Jake Wallis Simons

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rental electric bicycles are becoming a bit of a scourge in London. Unlike the old Boris bikes (can we still call them that?), they do not need to be docked, meaning that they are frequently abandoned on the pavement, to the annoyance of pedestrians. Neither do they need to be left in designated parking zones, like e-scooters. More infuriatingly, their motors often cut out when you pass from one borough into the next, so they are often dumped on the border. Yes, seriously.  The current Wild West arrangement is damaging the experience for the consumer and hollowing out the market The reason for this chaos is that while Transport for London (TfL) rules govern e-scooter hire, the e-bike market is so far unregulated.

In more innocent times, I’d have responded to the news that police wished to fit tracking devices to electric bicycles with a grunt of approval. Finally, I’d have thought. Plod has come up with a practical, apparently technologically literate yet relatively inexpensive method to fight low-level crime. Makes a change from the rainbow helmets. Why stop at e-bikes? Track all the cars, too. These days, however, I cannot help but view such measures with cynicism. But let me first explain. Sarah Kennedy, the chief constable of Merseyside police, has said that policing risked being ‘behind the curve’ because muggers are using e-bikes to carry out their assaults. Scousers were stealing them, she said, in order to rob people and speed away.

One is an oppressive regime that guns down its own people, promotes a radical Islamist theology and hangs gay people from cranes. The other is a liberal democracy that protects the rights of minorities, upholds the freedoms of speech and assembly, and grants equality to women and gay people. Yet when weightlifters from the two countries shook hands after a tournament, it was the oppressive regime that reacted with fury. Courage is readily found among Iranian sportspeople, as it is found among the Iranian people themselves I speak, of course, of Iran and Israel.

I can’t believe we need to say this, but here goes: Motorists should not pull over to allow cyclists to overtake. I know it’s obvious, but the cycling elites have been agitating for this ridiculous rule-change, led by Jeremy Vine. In an interview yesterday, he upped the ante in his general campaign to turn the country’s drivers into a second-class citizens. ‘I’m starting to think I want cars to pull over if they see me behind them because they know I’m faster,’ he told the Sunday Times. Thus the shark was jumped. I’m a cyclist myself and I’d wager I’m quite a lot faster than Vine. I’m younger, for a start, and in addition to commuting daily on my Brompton, on weekends I am a fully paid-up member of the Lycra brigade.

Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. If he was, he’d surely have let it slip by now; as Mel Gibson proved (‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!’), it can be hard to hold such things in. And Cooper certainly wouldn’t be portraying a Jewish composer sensitively and affectionately on screen if he was. No, his decision to use a rubber nose when playing the role of Leonard Bernstein – to nose up, if you will – was likely not animated by the anti-Semitism of Hitler or Gibson. But it was animated by something and it is useful to consider what it was. Why was it necessary to nose up? Did Cooper fear that we’d miss Bernstein’s ethnicity without it? Yesterday, Bernstein’s children rushed to the actor’s defence.

The outrage over the cancelling of Nigel Farage’s bank account has uncovered the lengths to which elements of the British establishment will go to mould society in their ideological image. Those who speak out publicly in support of unfashionable causes – whether Brexit, gender self-identification, Israel or abortion – now face being cancelled not just on social media but on an institutional level as well.  It is eerily evocative of China’s notorious 'social credit system', a state-sponsored credit rating and blacklist that awards greater freedoms to those citizens and businesses who behave themselves and fall in line with their rulers. There but for the grace of God?