An economic cyclist’s upbeat view of British manufacturing

Everyone seems to be talking about bicycles. This week’s eye-catching initiative from the Department for Transport is a scheme to turn Brighton, Aylesbury, Derby and Darlington into cyclists’ utopias, at a cost of £1 million per town. Meanwhile, more and more people have taken to cycling in London since the July bombings — an observation that had its status as a new cliché confirmed by an airing in one of Bird and Fortune’s Islington dinner-party sketches on Channel 4. And the BBC Panorama reporter Stephanie Flanders made cycles (geddit?) the motif of her assessment this week of Gordon Brown’s chancellorship. To illustrate the fate of British industry on Gordon’s watch, Flanders visited Raleigh, the Nottingham company that once made two million bicycles a year but now makes none at all, importing them instead from low-wage factories in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

So the humble two-wheeler has a lot to say about economics, environmental priorities and perceptions of personal safety and freedom.