People can only afford to be rude and indifferent to their customers when they have a product that everyone wants or needs and nobody else has. That’s why the organisations and businesses that behave badly towards their clients are monopolies and quasi-monopolies, usually in the utilities and telecoms sectors. Think gas, water, electricity, telephony, and so on. If they want to survive when competition enters the equation, then they have to brush up their act. Otherwise, their clients will delight in giving them a two-fingered salute and taking their business elsewhere.

The same applies to countries which depend for their survival on revenue from tourism. If they have unique attractions that everyone wants and nobody else has, then the people who work for them – i.e. all the people of that country or city – can afford to be rude to their customers, the tourists who visit, because they will keep on coming back. The bad behaviour might even become part of the experience, like the legendary rudeness of practically everyone you have to deal with in New York City. But New York City has something that no one else has, and that almost everyone wants to experience at least once before they die: Manhattan. There are skyscrapers in Hong Kong and in Frankfurt and even in Chicago, but it’s not quite the same thing. You haven’t seen those skyscrapers in a thousand films, and King Kong did not scale an office tower in downtown Seoul. Being in Manhattan feels like being in the living, throbbing heart of the developed world, and the last thing you’re bothered about is the taxi driver who swore or didn’t know the way and left you stranded, or the cashier who ran $800 through your credit card rather than $80 and then made out that it was somehow your fault, or even the man from the chauffeur service who stole half your shopping and the waitress who followed you into the lavatory in an expensive restaurant and demanded a higher tip than the one you left her.

Malta does not have unique attractions. It is competing for tourism business in an overcrowded market, and with no competitive edge. It is, to use a metaphor from humdrum reality, one of many boutiques along a high street, all of which sell the same kind of clothes. Why would you choose one over the other? Exactly. The trouble is that we have been brainwashed into thinking of Malta as being somehow special, and this because of our national-identity-building, in popular Maltese songs, conversation, and even lessons at school. But Malta is not special at all. It is actually much less attractive than several other destinations around the Mediterranean littoral. Indeed, the reaction of many Maltese people, when they finally begin to travel more extensively around the Mediterranean which is their home, rather than forever going to London and to Rome, is: why would anyone want to come to Malta? That’s when they realise that, far from Malta being special, it really has little or nothing to its particular advantage, and much to its disadvantage. They realise just how hard we have to compete for every last tourist we get.

Unfortunately, the number of Maltese who travel extensively round the Mediterranean is not that large. Also, the number of Maltese with business nous is small and appears to be shrinking by the month. As a Lebanese acquaintance once told me: “I can’t believe you people claim to be descended from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were famous for one thing only: their business acumen.” Incidentally, no, we are not descended from the Phoenicians. As another friend joked, we are probably descended from the people who got dumped on shore because they were too damn useless on board.

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Because we have nothing over our competition, we have to work extra hard to attract every last bit of business we can get – and when we do get any business, we should make it clear that we are very grateful for it. This is done by being polite, civilised and charming. It’s amazing how much customers are prepared to overlook if they are charmed by those who deal with them. The starting-point has to be an acknowledgement by us all that, when it comes to tourism, every last one of us works for Malta. Even if we are not directly employed in the tourism industry, we do work for Malta. The islands are too small; we are all in the tourism hub. We are all on show, all on display, and whatever we do or don’t do counts. If this message is not made to sink into the heads of those who don’t read newspaper columns, and who have no idea of the gravity of the situation, then Malta is going to carry on sinking. We can replace the revenue from manufacturing with new revenue from high value added services, but there is nothing that can replace the revenue from tourism.

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At the risk of sounding like one of the fascists I abhor, I would suggest imposing severe fines for any act of rudeness or aggression towards tourists, and for cheating them. I don’t imagine that anyone will actually get fined, but the main purpose of this measure would be to drive the message home to those Maltese who are sabotaging the entire country and who are acting to the detriment of us all. Sometimes, the only way to teach people behavioural codes is through the law, as with wife-beating and child neglect. And so it is with the ill-treatment of the tourists on whom we depend. These people have to be made to understand that, when they behave badly towards a visitor, they are not only undermining the efforts of their fellow Maltese, but causing damage to the economy as a whole. Tourism is what makes this country tick over. When tourism figures are lower than usual, we all feel it immediately. Even the thousands of English language students who come here in the summer have to be treated with the utmost courtesy. They all have family and friends back home, and because of the large sums that have to be paid to take courses here, they most often come from well-to-do families. We forget that each one of them goes home to give the news on a Malta their families and friends might have never been to. Too often, this news is dreadful, because we see these young people as gullible potential victims for fleecing and cheating, and precisely because they are so young, they make excellent targets for swearing and abuse. These kids come from countries where the payment system on public transport is very strict. Trustingly and naively, they expect it to be the same here. They get on buses and have 50c and Lm1 coins, even Lm2 notes, lifted off them without any change given. They are too afraid to ask for their change, as well they might be.

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Last Tuesday, I witnessed at close hand the most shocking display of “tourist abuse”. I had gone to remove my car from one of those parking-areas, in a major shopping centre, over which a so-called parking attendant reigns and demands a tip for doing nothing. There is no sign warning those who park there that parking is only permitted against payment of a tip – for the simple reason that tips are by their very nature optional. If they were not, then they would be payments, and payments require an official VAT receipt and a stipulated rate per hour. Nor is there anything to indicate that the two men sitting under a sun umbrella near the exit from the parking area are “attendants” rather than the kind of beggars you get in all southern Mediterranean countries. As I gave them my forced “tip”, which they accepted ungraciously, without a word of thanks and without looking me in the eye (a curious phenomenon, this general avoidance of eye contact), a hired car pulled up to leave, in which sat a family of British Asians.

One of the two parking attendants went up to the driver’s window as the car slowed at the exit, and held out his open hand, palm upwards, without a word. The man at the wheel must have said that he had no change and couldn’t (I suspect, wouldn’t) tip him. Immediately, the open palm became a fist, waved at the driver. “Ehe, you hev no money, a***hole? Wot you tink I em here for, sitting in the hot, for nuttink?” Yes, I felt like saying, you are sitting there for no purpose that I can see, except to extort money from people for allowing them to park on a public stretch of road. But I was too transfixed by the flurry of abusive language that followed. The parking attendant may not have known the difference between hot and heat, but he certainly knew the language of the gutter. “F**k off, a***hole! Stick it up your a**e! Go and f**k yourself! Ehe, you hev no money! I give you no money! A***hole! F**k off!” He was shaking his fist at the driver and gesticulating like an orang-utan during the mating season. The man at the wheel, instead of driving off, said loudly (which is how I knew he was British Asian): “Stop it, or I’ll call the police.” What a mistake. There was another volley of abuse, which revealed exactly how this parking attendant thinks, and unfortunately, so many others like him. It was a demonstration of the Mintoff syndrome that I described a couple of weeks ago. “Ehe, you call de poliss! De poliss Moltiss like me! De poliss Moltiss, a****hole! F**k off!” The message was clear: we Maltese stick together against foreigners, even if the foreigners are in the right.

Meanwhile, the driver’s family sat cowering with fear at the back of the car. He drove off and I nearly fainted with anger and dismay. All the while this horrible row had been going on, I had tried to tell the other “attendant” to restrain his colleague. He made a half-hearted effort to do so, but seemed more amused than anything else by his friend’s bravado. Another victim of Mintoff’s legacy, I’m afraid. When the row was over and the driver had sped off in fear and disgust, the one who had been doing all the shouting and swearing turned and saw me staring. Misinterpreting as admiration the reason why I was doing so, he swaggered up to me with the air of a Maltese hero who had just seen off a foreigner and showed him what’s what. “Imissek tisthi, (You should be ashamed of yourself)” I said. “For the sake of a lost 20 cents, you’ve just caused untold damage to your country.” He gaped, like a squalid and ignorant frog.

And that’s the problem: in a Malta where foreigners of whatever provenance have always taken the role of the enemy, it’s going to be a hard task to convince people to behave towards them as anything other than foes in disguise. Mintoff taught us to “see them off” and see them off we certainly are doing. There is all this resentment and suspicion simmering just below the surface. Had the driver without 20 cents been Maltese and not foreign, then none of this would have happened. As I have seen countless times before, the parking attendant would have waved him on and said, “Ma’ jimpurtax, siehb (not to worry, mate) ” And I won’t even begin to go into the thought that the abuse was worse because the parking attendant failed to distinguish between a British Asian and “an Arab”. Let’s stop all this, before it’s too late.