Middle-of-the-road bikers take issue with duty

ON WALL STREET: There was a rumbling of engines which became a roar and then the windows rattled from the pressure waves of unmuffled engines revving outside. The doors burst open and the peaceful bar where I was having lunch in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York became a mass of black leather, bald heads and pig tails, with Molly Hatchet's Gator Country blaring from the jukebox, writes Conor O'Clery

In their Rough Rider jackets, Hombre boots and Thunder Pass goggles, the bikers filled the pub with an atmosphere of aggression, but it was pretty much all show.

These were not members of Hell's Angels, or the Mongols - the tattooed thugs with nazi-style helmets who started a fight at a biker rally in Nevada last Friday that left four people dead. They were mostly ageing baby-boomers, of both sexes.

The riders who settled around us with their Coors Light and Diet Coke included a businessman, an accountant, a hotel receptionist and a steel worker. From their conversation it was evident they just enjoyed the camaraderie of gunning their Harely Davidsons or Hondas en masse along country roads at weekends, and stopping at wayside inns to admire each other's fat, noisy chrome-plated trophies. Motor-cycling in the US is in fact very much a middle-class, middle-aged pastime.

Almost half of all bikers are over 40, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, compared with 15 per cent two decades ago, and many of the riders thundering along are old enough to have caught the bug at the same time as James Dean. The actor Liam Neeson, who is 49 and lives in New York State, was a Harley rider until he crashed two years ago and his wife Natasha Richardson persuaded him to give it up.

The popularity of Harley Davidsons with all ages and classes helps explain why the company that makes them, started a century ago in a Milwaukee shed where 21-year-old William Harley and 20-year-old Arthur Davidson built their first 3.5 stroke racers, is doing so well these days.

The firm announced record revenue of almost $100 million (€109 million) for the first quarter of this year, with retail sales up 21 per cent in the US. A portion of the profits came from Europe, which has 150,000 Harley owners and where sales of the machines, currently 10 per cent of total output, increased by 17 per cent last year.

The popularity of Harley Davidsons in Europe perhaps explains why the EU last month selected US-made motorbikes as one of its potential targets for punitive duties on selected USexports, in retaliation for tariffs the Bush Administration imposed on imported steel in March. It would show Mr Bush that a high-profile US firm in a key electoral state like Wisconsin, where Harley Davidson is situated, would feel the heat.

US-made motorcycles therefore joined an eclectic list of articles on the EU's hit list due to come into effect on June 18th. These included certain categories of firearms, starting pistols and captive-bolt humane killers; ball-point, felt-tipped, fountain and stylography pens; automatic bowling alley equipment; dates, figs, pineapples and avocados; and brassieres, girdles, corsets, braces, suspenders, garters "and similar articles and parts thereof, whether or not knitted or crocheted".

Harley Davidson mounted a counter attack. The US firm asked its European dealers and company-sponsored organisations like the Harley Riders' Group to speak out. They needed little prompting. Harley Davidson fans in Europe, typically dentists and lawyers according to the company's European affairs director Klaus Stobel, went into action.

The Euro-bikers didn't use aggro nor did they brandish tattooed forearms but they wrote letters, hundreds of them, warning that the proposed 100 per cent duty on motorcycles would hurt only Harley enthusiasts. They may even have got some quiet support from EU bureaucrats in Brussels with Rough Rider jackets, Hombre boots and Thunder Pass goggles in their closets.

At the same time, Brussels was getting the message that the EU's proposed tariff on motorcycles would also hurt the Japanese firms, Honda and Suzuki, which export machines to Europe from their American factories.

For whatever reason, as of last week, the list of proposed short-term or long-term tariffs on US-made goods published on the EU website was revised.

It still contains knitted or crocheted bras, but it no longer includes motorcycles.