PETER HITCHENS: Don’t like assisted dying? Unlicensed electric bike riders are soon going to help quite a lot of us to die

City dwellers all over Britain are beginning to grasp that we are undergoing the biggest and most damaging transport revolution since Dr Richard Beeching destroyed the railways 60 years ago. This is the invasion of urban areas by electric bicycles and electric scooters.

The horrible injuries inflicted on ten-year-old Carter Ralph in Loughborough on October 30 ought to bring us to our senses. But will they? Poor Carter was left with severe facial wounds after being hit by an electric motorcycle that was being ridden on the pavement.

I’ve been mocked on anti-social media for persisting with this subject. Some think that people like me should only discuss huge issues such as the Ukraine war or Donald Trump or assisted dying or the transformation of the police into paramilitary social workers.

Well, if assisted dying is what you’re worried about, I suspect that, if we don’t act soon, a lot more people will be assisted to die by electric motorbikes and scooters than will be affected by Kim Leadbeater’s radical legislation.

The liberation of unlicensed, unregistered, fast, heavy motor vehicles on our streets is an enormous policy change, and it has been consciously made and sustained by governments of both big parties. Last week the current Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, made plain that the Government plans to fully legalise the use of private e-scooters on public roads. This is no surprise.

Ridiculous laws permitting these menaces if they are hired from chosen companies have made a mockery of the laws banning them from public roads, parks and footpaths. They are widely hated by pedestrians (the people of Paris actually voted to ban them). But various ‘trials’ of them in many English cities have been repeatedly extended.

Ms Haigh said electric motor scooters could be a ‘really effective part of an integrated transport strategy’. If so, it is a very bad strategy. It affects millions, mostly for the worse. It is getting bigger all the time. And yet it is not debated.

Here is the point. About 90 years ago, this country was suffering horrible road carnage. In 1933 there were more than 7,000 deaths on Britain’s roads, when there were far fewer cars than there are now. (By comparison, the latest British annual road death figure is around 1,700). 

The then government decided to do something about it, introducing compulsory driving tests, speed limits and pedestrian crossings. Since then, the rule has been that those who use motor vehicles, however small their engines, must be licensed. Motor vehicles have had to carry registration plates for even longer.

Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said electric motor scooters could be a ‘really effective part of an integrated transport strategy’

Broadly, that system has worked. If you can stop someone driving by taking his licence away, and if you can identify him through the numberplate on his car or motorbike, you can enforce traffic laws and make the roads safer.

Now, just as small electric motors have become extremely powerful, the rule has gone. In the last few years the Transport Ministry has quietly permitted the use, on British roads, of electric motorbikes and of electric motor scooters. 

In reality, you need no licence to ride them. I’ve seen 12-year-olds on electric hire bikes. And who are the masked bandits, astride those souped-up 40mph Hells Angel-type machines? They do not have numberplates.

So their riders, using surprisingly powerful motors capable of high speeds, can do what they want and never get caught or punished. This is a step into the Third World, where such lawless, dangerous chaos is common.

But why? The use of the words ‘e-bike’ and ‘e-scooter’, which sensible people should abandon, is part of the problem. These machines have batteries, charged from the grid. There is nothing green or environmental about them.

Very few car drivers are going to abandon their safe, weatherproof steel boxes so they can bucket about on mechanised tea-trays, or dice with death, alongside the food delivery riders, amid the potholes.

But in much of the country, public transport (especially buses) is on the verge of breakdown after decades of neglect. And at the same time millions of young people who would once have become car drivers refuse to do so. They aren’t interested in costly driving lessons and long waits for tests.

They can’t face the speed cameras, the congestion charges, the roadblocks and the parking profiteers. But they also cannot be bothered to walk or pedal.

So now they can be motorised, but without the responsibility that should go with such power.

And the Government, no doubt also heavily lobbied by the makers and renters of these devices, thinks it can fill the transport gap by returning to the old dangerous days.

The new Jackal is raising my hackles 

Why is there so much praise for the dreadful remake of The Day of the Jackal? If they hadn’t had the nerve to use this title, the Sky Atlantic series about a professional killer would just be another dull Mission: Impossible knock-off – slow-moving, witless, politically correct and laughably incredible. 

But how dare they set themselves up as rivals to one of the ten best films ever made?

For example, if the assassin is so good at disguise why does he meet a potential client as himself without even a wig, when he rightly fears being identified? 

As for his MI6 opponent, who threatens her sources like an East German Stasi agent, she deserves to lose. 

Edward Fox as the assassin in the 1973 film of The Day of the Jackal

The brilliance of the original Edward Fox Jackal is that the assassin is the actual Devil.

You know you’d enjoy his company. He has good taste in everything. He has a beautifully dry sense of humour. He can seduce men or women at will, and then kill them skilfully in a second. 

Yet he can be – and is – defeated by goodness in the form of stern duty, quick wit, courage and the most dogged, plain sort of detective work. 

And the whole thing is set in that lost dreamworld of 1960s France, when abroad was still fun, rather than in a series of flashy, sanitised Euromodern cities.

Do you remember all those headlines about how Lucy Letby had been ‘caught virtually red-handed’ harming a baby in the hospital where she worked? 

Well, now listen to the doctor who gave the evidence on which those headlines were based.

Dr Ravi Jayaram told the Thirlwall Inquiry into the Letby affair that he had not seen Ms Letby harming the baby, and if the incident happened in isolation he would have ‘probably thought nothing more of it’. 

He added: ‘There has been a narrative that I walked in and caught Letby doing something and that’s incorrect.’ 

So there’s another thing everyone thinks they know about the Letby case that isn’t quite so.