Target pavement cyclists, say MPs

Exactly.

I disagree. My mother only learned to cycle at the age of 40. As she doesn't cycle frequently, and doesn't get a lot of practice she is still very nervous about cycling amongst traffic, but is slowly building confidence. Should she stop cycling completely because she is inexperienced and feels uncomfortable in heavy traffic?
As an example of how uncomfortable she finds it: She will put the bike in the back of the car and drive to the canal (paying to go over a toll bridge which is free to cyclists) in order to go for a ride along the towpath, rather than cycle the 5 minutes (if that) to get to where she leaves the car.

No - sorry, obviously I was unclear. That's exactly my point - your mum will build confidence to the point when she'll be fine on the roads. In the meantime I don't think that she should be forced onto them if she doesn't feel safe, and I suspect she's not causing any problem. Even if there's the odd junction or stretch of road where she doesn't feel safe I personally have no problem with her considerately using the pavement.

I don't think that all cyclists should be told it's ok to always ride on the pavement though - but I certainly don't think that all cyclists on a pavement are cunts, or even that they're doing something wrong.

In the past week there have been threads here about taxis running wheels over, bus drivers cutting people up, taxi drivers coming at you with wheel jacks - I managed to end up on the floor in the middle of the road a couple of days ago (partly my fault :) ). Yet here we are saying that people who don't feel safe jousting with horrible traffic are idiots... seems the wrong way round to me.