Our very smallness has its advantages. It gives us great things like very close family networks that are easily maintained as we don’t live more than 20 minutes away from each other, a social life that is the envy of many, (although you always bump into the same people wherever you go, it is nice to have this kind of recognition and contact), and of course relative safety, particularly for our young people’s even more amazing social life.

Our smallness also means, or should mean that problems can be managed and controlled, that this island could be a little haven in the EU. But it is not happening because it is precisely of our smallness that we live in too close proximity to each other, which means that any sense of meritocracy, and a true and clean democracy is totally alien to us.

In theory we should be an easy 400,000-odd people to govern. We are one race and broadly speaking, follow one religion, which should make it all a piece of cake.

But ever since independence things have been rocky. We are always in fighting mode and people, except for the diehards, are tired. People just want enough money to manage decently, and others indecently. They have switched off, given up caring about the big red versus blue debates, because they are fully aware that the top people look after their own, whatever hue you happen to be.

The Greens never tire of telling us that we have all the problems because we are roughly divided into shades of red and blue. The media’s difference of opinion this week over the Queen’s visit versus the GWU demonstration is certainly testimony to the tribal system that persists.

And yet I think the colour divide is really a smokescreen that prevents us from tackling problems and looking forward instead of back. The real problem is our smallness, the undeniable fact that we are all related to each other, that every family has a skeleton in its cupboard, that every time something should be tackled properly it isn’t because of so and so’s contacts to a particular business, to a political party, or help he or rarely she gave in the past in whatever form this kind of networking might be.

We all know it. We all talk about it. Yet the most interesting and truly important stuff does not make it to our media and newspapers because all the important real news bits would actually threaten the whole edifice of power in Malta. And on this the two main political parties seem to agree and collude.

While we have Xarabank shows where we are meant to say whether we trust Lawrence Gonzi or Alfred Sant most, the reality is that for some reason the system keeps on trying to brainwash us into this kind of nonsense. I just refuse to vote on this basis – what kind of improvement does this offer the people of Malta, to trust or distrust less or more one leader or another?

Not that Xarabank is nonsense. It isn’t. It great for people to let off steam, and there is obviously a lot of steam to let off, but it is worrying that the public is being almost less informed not more, that more and more are switching off this kind of media, sensing perhaps that the news, the real news is not being presented to them. No wonder soap operas and reality shows are much more fun that what we are being fed every day?

A country needs a few basics to be truly democratic. One of them is a very healthy and independent press.

We certainly have a lot of media but how much of it is there sniffing out new stories? Isn’t most of it communicating facts that a private company, a government agency or political party presents as fact? Can anybody be independent in Malta?

Of course people are sometimes slated in the media but certain others get away with so much you do begin to wonder what is really behind it.

The media can make or break you. The way certain people are targeted and others are protected is really a media item in itself. And of course if an editor did start to go on a rampage in Malta, he would lose many friends.

It’s almost as if real media people have to be social pariahs in order to be truly independent, much like some of our better judges are, keeping out of social circles because they know this would compromise their independence. Not all are as scrupulous though.

In the end it is our smallness that means we have to navel gaze and look at our dirty navels without too much chance of seeing clean ones!

If it was your brother or cousin who was accused of anything from drug trafficking to taking bribes you would be on that person’s side. I hear such amazing excuses people make about certain family members, that you realise the whole island is compromised, the whole island is in fact one big compromise, big on religion but low on morality whatever surveys might say.

In the last few years there have been some amazing accusations levelled at the most important figureheads in the land, yet it’s business as usual, these people are everywhere with their heads held high. Standards and morals are not on the up, on the contrary they have become almost irrelevant in Malta today.

We, as in all those who didn’t like the excesses of the 1980s (whether red blue or green today), were all brought up knowing what went wrong when one man in the shape of Dom Mintoff and a few of his ministers became too powerful, and how those times became a reference point of how we do not want Malta to be.

But I do wonder whether a far more insidious form of moral rot is creeping in, when the perpetrators do not seem to realise that they are in fact behaving like some did in the past.

The people are smelling a rat but the people are powerless. In a country where almost everyone votes the voters are powerless. Something is very very wrong.

Our two main political leaders are in all probability moral men, yet neither of them alone can make the improvements we desperately need. If enough of the moral good got together in this country we can go forward. But our smallness, our small mindedness and a huge dose of self-interest are stopping this from happening.

Good news cannot be round the corner in the current climate.