mjr

Didn't stop the signs as late as the 1980s.

And now Farage has suspended a party councillor for letting the mask slip too far:

Tom Pickup, who was elected to Lancashire county council in May [...] posted: “Everyone in Reform is a lot more hardline on immigration than is typically stated publicly, to get a majority government we have to be tactical.”

[...] Pickup, who was the council’s lead member for resources and finance, admitted he was a member of the group but said his messages had been “twisted out of context”. He said he was not aware of the more extreme posts, which included one person allegedly calling for a “mass Islam genocide” and encouraging others to stockpile weapons to attack “lefties” and “migrants”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/19/reform-uk-councillor-suspended-over-whatsapp-group-featuring-extremist-posts>

And it would be even higher if they didn't require people's parent/grandparent to have registered an Irish 'foreign birth' before they died. Being Irish was stigmatised in the UK until a few decades ago so people often didn't.

Countries like the Netherlands, Austria, France, and Italy reject automated transmission

The article tells us a lot of who's against what but not many that are pushing for more, except Czechia. I bet Hungary is one again, isn't it?

And bicycles are ridden both by poor workers who can't afford cars and the elite who don't need to rush about in cars, so it's a form of transport that all classes can be told to hate! 🙄

Does it work for the politicians? Hidalgo re-elected, Kahn re-elected, to name two. I don't remember all the bike-bashers who lost because history soon forgets most losers.

A cap would be OK. Ideally two caps, with a higher one for utility e-bikes. But cutting it entirely with no replacement would be deeply stupid.

Shouldn't they cap the far more costly electric car subsidy first? That reportedly costs over £600m a year, five times the cost of the Cycle To Work incentive. I guess Starmer's spindoctors think a bit of bike-bashing will be popular with those wavering on switching to Russia/Reform, despite bike-bashing politicians losing more often than they win.

safe or just safer?

Could be good polling with poor explanation!

Is any national dictator's army yet doing the "two steps forward, one step back" march to appear less scary?

The ones that deliberately run people over are gonna do it anyway. Fortunately, they're rare, even in some parts of the USA. The only cure for those is policing. I believe the USA has some problems with that too, as well as road design, but that's a more general problem.

By far the bigger problems are those that either don't see you, or see you and think they can "squeeze by" ignoring that their car is incompressible and doesn't get narrower like a bunch of bikes can, so put you in the ditch. Both of those problems are reduced by taking the lane.

On one level, I totally get you: it's far less stress not to be mixing with what the video calls "hippos" and be on a good bikeway. But if we have to swim with the dumb hippos, l'm gonna do it the way the evidence says is most likely, on average, to avoid injury, which is to take the lane when it's narrow. It's possible that you live in some extremely hostile place that the evidence points the other way, but I doubt it.