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news
Viral video debated on Jeremy Vine show (screenshot Twitter video/ @azb2019)Sajid Javid blames father of five-year-old cyclist for letting child ride on road in viral video
Sajid Javid has become the latest Conservative politician to weigh in on the viral video – discussed during Tuesday’s episode of Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 show and viewed almost 2.5 million times on Twitter – which shows a motorist failing to stop before narrowly passing a five-year-old cyclist.
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has also served as the Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during his time in government, joined Tory peer Baroness Foster and Conservative London Assembly leader Susan Hall in pointing the finger at the child’s father for letting him cycle on the road in the first place.
Responding to a tweet from the Jeremy Vine on 5 Twitter account, which asked viewers who they thought was “in the wrong”, Bromsgrove MP Javid – who unsuccessfully stood to replace Boris Johnson in the first of this year’s Conservative leadership contests, before later endorsing Liz Truss – replied: “The 5-year-old’s father”.
The 5-year old's father. https://t.co/nMfncye03d
— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) November 10, 2022
Javid (whose driver, incidentally, was filmed stopped in a bike box outside Westminster earlier this year) has been heavily criticised for his comments by other Twitter users, who ridiculed the MP’s apparent ‘car is king’ attitude and advised him to review the Highway Code:
You might want to review the highway code:https://t.co/yjnUlHzeCq
— Chris Parker (@HyperHydr0) November 10, 2022
Car is king, eh, Sajid? I expect better from you, as the current health secretary and a former secretary for sport.
— Felix Lowe (@saddleblaze) November 10, 2022
The pavement would be safer:https://t.co/j3B3rUVAf9
— Sustainable us - moving at 25km/h (@Havant_Enviro) November 10, 2022
Nevertheless, the MP’s comments echoed those made earlier this week by some of his Tory colleagues, including Susan Hall, the chair of the Police and Crime Committee in the London Assembly.
Replying to a tweet – this time from Vine himself – which suggested that anyone who does not think “the driver must go dead slow, or stop” should “cut up their driving licence and send the pieces back to the DVLA”, Hall argued: “Surely the issue here is that a 5-year-old should not be on the public highway riding a bike!”
Hall then claimed that the child should only cycle “slowly on the footway, or preferably in the park” and that she was “amazed that given road behaviour by all that you find it acceptable for a five-year-old to be on a bike in the road.”
Conservative peer Baroness Foster – appointed to the House of Lords by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in December 2020 – also took to Twitter to castigate the child’s father, writing: “A child that small should not be cycling on a road! A completely irresponsible decision along with your comments that put the entire onus on the car drivers if/when something goes horribly wrong!”
The widespread argument shared by the Conservative politicians, that the five-year-old should have been cycling on the footpath instead of the road, was today countered by his father, who posted the below video of his school run:
"just ride your bikes on the pavement, no one will mind. It'll be safer, no cars on the pavement are there?!"
The pavements next to a school pic.twitter.com/tq45IcW1m0
— AZB (@azb2019) November 10, 2022
On Tuesday, after the contentious video went viral, the child’s father Ashley also appeared on Vine’s Channel 5 show, where the noted cycling advocate criticised the driving on display.
Ashley told the show that “the facts are clear on this one: the driver was wrong and my son has every right to ride on the road.”
Panel guest and journalist Mike Parry agreed, dismissing the debate about whether the child should have been cycling on the road as “utterly irrelevant”.
“Surely human compassion, surely human nature says that if you’re driving a car at speed and there’s a little child coming the other way your instinct should be the protective nature of an adult in a car over a child,” he told Vine.
Meanwhile, on the same day that the video was discussed on Channel 5, road safety expert Tim Shallcross of IAM Roadsmart told the Sunday Times Driving: “There is no minimum age limit for cycling on a road; the lad is a little younger than most cycling organisations recommend to be on a road, but he’s certainly riding competently and with confidence and under supervision, so no problem there.”
Shallcross also pointed to Rule H3 of the Highway Code, referencing the ‘hierarchy of road users’, which tells drivers to “stop and wait for a safe gap in the flow of cyclists if necessary”.
“Highway Code guidance is for cars to give 1.5m clearance to cyclists in 30mph limit, and since the cyclist was already passing parked vehicles and there was clearly not room for 1.5m clearance, the car should have waited until the cyclist was clear before carrying on,” he concluded.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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93 comments
This is back on the ch5 Jeremy Vine show right now, the child's father is being interviewed in response to the govt sanctioned victim blaming.
I saw the Daily Mail had picked it up as one of their who do you think is right stories
So based on the universal Tory response that cyclists are de facto banned from the roads, by poor road safety, I take it that they're about to legalise pavement cycling or build an integrated cycle network? No?
Actually on that note how have Labour responded to this? I can't say I'm hopeful there either..
Of course Javid is wrong. He's a Conservative and so will always make the wrong decisions.
What experience and knowledge of cars, lorries speed and stopping distance does this 5 year old have? It is very irresponsible of the father to allow his child to ride on the road. Whether the approaching car should have slowed or stopped to allow the child through is irrelevant. A 5 year old inexperienced riding in the road could have panicked. Not knowing what the car driver was going to do he could well have lost control of the bike and fallen off into the path of the car. Would the driver have been held responsible for the child's inexperience just because of a new rule written into the highway code? It also appears the car is on the correct side of the road and the child is perhaps too far over.
An experienced adult cyclist would have stopped by the van and waited for the car to pass so that he/she could continue on safely.
Good to know the incredibly low importance you place on whether someone follows the highway code, in your first couple of posts at that. If you think this, you should not be using UK highways. A child knows this.
The driver should have stopped. That you can't see this is rather worrying.
'The 5 year old might have... ' - all the more reasons to stop then as a driver.
The driver is over the centre line and the 5 year old is on his own side. Clearly shown in the still.
An experienced cyclist would have taken an even stronger road position to stop the driver trying to squeeze through.
Amazes me that drivers come onto a cycling site to try and tell cyclists how to use the roads. And then think that the highway code can be ignored if you are a driver.
Not going to waste too much time on you as you are obviously yet another first-time-straight-in-with-the-hate poster, but just have a little think about the logic of that; there are parked cars to the left and right of the driver, the only way they could be completely on their side of the road is if the road was a four lane carriageway, which it quite clearly is not or there would have been no conflict at all..
Is it really obvious? I'd have thought long-time-troll with yet another sock puppet account was at least possible, if not probable. Not that it makes much difference.
An experienced adult cyclist would have stopped, or slowed more likely, purely because they expected the driver to behave like an impatient idiot.
not because it inferred that cyclist had to stop, the driver had any priority call and the driver wasnt doing something that was totally wrong.
It is amazing how much emphasis you place on the cyclsts needing to take action to mitagate the poor driving standards of motorists.
Do you even ride bro?
The child is NOT "perhaps too far over". They're cycling about a car door's width away from the parked cars/van, as recommended. For example, that panel van is a prime candidate for a good old fashioned dooring. Obviously you have zero experience or knowledge of how to cycle safely.
It's very relevant because even if you regard the father as irresponsible for allowing the kid to cycle on that road, it doesn't absolve the car driver of their responsibility to drive with due care. Forcing their way through with an oncoming bike in the position it was was not driving with due care. And then there is the obvious fact it was a small child not an adult, clearly higher risk yet the car driver still barrelled in.
Yep - the irrelevant bit is whether or not the child should be on the road. He clearly is, therefore the driver should have stopped. If you were bowling in a cricket net and a child wandered in, you wouldn't carry on bowling just because the child "shouldn't be there".
Does he have a helmet on though?
Newbie troll says what?
Read the Highway Code.
the thing that annoys me most, which I suspected would happen when the video first went viral, is people focus solely on the aspect theres a child involved, so weve pivoted completely away from the closeness of the pass and the actions of the driver and whether they should stop and give way which is the aspect of the pass thats actually the issue whether its a child or a full grown adult riding there, and instead are focussing on going on a completely irrelevant sidetrack about whether a 5year old should even be riding on the road.
Maybe if we brought the discussion back to no you cant pass any cyclist like that on a road, than these politicians wouldnt keep making themselves look stupid.
But that is exactly why it is so illuminating, to see how some people take any avenue to exculpate the driver. It's like a Rorschach test - what did you see here? Especially galling is seeing how our political leaders align themselves. I don't believe for a moment they are merely trolling, or even too dim to see both sides, so I'll take their stance as a manifesto for the next election.
Oh if you want a really good example of this just watch some videos of dash cams and you will see a huge number of the comments on a cyclist that did something stupid. They ignore the other 95% of the video with drivers nearly colliding head on when overtaking on the wrong side of the wrong on a blind corner. Its that bloody cyclist who nearly got hit by flying out of a side road without looking.
But they are stupid, so they can't help it.
I am very impressed with Javid, and it's good to see 10,000 likes and rising for his honest and common sense Tweet.
Martin is completely correct is his question below; either the roads are too dangerous for grown adults (never mind children), like the pearl-clutchers hysterically claim every day, or the roads are safe enough and they have been lying all along.
Where I diverge with Martin is that I believe strongly that Britain's roads are indeed safe enough to ride with a 5 year old, as I have done many times, but the 5 year old has to be competent in cycling, and the dad has to be confident in their ability. Without both of those being true (as is the case is this video), the father showed astonishingly poor judgement.
Congratulations on your 51st post!
🎉🎉🎉
Good effort to get over 50 without a further banning.
I am very disappointed with Javid, who I would have supported (had I been a Tory) for the Tory leadership because he was the first to break ranks in protest at Johnson. Here, he is simply following the hyper-junk press line.
but I dont understand why he is bothering or getting involved, his twitter timeline seems full of the mundane boring MP delights at meeting constituents stuff to the point you wonder if its someone on his staff just tweeting for him as no-ones twitter feed is surely that boring, and gets barely any engagement from his followers (304k followers and he gets around 10 likes per tweet).
So why touch this with a political bargepole, he doesnt provide "hot takes" on other issues of the day, and this wasnt in Bromsgrove was it ? and you can quickly read the room temp and work out where not just angry taxi mob on twitter is.
seems a completely selfed own goal, because it will get dragged up everytime in he attempts to go further in his future political career, and he didnt have to say anything about it.
I'm aware of an MSP who has an 18 year old first year politics student doing her socialz, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if this was written by either an enthusiastic young idiot or daft politician.
But he's not great at spotting fault really, as a Truss voter.
He's far far worse than Boris..
My twitter on that thread:
"The staggering number of people who think the cyclists were at fault, not the driver, explains why so many people won't cycle on the roads. If you think the cyclists were at fault, please, please, please, read the Highway Code; you are the problem."
The vast majority blame the father, even when they admit that the driver should have stopped. There could be no better example of the utter, incredible, sheer deluded attitude of entitlement of drivers than this, where a 5 year old cyclist is put in danger by a callously indifferent driver.
The fact that all the politicians who have condemned the father are tories is yet another example of their party's complete lack of empathy for anyone of lower social status than themselves. Cyclists are by definition, for them, of low social status, so it doesn't matter what you do, you're wrong; even when the law says you're right. The fact that so many of these tories are quite senior, and should have some knowledge of the law and should be behaving like adults, not like 5 year old children, demonstrates their astonishing detachment from real life.
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