Italy’s crackdown on cyclists is a step too far

What are the politics of your bicycle? An interesting question. I’d like to say that mine is an expression of a basically conservative temperament, with its ability to endow individual liberty, its lack of imposition on established cities and countryside, and its preservation of fine and noble sporting traditions. 

On the other hand, the bicycle has a long progressive heritage. The suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst was a keen member of a socialist cycling club, known for its group renditions of ‘England, arise! The long, long night is over’. And as the gauche but committed cyclist Jeremy Corbyn demonstrated, ‘socialism can only arrive by bicycle’, in the famous words of Chilean politician Jose Viera-Gallo. Some might argue that Boris Johnson was another example of this. Though when real socialism arrives, it invariably does so at the barrel of a gun.

My bicycle’s Italian cousins are facing oppression.