Transport Secretary tells councils to stop "abusing" emergency active travel funding

Exactly.

It's not written to appeal to the already converted.

It's written to appeal to those currently opposed.

Annoyingly pay walled,but his opening sentence is "I'm a petrol-head." dont think we need to read further to understand which dog whistle he is using there. He goes on to say he's more accurately an electric head but believes our roads should be good to drive on, so he's no doubt bending to the will of his noisy back benches who are demanding to rip the protected lanes out because some motorists dont like them

Did you read the article?

The issue is with continuous lines of "rhinos" as shown in the picture at the top of this story. 

It is now impossible as a pedestrian to cross the street anywhere but at road intersections. Look at the picture - you want to get from the blue fronted shop to the bus stop across the street by the glass building. How do you do it?

Any protection of cycle lanes or extended pavements needs to be permeable for pedestrians (or cyclists) wanting to cross to the other side.

That is an issue and one I'm familiar with, but again, bearing in mind these schemes are "temporary" and were installed in a hurry, it's the same point: local authorities were asked to do this, they did it, and he's complaining that they did it. What he could do is say, great, now we need to assess these schemes and replace the rhinos (new term to me, thanks!) with proper kerbs and wider pavements.

.. to see his flat mate

replace barriers with constant stream of vehicle traffic and pose the same question and no one would blink an eye if you told them they had to cross the road at the corner of the street.

which maybe not the right approach either, but by default we create roads with invisible barriers to cross them by encouraging motor traffic unfettered use of them, and no one cares about the pedestrian then. We install some minor pieces of cycling infra to try and promote a better way of using the space, and yes it could be made to be more permeable to cross the road in that example, but that would surely be the feedback from the trial, but rather than make a minor correction, suddenly everyone is campaigning to pull it out completely because they are concerned all about pedestrians suddenly.

Shapps didnt write his piece for the Telegraph because a council has used rhinos instead of a more permeable barrier (and fwiw they probably did that only because there was bizarrely a shortage of barriers in the country and thats all they had available)  he's being the arch politician appealing to his partys core voters and backbenchers by echoing what they say about how councils have abused the funding and need to reverse the changes and consult more, which we all know kicks most schemes back into the long grass and we are back to square one

Awavey wrote:

replace barriers with constant stream of vehicle traffic and pose the same question and no one would blink an eye if you told them they had to cross the road at the corner of the street.

There was a letter I read recently (cannot remember where, sorry) and someone was complaining about the new pop-up cycle lanes.  The crux of their point was that they were worried that someone was going to get knocked down because they had to remember to look before crossing the cycle lane.  Which led me to wonder how they ever managed to cross the road...

Drivers are mostly locked in to using the kerb as their guide for road positioning. One of my local roads has cycle lanes painted each side and the central white line removed  . I get the idea is to create more perceived danger and reduce traffic speed a a result. However, 90% of drivers can't help themselves from driving 1-2 feet from the kerb and within the painted cycle lane. I do understand that it takes some re-adjustment and concentration for a driver to position themselves correctly in this road set-up. However, this is the crux. It's clear that 90% of drivers don't possess either of these attributes. Painted white lines don't provide the safe space cyclists need to travel. I can only see the Dutch model working in the future and we will need a whole lot more investment than £250M to achieve that. 

You may have a point there.  The local BTL news commenters all complained about how these protected lanes were taking up road space, forgetting that the wands are only protecting painted lanes that were already there.  If these people think that the wands are taking up space then they're admitting that they never stayed out of the painted lanes...

The allegation has been made that a few drivers are deliberately knocking the wands down in protest. Whether this is true or not, I don't know.

Allegation? We had the video of the driver in Brighton actually doing it last week.

There was a report in this very organ a week or so ago

https://road.cc/content/news/update-police-investigate-brighton-driver-clattering-wands-276907

Hadn't seen that. Wonder if it was an Uber driver in Bristol too? (No reason it should have been particularly.)