Just imagine the tension at Air Malta as employees are told that more than 500 of them will have to go. Some of them are just setting up home; others have children to raise and loans to pay. Many are in late middle-age and know that their severance pay will mark the end of their working life because they are unlikely to find another job. All of them are now going about their business with a knot in their stomach, wondering where they might be by the year’s end.

The knowledge that if 500 of them don’t lose their job, then the airline will collapse and all of them will be out of work, with many more besides as the knock-on effect runs through the economy taking down other jobs and businesses, will be of scant consolation to them. If you stand to lose your job, the fear obscures all other thoughts, and renders impossible meditation on the fact that the inevitable has now happened, that it should have happened years ago but nobody was able or willing to bite that particular bullet.

Now that Air Malta is technically bankrupt, or would have been without that coup the government pulled off in securing exceptional EU approval for state aid in the form of a loan, hands have been forced and the rescue team has been brought in. And hundreds of people will be made redundant. You can argue that many of them have long been redundant, that several were redundant from the word go, and you will have highlighted part of the problem that has crippled the national airline from the start. But still you have to sympathise with those people who were allowed to think that, like those on the public sector payroll, they had a job for life and total security.

To a certain extent, they are victims of a corrupting mindset, a freeloading mindset, which has been largely responsible for hampering the commercial development of the airline since it began. The Air Malta employees with ‘real’ jobs, jobs that were needed, jobs which they fill and filled on merit, have been imperilled by the dead wood and dead weight of those for whom jobs were created because of political cronyism, who were put on the Air Malta payroll as a sort of partisan social service.

For years, Air Malta was treated like a piggy bank to be raided by politicians perfectly positioned to do the raiding. Jobs with Air Malta were found for constituents and party canvassers of both sides of the political divide, but most appallingly by the Labour governments of the 1970s and 1980s, which is why so many of the oldest Air Malta administrative and manual staff are diehard Labour supporters. Perhaps it is fitting – a form of karma, perhaps – if they are now among those to be made redundant or offered (in)voluntary retirement, because they almost certainly did not get their jobs on merit. When the Holiday Inn opened in Sliema in the 1980s, Wistin Abela, the Labour government minister responsible for Air Malta, turned up with a small army of thugs wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with the legends ‘Wistin’ and ‘Air Malta’. They stood among the assembled Holiday Inn dignitaries looking completely incongruous, except that to the other Maltese who were there, including me, that sort of thing was normal.

It really is the most terrible shame that those who have their jobs on merit, who are hardworking and responsible for keeping the airline flying despite the terrible difficulties, have had their employment future prejudiced because of that gravy-train culture of jobs as a social service or political favour.

Variations of that kind of freeloading have been institutionalised at the national airline. The free-flights programme (backed by the Maltese bumming mentality where getting something for free obscures all other issues linked to the freebie) had reached the ridiculous level where being given a directorship at Air Malta – for that is how it was thought of, rather than being appointed to the board with all the attendant commercial and legal responsibilities – was viewed as a reward for political favourites. This is because directors at Air Malta and their entire families are entitled to free flights for life, even when they cease to be involved with the airline or sit on its board. It’s hard to credit, but there you are. Under the incoming chairman, no-nonsense Louis Farrugia, this will be the first thing to go. Imagine the resentful muttering.

But the freeloading has been much worse than that, and truly reveals the way in which government after government has seen Air Malta as something to be plundered and bummed off, even as rescue measures and rescue packages were spoken about. Anyone who is or has ever been a member of parliament, even if only for just a few months in 1973, has free flights with Air Malta and so do members of his or her immediate family. You will agree that this is a wholly abusive situation and was possible only because politicians thought they owned Air Malta and behaved accordingly. The result is what we are seeing today.

I wish those Air Malta employees who got their jobs on merit and not through cronyism the very best of luck. I don’t ever remember a time when I have received anything other than excellent service on the national airline, except for one farcical ‘work to rule’ incident when in-flight staff, in the midst of worldwide turmoil in which airlines were collapsing in bankruptcy and thousands losing their jobs, refused to hand out the newspapers or meals that were sitting there for passengers. Meanwhile, politicians can discover the novelty of paying for their own flights like the rest of us, and about time too. It is bad enough that their malfunctioning and arbitrary consciences permitted them to take free tickets from a crippled airline, further putting hundreds of jobs in peril.

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