THE WOMAN in the car in front, about to turn right at the traffic lights is chatting on her mobile phone; the man behind, about to overtake, is also on the phone, his other hand, holding a cigarette, is airing, out of the window. Illegal, yes, but par for the course in a country where respect for the law has traditionally been a bit of a joke.
Given the number of drivers who very publicly flout the regulations on using a mobile while driving, you would be forgiven for thinking that the police have given up on the job of driving home the ‘hands on the wheel’ safety message. Not so – according to CyBC on Tuesday more than 37,000 drivers have been charged with using a phone while driving. Police stationed at a crossroads in Nicosia caught and fined each of ten people the regulation £50 in just one hour.
The crackdown is part of a national campaign which will last for the whole of this month, and it will be easy money as far as the police are concerned – they won’t have to look far to catch the next offender. Therein lies the problem, a combination of the old ‘it won’t happen to me’ attitude to the law and the new ‘everybody does it, so what the hell’ approach.
Will a campaign do the trick? It should have some effect since paying £50 for a phone call is a sharp kick in the wallet, but given the extent of the problem it’s unlikely to be a lasting lesson. Significantly, the UK, which only recently introduced a specific law against drivers using mobile phones at the wheel, imposed automatic penalty points for each offender, on top of a £30 fine that could become £1,000 if the case went to court.
It’s the penalty points that are the real deterrent. For some drivers who habitually break the rules, the prospect of losing your driving licence through the ‘totting up’ procedure can be a very real deterrent. At three points a time, you would only have to be nabbed on the phone twice in a day to be halfway to the twelve points that trigger a ban. That’s worth thinking about, but as long as you can pay £50 and drive on, new habits will die hard.
What sort of message are we putting across?
THE ECONOMIC arguments on the lunacy of the plan to bail out investors who borrowed to buy shares during the Stock Exchange boom were covered in the Opinion column of the Sunday Mail. The moral arguments are equally compelling.
Why should those who borrowed from banks to invest – and lost their money – be any more deserving of recompense than those who used their own or their parents’ savings, and lost. Why should men and women who borrowed from banks but whose businesses failed, through their own poor judgement or that of others who misled them – as was the case with many ‘bubble’ investors – not receive compensation?
In short, why should share debtors merit a lifeline allowing them to repay just 25 per cent of their original investment loan from a bank when other debtors are denied such a privilege? Apart from vote-catching, could it be that some deputies caught in the debt trap will benefit from such stupendously unjust legislation? Putting aside that cynical suggestion, would it not be fairer for the state to pay all our debts so that each one of us can start with a clean slate?
