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.
Number plates? Indicators? What is this, political Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?
My bicycle’s Italian cousins are facing oppression. In a speech to parliament this week, Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the populist Lega Nord and transport minister, outlined a crackdown on the scourge of the bike. Under his new proposals, those who dare take to the streets on two wheels could be forced to pay for insurance and fit number plates and indicators, in a supposed attempt to boost road safety.
As a cyclist myself, the insurance I can understand. Maybe. It can be a dangerous pastime after all, with 154 of us killed in Italy each year. But number plates? Indicators? What is this, political Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang? Motorists of all persuasions might be forgiven a smirk of schadenfreude at the authoritarian proposals, but let me tell you this: next they will be coming to license your dog.
The brute intrusion of state regulation into the innocent world of personal cycling feels like a hard-leftist putsch, not seen in any other European country, even France. In Salvini’s reactionary mind, however, the repression of the cyclist was not born of socialism but a sort of post-Mussolinism. In the weird world of European politics – where liberalism has been draining away from both sides of the political spectrum for decades, if indeed it ever existed – the bicycle is now the symbol of the modern left. It’s good for the environment, you see.
For years, Salvini has been waging war on bicycle lanes in his native Milan, where he sees them as disgustingly progressive, branding them an expression of ‘radical chic environmentalism’ and a threat to business, drivers and local police. Since his appointment as transport minister, he has cut funding for bicycle infrastructure by €94 million (£80 million).
Now he is upping the ante and demanding (metaphorically if not literally) that all cyclists report to their local police station. As the Italian bicycle makers’ association ANCMA put it, the plan ‘seems to be more about stopping the spread of bicycles than increasing safety on the roads’. What’s next, banning Lycra? (Stop it.)
Much has been made of Italian leader Giorgia Meloni and her far-right roots. As a teenager, she was an activist in the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a now defunct neofascist group that was openly sympathetic to Mussolini. Yet she has since powerfully disavowed Il Duce’s antisemitism, and as Daniel Johnson pointed out in a perceptive Telegraph column this week, in power her agenda has been nothing but mainstream conservative.
Perhaps it was unfair to make comparisons between the current Italian leadership and the wartime fascist dictator. Mussolini was pictured with cyclists several times, including the bicycle division of the fascist youth organisation Opera Nazionale Balilla in 1930; four years later, he was photographed riding one himself on holiday in Romagna, a look of haughty concentration on his face (and not a numberplate in sight). There is strong evidence to suggest that his henchmen murdered the socialist Ottavio Bottecchia, Italy’s first Tour de France winner, who was found battered to death on the roadside in 1927, his undamaged bicycle propped against a wall. So there’s that.
Either way, the humble bike has been caught in the culture wars of 2023. It has become a case of Schrodinger’s bicycle: the political significance of the bike depends upon the observer. The last time the oppressive number plates policy was proposed in Italy, in 2015, it was by a left-wing politician. At the time, Salvini himself criticised it on Twitter as ‘crazy’. Yet now the politics have revolved, and the cyclist has become a whipping boy for a different kind of politician.
The fact remains that everybody likes kicking a cyclist. Enough. You can take your number plates and shove them. My brothers in Lycra, rise up! Cyclists of the world, unite!
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