Fast forward a few years. To board a bus or enter a railway station you have to tap your digital ID, which is then verified by facial recognition cameras.

The vast network of cameras tracking number plates has been augmented by technology that also scans faces. The EU has mandated biometric requirements for new cars and motorbikes, and the UK has meekly fallen into line. It’s impossible to drive them without complying.

In any case, increasing restrictions in towns and cities have led to a massive decline in car ownership, forcing more and more people to use driverless taxis instead. For safety reasons, so they say, you have to scan your biometrics and digital ID to use them.

There’s only one loophole that allows you to travel significant distances without being tracked by the totalitarian surveillance grid: cycling, particularly on an e-bike.

Moreover, it’s normal and acceptable for cyclists to wear helmets and masks. Pedestrians are pulled over and questioned if they step out in similar garb. They are deliberately confusing the monitoring systems, so must be up to no good!

But the “power elite” don’t want anyone at all to escape their gaze. As a recent Home Secretary put it:

“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”

Needless to say, the “criminal justice system” now includes persecuting dissidents for various thought crimes, shutting down free speech, stifling political debate and preventing unsanctioned protests.

Clearly they want to track every journey and know your exact whereabouts at any given moment. So they need a convenient pretext to apply new controls on cyclists.

They ramp up fear using their assets in the controlled media, giving outsized coverage to rare examples where bike or e-bike riders cause serious accidents. Councils then start to impose speed limits and other restrictions in response.

Annoyed by the privileges granted to cyclists in recent years, much of the public, particularly the “authoritarian right”, strongly support this. Indeed their complaints about cyclists’ behaviour help justify the crackdown.

But what about enforcement? Controlled media then bombard the public with reports of dangerous, speeding cyclists getting away with breaking the law. Momentum builds for compulsory registration and mandatory tracking devices linked to digital IDs. The perpetrators can now be brought to justice. The technology also enables riders to monitor their speed, so they have no excuse.

The loophole has been closed and every mode of transport is now thoroughly spied on.

The push for cycling speed limits, and indeed the registration of bikes, may have a more mundane explanation. Certainly it’s difficult to justify on a rational cost-benefit basis. The risks posed by cyclists to other road users, including pedestrians, are very low. And the risks to cyclists themselves are likely to be far outweighed by the health benefits of the activity. (This is not to excuse bad behaviour by riders or to downplay the impact on individual victims of the incidents they cause.)

However, a command-and-control culture now infests transport authorities, unhindered by economic concerns and fostered by the war on motorists. Perhaps this mentality is now being applied to cyclists, a form of blowback on a group the bureaucrats were supposed to be helping.

But there remains a possiblity that more sinister and disturbing motives are behind this agenda, a hypothesis made more likely by the rapid erosion of freedom across the board, not just within the transport sector.

Richard Wellings