Rod Liddle was on good form in today’s Times:
British Cycling has a hell of a lot to answer for. Twenty-five or so years ago, the only people you ever saw riding a bicycle were children, paedophiles and freaks. There were few, if any, cycle lanes and nobody really cared very much if the occasional cretin, pedalling like billyo in the gutter, was decapitated by the wing mirror of a passing lorry. When this happened, we agreed, the national gene pool had been marginally improved. Happy days.
But fast forward to 2016. Walk for five minutes in any big UK city and some self-righteous, Lycra-clad hipster with a fatuous water bottle affixed to the frame of his £10,000 Pinarello will knock you through the window of Topshop and then hurl abuse at you for getting in his way. Stand at the traffic lights and watch them slow down to make sure the lights are red before they whizz through! Watch them ride three abreast to annoy car drivers! We even have a Tory mayor of London who is intent on indulging these maniacs with more and more space for them to annoy the hell out of everyone else. A proper Tory, Boris, would have taken the same approach to discourage cycling as Lord Baden-Powell did to discourage masturbation: exercise and cold showers.
And so on.
