This country is going down the crapper. Everywhere we look we have WOKE nonsense showing how we’re circling the drain and communism is about to take over. How do I know? The media keeps telling me, so it must be true. 

I’ve been told that avocados are WOKE, not being racist is WOKE, working from home is WOKE, how an AI tool owned by Elon Musk is WOKE, but most worrying of all… roundabouts. Roundabouts. Are. WOKE! 

That’s because according to MyLondon, “Britain’s ‘most woke’ £2m roundabout [is] due to open next week”. Could the last person to vacate this ludicrous country please turn out the lights? Or maybe don’t, because didn’t you know? Saving electricity is WOKE!

MyLondon are not the only site to cover this. The Daily Mail, the Express, and the Telegraph have all written stories about it, and go into great detail about how ridiculous it is that there is a ‘3-minute explainer video’ that people must watch in order to understand how to use this roundabout.

I’m hoping that it will come as a surprise to nobody that this explainer video doesn’t try to explain an incredibly complex system. Mainly because this is not a complex system; it is a Dutch-style roundabout, so it has a cycle lane going around it in the same way that most roundabouts have footpaths around them. 

The first 50 seconds of the video – which we’ve embedded above for your viewing pleasure – introduces where the roundabout is, what is does, and why it was built. It then takes 30 seconds to show how a cyclist needs to do ‘complex’ manoeuvres, like stopping at stop lines and not running over pedestrians on zebra crossings. The next 45 seconds explain how cars need to stop at stop lines, not run over pedestrians on zebra crossings, or cyclists in cyclists lanes, and how lorries need to check their blind spots. The last 25 seconds talk about onward active travel routes. 

WOKE!! COMPLEX WOKERY!!

The idea that stopping at stop lines and checking your blind spot is somehow woke is absolutely mental, but is unfortunately symptomatic of the right-wing media’s constant need to find thing to make people angry about that don’t run counter to their long- standing narratives. 

It means that progressive ideas that would make the UK a better place for people to travel, for people to raise their kids, to clean up pollution, and reduce deaths on the road are labelled as something that people should be angry about. It is desperation from a bunch of people clinging to relevance, and keeps the kind of people who still read their awful papers in a state of constant anger and bewilderment, scared of change but also wholly unsatisfied with their current predicament. 

Unfortunately, this means their ire is generally aimed directly in the direction of cyclists and/or people who just want to walk around now, so it seems. This is all because what we choose to spend our time doing and writing about does exactly what they don’t want people to do: be active, happy, and healthy. 

Calling roundabouts ‘woke’ is just the latest in a long line of culture war nonsense aimed at cyclists by these titles. Whether it’s the Telegraph claiming that cyclists are running people down at 52mph, or Iain Duncan-Smith trying to persuade the public that cyclists are more deadly than drivers (despite statistics suggesting that his own policies killed more people in five years than cyclists have done in 200), the juggernaut of fact-lite nonsense rolls on and on.

We are in a media landscape where journalists at these bigger titles are forced to write this stuff, I suspect because it is the only way they can get on in journalism. The person who wrote the article is not a frothing idiot. They are almost certainly a recent graduate who has clearly been asked to write a boring article, then an equally downtrodden person knows they must write an attention-grabbing headline to generate page views and engagement. They have done what they were asked to do, but that just reinforces the stereotypes around cyclists, and ultimately adds to the content that makes all of us less safe on the roads.

The problem we have is that it works. Mainstream journalism today is not so much about covering the important news, it’s a rocket-powered race to the bottom… and the culture war-obsessed rags are using cyclists and active travel as fuel.