By Charlie Charalambous

Giving and forgiving is a big part of the Easter message, although how many of the faithful attending Church adopt such sentiments – even temporarily – is open to question.
I’m not a great believer in forgiving or forgetting but I’m sure dementia will remedy those sins sooner or later, so I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about it.
Having said that, I think Cypriots – somewhat belatedly – are acquiring a sense of fairness in public life that maybe wasn’t so fine tuned in the days before the economic global meltdown.
Less tolerance for graft and inadequacy among officialdom is now more tangible than the ‘shrug-of-the-shoulders’ attitude of previous generations.
The more people fear for their jobs, try to make ends meet or are finding it difficult to earn a living – the more sensitive they are to public figures dipping their hands in the till or abusing their position.
Despite there being no class system in Cyprus the population is divided by the haves and the haves not and below these two strata is an underclass that has nothing to lose.
Getting access to the establishment is no easy climb -- it requires political affiliation, truck loads of cash, family connections and an ability to behave like a non-intelligent life form similar to plankton.
Don’t prejudge me, there is zilch wrong with plankton it’s just their sex life must be rather blasé.
If in the past things got done with a nod-and-a-wink -- greasing the palms of politicians has become a much riskier endeavour because we are watching them.
This is why, understandably, there was a big fuss over the morality or legal status of MPs who flout the law when it comes to minor offences.
Apparently politicians who like to speed down the highway in their subsidised limousines are immune to traffic fines and that nuisance we call the justice system.
There was some confusion whether MPs asked to be scrubbed off the points list for driving offences or the police messed up because they shouldn’t have booked them in the first place.
Well one MP in question paid it but police still re-fined him for good measure and so the President had to step in to bring some sanity back to the situation.
Where did the police get the fanciful notion that they could inconvenience politicians by stopping them for a traffic offence? Seriously, law enforcers should know better than to treat MPs like the rest of us.
They might be tasked with making the law but there is an unwritten code that puts them firmly above it. Police are only supposed to throw the book at us mere mortals not the suits that oil the wheels of industry and politics.
There was a suggestion that a list of shamed MPs -- who broke the law and didn’t pay their fines -- should be made public. A rather pointless exercise seeing as politicians have no shame or anything that resembles a moral compass – these attributes are taken away to be destroyed when applying for the job.
Are there people out there deluded enough to want to become a politician when they grow up? Still there’s no legislating against folks with an abundance of the stupid gene. Which leads quite nicely into one of the best driver insurance claims: “Coming home I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.” Classic.
As Winston Churchill told Bessie Braddock who called him a drunk.
“And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.”
Happy holidays – all I want for Easter is the scalp of Barcelona.