But therein lies the rub; by trying to stay safe I end up infringing those very laws intended to keep me safe. This is largely because motorcycling presents a unique conundrum for politicians; it is an undeniably superior mode of transport in almost every way that matters – environmental, congestion, cost – yet the perceived dangers of the activity mean it must be frowned upon by those charged with keeping us safe. The reality clashes with the perception; but in politics, it is perception that matters.
A few years back I got into an excitable argument with the then Transportation Director for Westminster Council, Martin Lowe. The council was busy scrapping bike bays, forcing motorcyclists to find new and innovative places to leave there machines; it was a brazen, mean and disingenuous bid to increase revenues via parking fines and it riled me.
In hindsight, I should have got in early, laced the letter with anthrax before the buggers were savvy to the ruse, but I was younger then, more tolerant. I asked Lowe why the council was actively deterring motorcyclists when the city was in gridlock. In return, I received a neat little lesson in politics, delivered by a man so clearly at ease with his own lack of integrity that any comeback seemed almost pointless.
“The City council,” Lowe irritably explained, “does not seek to encourage the use of motorcycles…for the spurious reason of reducing congestion.”
Synonyms for spurious include ‘bogus, ‘fake’ or even ‘fraudulent’, which are pretty harsh words when arguing against the obvious fact that motorcycles do reduce congestion. It’s an odd approach for anyone operating on traditional notions of logic or even honestly. But lest we forget, I had stumbled deep into the shadow of the beast, where concepts of reason and decency do not apply as one might expect them to in the daylight.
The beast Lowe noted that: “Were five car drivers to switch to motorcycles it is likely there would be no reduction in congestion as the five cars would be replaced by…five motorcycles and two or three cars.”
Setting aside the stupidity of this argument and the defeatist mentality at its core – that there is no point doing anything because things will always get worse – it is the giddy willingness to place reason and logic and sense to one side if they prove inconvenient obstacles to a stated goal that left me feeling very deflated. I was right, I knew that, but I had lost an argument to someone utterly indifferent to those values I thought common among all higher animals.
This exchange took place many years back now and I use it only to highlight the crass and dangerous idiocy that lurks beneath the thin veneer of ‘professional’ politics, which at the end of the day, is merely a game of perception; it’s all about existing in a reality defined by somebody else who does not have your best interests at heart.
You can play the game, stay on track, don’t upset the apple cart, but you will lose anyway and the newspapers will report your death as being entirely the fault of the reckless loon who ploughed his Kawasaki into the passenger door of a now heavily traumatised father of three; if you’re lucky, you may find some justice in paragraph four, where the fact that the driver was drunk, banned, and texting his partner at the time of the impact will get a single-line mention.
Or maybe I’m confusing politics with life; is there even a difference? Does it matter? These are horrible concepts to be battling with as I struggle with back-pain in my early 40s. If only I’d never ridden pillion on my friend Rich’s Virago; I wouldn’t had stumbled into this ugly infatuation with these lunatic machines and none of this would matter. I would be oblivious to it all; concerned only with Brexit, inflation and library closures. Normal people’s politics.
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ENDS