.a call to decapitate cyclists

One of the golden rules of being a journalist must surely be to make sure you never actually become the news. Maybe Matthew Parris forgot this in a moment of thinking he was back to being an MP when spouting forth some vitriol in his Times column a little after Christmas. Chief among the hatred filled diatribe was the comment that, "A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists."

If you read the news last month you'll know that Milton Keynes police were having a problem with exactly this issue, and were trying to take steps to stop it happening, and warning cyclists about the possibility. For a national newspaper to allow such a message to be put into print simply beggared belief.

The outrage was immediate, and as of the date of writing this the Press Complaints Commission has received more complaints about this particular article than any other in 2007. There is still an outstanding consideration of the possibility of charges being levied against Parris for what basically amounts to an incitement to violence.

Unsurprisingly an apology followed swiftly. Whether this was occasioned by Parris himself realising his mistake, or the newspaper responding to the furore this has created, we can only really take that at its face value - although both the apology, and responses from the paper received by various cyclists, do seem to suggest that we have lost a bit of our sense of humour in all of this.

Many, however, have replied to those comments that if the word 'cyclist' was replaced by virtually any other minority group the paper would never have printed the column in the first place.

This one will run some more no doubt, but we can only hope that the reaction to this, and the PCC taking the matter so seriously, might mean that such vile, and obvious, violent bigotry and incitement may not appear in print too often in the future.