The chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority has resigned, and a cheer has gone up among hoteliers. This seems rather unfair as there was only so much the man could do, operating as he was within a political straitjacket. But bad situations always need scapegoats, and it is easier to pick on the tourism authority chairman, who will resign, than on the tourism minister, who will not.

That the government is to blame for much of the mess that has led to a falling-off of tourist arrivals is a given. That the rest of us are also to blame goes unacknowledged, though it is a fact. The government may be the boss of the country, but it is not, to use a memorable phrase from a Mafia film, the boss of me, or the boss of you, or the boss of them over there. It is the responsibility of no government to ensure that we are polite to strangers, that we smile and say “please” and “thank you”, that we clean up after ourselves and, if need be, after others, that we are civil, and that we have good taste. If any government were to take on this responsibility, it would deserve the name of a nanny state. The government, through its agencies, can tell us where or where not to build, and it can even, to a certain extent, tell us how to build. But it cannot prevent us from building offensive eyesores, or from decorating our shops and restaurants with hideous furniture. That is up to us.

You cannot blame the government for everything. You can blame the government for the disgusting roads and the fact that there is no plan and no money to rebuild them. You can blame the government for refusing to be creative in its approach to accepting low cost airlines and the weekend-breakers they will bring. You can blame the government for not cleaning up the streets. You can blame the local councils for not putting out enough big bins and emptying them before they spill over. You can blame previous governments for not having the foresight to see that the Salina coast road should have been a prime villa area with a beautiful beach, rather than a no-go zone with a giant rubbish dump and toxic seepage into the water. You can blame the government for succumbing to pressure from developers and for not controlling the way building is carried out in areas where people are living and holidaying. You can blame the government for lots of significant things. But you can’t blame the government for the problems that we have caused ourselves with our greed, our bad taste, our cavalier attitude towards good manners, our predisposition towards ugliness, and above all, our social culture, which is predominantly working-class and the legacy of that man who is so much to blame for Malta’s ills, Dom Mintoff. Mintoffianism is gone from politics, but it is here to stay in society. Mintoff’s enduring legacy is that he turned Malta into a working-class country.

Don’t shoot me down for saying that. Some things just have to be said, because to ignore them is dangerous. I am not saying it as snobbery or judgmental condemnation – far from it. I could easily avoid the subject altogether, sit on my sofa, and join the chattering classes in blaming “service” – as though bad service comes out of a social vacuum. I prefer to make a serious observation, because if I have noticed this, then you can be 100 per cent certain that the tourists who shudder and go off to run us down have noticed it too.

* * *

People do not travel in search of the very things they avoid at home. To strangers from a strange land, the whole of Malta seems to be populated only by characters from the Mediterranean port equivalent of Eastenders, dressing and behaving as you would expect. If you don’t like what I’ve just said, then run along and bury your head in the sand. Or accuse the world and me of fatuous snobbery. But all your shouting and complaining will not drown out the fact that people travel among their own social class, just as they do everything else among their own social class. The kind of person who stays at the Pellicano in Porto Ercole is not going to consider Bognor Regis as an alternative break. The government cannot work miracles in turning Malta into a sophisticated, “smell the money” destination when the people themselves look as though they would be very much at home in Mo Slater’s kitchen.

We don’t notice it for most of the time, because we are either like that ourselves or we blank it out and take it for granted. When you’re used to a situation, you take it for granted. You stop seeing it. I remember being brought up short some years ago, when I took an English friend, who was on a diving holiday in Malta – a holiday that had been ruined by bad weather and worse people – to a restaurant one evening. He knew me well enough to ask, at one point: “Is this a working-class restaurant? Why have you brought me here? To pay me back for something?”

I burst out laughing, and asked him what he meant. It was quite an expensive restaurant, and one of the places of the moment. Then I looked around, and I understood. Horrible snobbery, I thought at the time, and upbraided him. But when he returned the compliment when I was in London, the smart restaurant was really smart, and that included the people there. In Malta, there are no places to compare.

Those coming from more sophisticated environments define hotels, bars, restaurants, beach clubs, shops, and even streets, by the type of people in them. You can spend a fortune doing up your venue, hike up the prices, and call it “smart” – but if at every other table there is a version of Kat Slater or Dawn Swan, men decorated with gold jewellery and “Arani, ma” children skidding everywhere, it’s not smart at all. And you know what? The kind of visitors we always say we want, the ones who we imagine will pay a huge air fare to fly over here to see the Beheading of St John and the temples, will notice. And they will be put off.

* * *

You can call it snobbery all you like, but you are not going to change the facts. The kind of people we insist we want are not the kind who will pay good money to immerse themselves in working-class culture for a week. People like to travel among their own kind, just as they like to live, work, socialise and send their children to school with their own kind. It’s not only the people at the so-called top who like to do this. Everyone does. That’s why there’s inverted snobbery. That’s why we have so many working-class tourists and little else.

Urban working-class culture has invaded every sphere of life in Malta. You will notice, I hope, that I said urban working-class culture and not urban working-class people. There’s a difference. Even those people who are not, strictly speaking, working-class, are behaving like that now. It’s become desperately uncool to have manners, or to talk in a low voice. You’re regarded as a freak, or a nerd. Boasting about working-class roots is a de rigueur matter of pride. Why? I can understand bragging about it if you have come far in the world, and you want everyone to know how much you have achieved despite your humble beginnings. But to boast about it when you’re still like that? To wear it like a badge of honour? Come on! What happened to people’s desire to better themselves more than just financially?

The permeation of the whole of Malta by working-class culture has been the prime cause of many of our problems, and I blame it all on Dom Mintoff who, instead of helping people to improve themselves in ways that have nothing to do with money, told them they were all right as they were, that everyone should be like them, and that he was going to make damn well sure of it. He did. In the past, the first things that people sought to acquire, after money, were the manners and feathers of their social betters. Then Mintoff came along and told them that they were actually the “betters” and had no need to mimic anyone. He systematically made fun of all that he resented. Instead of being something to aspire to, the behavioural codes of the tal-pepe classes became something to be mocked and ridiculed. And here we are today. The result is all round us. Yet the codes of behaviour of the social classes that Mintoff so despised were developed over generations for a reason: to make life more pleasant and tolerable. It is their absence that makes life here so unpleasant and intolerable, despite what we like to think in our ‘let’s look on the bright side’ moments.

* * *

Now, it’s too late. The situation has deteriorated so badly that even those who should know better are embarrassed to talk or behave in a certain way in case they are thought tal-pepe or undemocratic. I agree that it is extremely insensitive to walk into a village bar talking loudly in tal-pepe English, and I won’t do it. But there are limits, and to me, that limit is reached when people no longer know that there is a response to “thank you”, and that this response is not a blank silence and a refusal to look you in the eye. Even the most rural peasant in Italy knows the response to “grazie”: prego. That’s how far we have sunk.

We lack any vestige of charm or manners: charm is ksuhat; manners are pozi. Behaviour is so routinely abysmal that I am sometimes left breathless. Recently, when I was working on a photo-shoot at St John’s Co Cathedral, I asked an attendant (politely) to open the door that would allow us to the higher level, and explained that we had permission for this. He adopted an aggressive and challenging stance, and began to yell at me to prove that I had permission. I told him from whom. “Imbilli qaltlek dik!” he screeched. He was awful, really awful. I turned calmly – when I am really angry, I become like cold steel – to his colleague and asked her to please call the office. She was very civilized, and asked for my name, so that she could explain the problem. When her Neanderthal workmate heard me give my name, there was a 180-degree turnaround in his attitude, and he became effusive and lackey-like. I gave him the thinnest of thin smiles and ignored him in favour of his pleasant colleague. What shocked me most was that this was St John’s Co-Cathedral, the single greatest attraction in the islands, for tourists. Many had overheard him yell at me, and even if they had not, his stance and body language were unmistakable. This is a person with absolutely no manners and no idea how to behave, and he is one of the people “guarding” the main door to the cathedral. Even if he is there as a favour to somebody, he should be put where he has no interaction with human beings.

The chief complaint among visitors – and even Maltese, we can’t forget ourselves – is that one of the most unpleasant aspects of going out in Malta is that almost everyone is rude and indifferent to you, even if you are paying. You can sense the hostility and resentment. A girl who last year spent the summer working as a waitress explained it to me. Her colleagues, she said, felt resentful serving people who were sitting there eating and drinking, and paying lots of money for a meal, while they had to do their bidding for Lm1.50 an hour. So they would pretend not to see those signalling for a waiter. Or they would plonk the plates on the table with hostility, or splash wine “accidentally”. In other words, I told her, they behave like wives with a grudge against their husband because he has worked too late another day and they are bored and angry. Another Mintoffian legacy, I suspect: the giant resentment on which the worst kind of socialist tries to capitalise.

* * *

You can’t teach thousands of people across three generations how to behave. You can’t blame the government for this – well, not this government, at least – and you can’t even blame “staff training”. If a waiter in a restaurant doesn’t say ‘thank you’ when somebody leaves a tip for him, it’s not because he has received no staff training. It’s because he was badly brought up. If I became a waitress tomorrow, I wouldn’t need any staff training to know how to behave. I got all that training when I was a child, and learned the rest by observation. It doesn’t take intelligence or “staff training” to know when to say “please” and “thank you”, or the difference between politeness and unacceptable rudeness. So my conclusion is that all these people know they are being rude and indifferent. They just don’t care, because they have been led to believe that their behaviour is wholly acceptable. U mur ara!

How can you learn good behaviour if everyone around you – at home, at school, in the streets, out socially, even in parliament, for heaven’s sake – is behaving like the cast from Eastenders? You can’t. And it’s only going to get worse. Since Dom Mintoff’s social revolution, two generations have been born who don’t know the first thing about acceptable behaviour, and who refuse to acknowledge that there are such things as social codes. Because they have been told that they don’t have to “pretend” and that they are “just as good as anyone else”, they take their unacceptable behaviour and dress sense everywhere they feel like it, without the slightest sense of embarrassment or of feeling out of place. If I went to a village bar in a cocktail dress, I would feel out of place and awkward. But the wife of a village bar denizen, going to a “smart” restaurant in a tacky outfit, does so with absolute confidence. What is this remarkable phenomenon?

That people feel confident about going to places where their grandparents, or even their parents, would never have set foot is simply wonderful. Nobody wants to live in a country where there is class apartheid. What is not wonderful is the failure to understand that behaviour which passes muster at the local water-polo club bar does not pass muster in a five-star hotel restaurant. There is absolutely no understanding that if you go to a certain kind of place, you cannot dress and behave as though you are having a pizza with the kids at the local pizzeria. So what happens? Immediately, the atmosphere at the “smart restaurant” turns to that of a pizzeria. The atmosphere in places depends heavily on the people in them and how they are dressed and behaving. The décor and the menu play only a small part.

* * *

The pressure to behave badly, rather than well, is enormous. I sometimes find myself doing and saying things that, in retrospect, seem to me unthinkable. At the time, they just go with the flow. I reach over to take something from a shopkeeper and don’t bother to say thank-you, because I know that there will be no response. Then I think “Watch it, Daphne – thin end of the wedge. Don’t say thank-you today and you’ll find yourself waving your spoon in the air tomorrow.”

The pressure to conform is only positive when the dominant group is well behaved. When it is badly behaved, it is tough to keep yourself from slipping into the morass. One person at table picks up his knife and waves it around while speaking, and before you know it, you are feeling like an anally retentive prude for keeping your knife firmly on your plate when not using it to cut food. The old saying, if you want to know where a person comes from, watch him eat, no longer holds true because everyone is slipping up now. When I was a child, I remember people saying they had heard how Lorry Sant had engaged somebody to teach him table manners. That was a good thing. What’s bad is what is happening now: people with foul table manners not noticing that there is anything wrong with them.

I try not to look about me in restaurants because I get too upset. It happened a few days ago: a man wearing shorts slouched in his chair with his legs wide apart, his wife with her arms wrapped around her plate as though somebody was going to snatch it away, badly behaved children who had been led to understand that sitting down and eating with a knife and fork is something you do when you are over 18, and calling the waiter with the words “Aw, hi.” And no, we weren’t at the local water-polo club, not at all. I’d like to do what everyone else seems to do, and pretend that these things don’t matter. But they do. They matter enormously. It’s the sight and sound of this kind of person that scares off the visitors we dream of. They wouldn’t seek out their presence at home, so they are not going to seek it out abroad. You can’t ban people from restaurants if they’re paying, and you can’t teach them not to behave like something from Eastenders, so there’s no solution in sight.

* * *

The reason we get mainly working-class tourists – I refuse to use the ridiculous euphemism “bucket and sand brigade” – is because Malta is a working-class destination. Everything about this island screams out “working-class”. That’s why nobody else will come here. And please, don’t shoot the messenger. I haven’t created this situation, nor am I imagining it. I am just describing it. I am quite certain that the myriad consultants appointed by the government and the tourism authority have either not noticed the real cause of our problems, or have been too politically correct to spell out that non-working-class people do not take holidays in working-class environments. Even saying the word “working-class” is taboo, because somewhere down the line, somebody decided it is a term of abuse rather than a statement of fact like that other term we are allowed to use, middle-class.

Urban working-class culture is common to all of Europe. As such, it is instantly recognisable to anyone coming from Italy, Germany, Britain, France, or Sweden. Only the language is different. It is not exotic. It does not have the allure of the strange or the interesting. It is what sophisticated travellers avoid at home. They would no more want to sit among 10 working-class families in a restaurant in Malta than they would in their own city. Like I said, there’s no solution.

* * *

It’s not just the dirt, the slummy, third-world roads, the ugly buildings and the poor beaches that are the problem here. The main problem is the people, who feel they have a “right” to behave like the inhabitants of Albert Square. Yes, of course they have a right to do so, and nobody can stop them. But a socially intelligent person would recognise the fact that this is not the way forward, and that self-improvement is not just about money. The best thing the Malta Tourism Authority can do with its campaign money is to turn itself into a sort of giant Henry Higgins, with the entire population of Malta as Eliza Doolittle. Then something might come of it. Dom Mintoff has a lot to answer for.