I confess it. I am a bike owner. But no, I am not the sort of bike owner who squeezes himself into Lycra shorts. I do not use a periscope on my head, or a camera, like Jeremy Vine, or radar gadgets. In actuality, I dress very commonly – even though I use lights at night time and carry a reflective backpack so that I glow in the dark.

I sign my turns and halt at pink lights. I pay out a lot of tax and substantially of it is invested on roadways. I am insured. I am licensed to push each cars and motorbikes and know what it seems to be like from the other aspect.

I have been bicycling in big cities for just about 50 decades. If a lot more individuals had been like me, the nation would be better in quite a few approaches. The air would be considerably cleaner, our towns would be pleasantly quieter and we would be much less dependent on awful despots for noxious gasoline.

Perhaps most crucial of all, we would all be substantially more healthy and need to have fewer costly medication and operations. It becomes clearer every day that average training fends off coronary heart disorder and sustains health in typical. It is also just one of the greatest defences against the depression that is now so prevalent. Most people today locate exercise for its have sake tedious, so the very best way to do it is to make it aspect of your each day everyday living.

Any one who really thinks in preserving the planet or preserving the NHS ought to be an active supporter of biking. But governments which declare to be so are in simple fact the allies of the auto. The whole of our transportation plan is still primarily based on a 1950s perception that the car or truck is supreme.

Sure, I know about congestion rates and speed limits and speed bumps and site visitors jams. But these matters are the consequence of vehicle mania.

The Federal government has for 60 decades crafted cities round the wants of autos and lorries. But it doesn’t do the job, for the reason that all these motorways and bypasses have amplified the number of automobiles and will always do so. We will by no means capture up with the desire our procedures have designed. Inside of a calendar year or so of any new motorway opening, it is total. You have noticed it a dozen periods. Now, I know that autos are from time to time vital. I know that most individuals really do not want to get soaked on the way to perform, that some elements of the country are so hilly that a bike is no use to them. I know that tradesmen and modest organizations need vans.

But I also know that the streets are too complete since so quite a few people today are working with automobiles – a ton of steel, rubber and glass – for small, straightforward journeys they could effortlessly do by bike. Several thousands of schoolchildren, similarly, are chauffeured to faculty as if they have been tycoons or emperors, when they could wander or ride.

Most adults do not journey bikes because they are fairly frightened to do so. Mother and father also never want to let their youngsters cycle. I concur with them. Targeted visitors is as well thick and way too rapidly. Seat belts, much better brakes, airbags and side-effect protection make people in vehicles sense far too risk-free, so they generate a lot more recklessly. Biking can be quite unsafe, and each time I set out, I prepare for war. It is time for peace on the roads.

Nonetheless there is no indicator of it. A survey for BBC’s Panorama past week confirmed that 1 driver in 3 thinks cyclists shouldn’t even be authorized on public highways and need to be confined to cycle paths.

The very same variety – who are probably the similar people today – also reported they felt also substantially income experienced been used strengthening infrastructure for cyclists. This is plainly a mad attitude. If you really don’t commit dollars on cycle paths, then there will not be any cycle paths for us frustrating cyclists to trip on. Or the paths that exist will be the worthless type that pressure us on to crowded pavements with pedestrians, or which consist of a line of paint which quickly stops just when you need it most. There is also the simple fact that so lots of motorists believe the words and phrases ‘cycle track’ in simple fact signify ‘free vehicle park’. More proof our educational institutions aren’t up to considerably.

AND of class there is the dire impact of broadcaster and farmer Jeremy Clarkson, who has declared that every single bicycle owner ‘is a visitor on roadways that are compensated for by motorists’. Each individual cyclist has heard drivers regurgitating this bilge, snarling at us: ‘You never shell out highway tax.’ But we do. The excise responsibility charged to vehicle-owners, and the fuel tax at the pumps (held down for decades by Chancellors frightened of a drivers’ rebellion), is not invested on roadways in any case. We all shell out for streets, through VAT, money tax, council tax and all the other methods in which the Governing administration reaches its hand into our pockets.

Anyway lots of cyclists also very own and push cars. Potentially the solution could possibly be a summit amongst me and Mr Clarkson, at which he withdraws his foolish words and phrases. Then this place may well turn into as healthful and happy as the Netherlands, which was when as motor vehicle-mad as us, but decided not to be so silly any far more.

Secret of defeating spies

Liz Truss’s phone is now imprisoned in a harmless for the reason that the authorities think it was tapped. Of study course it was tapped. Phones just are tapped, however these who bug them will hardly ever have time to pay attention to most of what they record.

I figured out to rest about this throughout my a long time in Moscow, when the KGB crazily suspected me of doing the job for MI6. My flat was bugged. My personal computer was bugged. My automobile was bugged. My mobile phone would stop doing work each and every few hrs when the tapes ran out, and I would go to the telephone trade and bang on the door. Stunning Russian ladies would poke their heads out of the window and guarantee me it would be operating once again by the time I obtained residence. It was.

My cellular has never ever been the very same because the North Koreans ‘looked following it’ for the duration of my go to. The resolution is basic. If you have anything key to say, go for a wander and depart your mobile phone driving.

Tact will resolve migrant crisis, not Chinooks

I am baffled by Property Secretary Suella Braverman’s Chinook helicopter check out to Kent. There are flawlessly excellent railways there, or even roadways, both of those of which I used on my latest check out to the undefended shorelines around Rye, just around the East Sussex border.

Chinooks are large, noisy machines, certainly not best for this kind of a journey in any case. It reminds me a little bit of Lord Heseltine storming about the nation in a camouflage jacket in the 1980s when Liz Truss was serving to her mom marketing campaign against the West’s nuclear defences. Heseltine’s militaristic garb only drew interest to his remarkably temporary spell as a National Services soldier in 1959.

We have had noisily militant House Secretaries before, these types of as Theresa May well. She sent vans spherical London warning falsely that the authorities had been closing in on illegal migrants. The reality continues to be that British governments handle to get rid of only a very small variety of illegal migrants. The Rwanda program has definitely flopped. It is also apparent that we simply cannot lawfully quit migrants as soon as they have established off from French shorelines.

I’ll say it again. The only serious Coverage will involve obtaining France to halt the migrants embarking in the initially place.

All the tact, income and diplomacy we have should really be employed to reach this. You won’t want a helicopter.