like this, or face the fact of being no better than those who walk past a collapsed person on the pavement, pretending not to have noticed anything untoward.

Those who fail to intervene are guilty by collusion. This more so given by how Mr Lindsay described “bursts of laughter” from other Maltese who were on the bus, and who are doubtlessly so pig-ignorant that they think monkey noises and chants of ‘nigger’ are highly amusing and witty, on a par with something written by Ben Elton.

What is this, except the most atrocious form of bullying? It is revolting playground behaviour by adults: the bullies mock the weak scapegoats, the other kids shift uncomfortably from foot to foot, and those with a low IQ and no sense of dignity (their own or anybody else’s) try to suck up to the bullies by laughing. I can’t stand any kind of bullying of the vulnerable, and if I were on that bus, I would have exploded.

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“Niggers go home,” these Neanderthals said to the black people as they got off the bus. I am sorry, but what makes them think that people like me would rather live among people like them, than among civilised Africans? If I were forced to share my neighbourhood with people like those Maltese on the bus, I would move house rather than have them as neighbours.

To tell me that I have anything at all in common with the atavistic apes (and that means the people producing monkey-noises) on the number 13 bus, just because we all have a Maltese passport and grew up in Malta, is to insult me gravely. It embarrasses me to know that I might be judged by the poverty of their thoughts and behaviour, by others who are not Maltese.

I and the barbaric peasants on that bus are fundamentally different and do not share the same culture in any way. We might as well come from different countries. It is very foolish to assume that all people from the same country share a single culture. This is not the case at all; there are many different cultures within a single country, and very often people from one culture will have more in common with those from another country, but from the same culture, than they do with those from the same country but a completely different culture.

The culture depicted in Eastenders would be familiar to many in Malta and entirely alien to other Londoners. Similarly, the culture of the rednecks on the number 13 bus would have been entirely familiar to the rednecks of Georgia in the 1960s. They could have married each other and lived happily ever after, the only

problem being that the Georgian rednecks would have considered the rednecks of Malta as ‘coloured’ and so beyond the pale.

Quite frankly, it is not the impossibility of shipping out the black people that we should be worrying about, but the impossibility of shipping out such Maltese people. I am in no doubt at all who it is I would rather Malta got rid of. The trouble is that nobody else will want a bunch of such Maltese people, and despite their EU passport and a choice of 24 other countries in which to live and work, nothing and nobody will persuade them to leave this one. This is understandable.

Here, in this miniscule pond, they can play at being big and important fish (the kind that open their big mouths to release bubbles of hot air). They can throw their weight around, bully others, and feel less insignificant than they really are. They can shout about defending their country and keeping Malta for the Maltese. They can pretend that they have anything at all in common with professors Kenneth Wain and Joseph Friggieri, who wrote to The Sunday Times in condemnation of their antics, just because they too are Maltese.

Anywhere else in Europe, they’re going to have their tails between their legs, and experience the flipside of being on the outside and trying to make it, with the people they meet treating them as inferior because of their bad manners, semi-literacy, and lack of eloquence – in other words, because they really are inferior when judged by the qualities – not skin colour or nationality – that truly make people so, though of course never from a legal, moral or human rights perspective. No wonder they stay here.