Bikes with numberplates will rob cycling of all pleasure

Years ago, eccentric people wrote to newspapers calling for certain breeds of dog to be given the vote and for pensioners to only be allowed out at night if they were fitted with lights. Such scribblers have not gone away; they now rule social media and have enormous influence beyond it.

This green-ink agenda expressed itself this week when Stanley Park High School in south London announced that pupils who cycle must now attach number plates to their bicycles. The head, Amit Amin, says the children will be issued with the plates and banned from cycling to school unless they use them. He says this is the only way to stop children “endangering themselves and others” as they cycle to and from school. He wants the public to be able to report irresponsible bikers.

His announcement has been divisive. On social media some parents welcomed the call for extra safety. “Sanity at last!” types are calling for all cyclists to carry visible ID. Others point out that more people are killed by cows than bikes and ask whether farm animals also need number plates.

The measure seems odd to me: most schools wash their hands of children as soon as they leave the premises, and according to a 2016 survey by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, only 10 per cent of cycling casualties involve children. Most cycling mishaps occur at road junctions; those involving children often involve teenage boys “doing tricks, riding too fast or losing control”.

Such laddishness is, of course, no longer much approved of. As far back as 2008, a study by the National Children’s Bureau found half of children had been stopped from climbing trees, while 21 per cent were barred from playing conkers – or had to wear goggles to do it. Seventeen per cent were stopped from games of tag. Some parents had forbidden hide-and-seek. Anyone suggesting “kisschase” would probably be reported to the police.

Now the innocent, private pleasure of a bike ride is to be licensed, too. That image of childhood where a boy and his bike, almost fused into one, take off on a search for freedom and adventure, is about to go the same way as conkers.

Carefully number-plated, helmeted individuals cycling slowly to school look like the future: hardly an inspiring image, given 22,000 of British children left primary school dangerously obese this year.

How has it come to this? European children are safer than any previous generation, but curiously more restricted by adult anxiety than ever before. Some of this is surely about our increasing fear of each other. In the age of social media and identity politics, we are increasingly bound up in single tribes – and one of the most feared is cyclists.

Which mild-mannered driver on a country road has not muttered about tax-free Lycra louts on seeing a black cloud of them descend and deliberately block the middle of the road? This summer I witnessed these cycling fascists stopping traffic, not because there was an accident but because they could. These smug eco warriors now form a furious army who will beat on your roof if you do something they don’t like. Some people, no doubt, feel it’s time they were reined in.

Our society is wobbling over with rage and fear. Pity the children of Stanley Park: the Lycra louts are ruining cycling for them, and probably for the rest of us, too.