Message to Kids: Walking or Cycling puts you in hospital.

Advice for children from the Department for Transport via deep-cover agents at Manchester Cycling.

The implication of all the clever games and multimedia stuff on the DfT website is clear: Walking and cycling are very unusual and highly dangerous activities which require an advanced level of planning and special (possibly costly) safety equipment. Until you are old enough to drive and get yourself a nice car you're on your own and liable to be severely injured. Under no circumstances must you do anything to get in the way of or impede the progress of the important drivers of cars. If you do, you will be hospitalised, maybe killed. FACT. It will be your own fault. END OF. So you should get mum to drive you to and from school, visits to friends, trips to the shops, everything - it's just easier, it's definitely safer!

If you do survive long enough to get a driving license, then you'll have carte blanche to drive inattentively and at speed in the presence of children, it will be your right; that is the normal way of things.

"Tell your friends about these kids' sticky ends!"

Yes indeed, if anything, we think the DfT is a little too dovish. Children, and indeed all pestestrians and cyclits NEED to know that if they insist on putting themselves in harms way, then they're liable to be harmed. And then it will be their own fault.

But we're obviously delighted that our message is getting through at last. And we totally approve of the government using fear to programme the anti-walking and -cycling message into young impressionable minds. Advice for children on the site includes the wearing of special items such as reflective vests, bright stickers, flourescent caps and yellow backpacks. We must support the DfT in this, and perhaps suggest that they extend their advice to all pestestrians and cyclits; the adults too who should, after all, be in nice cars. After a while perhaps we can hope to see that this clothing advice is upgraded to mandatory compulsion. Only by putting all these subversive non-motoring elements into this humiliating and clownish uniform will we be able to identify them quickly and easily - to flush them out - when the time comes for their re-education.

 The re-education programme commences here...