IN great things and in small, Scotland has often been ahead of the pack – only to fail at the end to come out the victor. What do you think happened last Friday at Wembley? We treated the Euro 2020 match against England, as a triumph, yet we did not actually win.

Tonight’s crunch against Croatia? I won’t elaborate on my doubts but instead get off the beaten track of high sporting excitement and scurry away for a peek at an event that is much smaller in scope yet, I would argue, but equally revealing of Scotland’s role in world history.

The recovered delights of what used to be the biennial trip to Wembley are comparable with another recent event that brings home – and if anything yet more forcefully – a significant analogy between sport and life. My realisation of this came as a bolt from the blue when I read that the Clarion Cycling Club (founded 1895) had last week voted to remove the struggle for socialism from its official list of aims.

The club goes back to the times when the working class was just entering parliamentary politics. The vote had been extended to most proletarian males in 1885. In 1888, Keir Hardie stood as the first ever Labour candidate at a by-election in Mid-Lanarkshire. He would only get into Parliament in 1892 when he transferred to a seat in London. The Independent Labour Party had meanwhile been formed, and he represented it at Westminster till his death in 1915.

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This political advance was only made possible by decisive progress in the economic and social standing of the workforce as a whole. During a long boom in the late Victorian era, living standards rose. Many people won higher real wages, giving them a modest financial surplus that they could spend on plain consumer goods. Leaders like Keir Hardie hoped also to see a moral reformation of the workers, forsaking booze and turning to a more wholesome lifestyle – including, for example, cycling in their spare time.

Transformation of life in the great industrial cities began, in Glasgow not least. Here in 1895 the Clarion Cycling Club was started, taking its name from an early socialist newspaper, The Clarion, that sought to call its readers to the coming class struggles in both a physical and a mental sense.

Six earnest but athletic young Glaswegians read it and took its advice. Their leader was Tom Groom, who said they sought to “combine the pleasures of cycling with the propaganda of socialism”. And that was the principle of the club they founded.

The club proved popular and continued to grow through the twentieth century, in peacetime and wartime, in slump and boom. Young teams of cyclists would take copies of The Clarion out on their trips and hand them to unsuspecting country bumpkins. By 1931, there were enough clubs in Scotland for them to form a national association that could link up with counterparts in foreign countries. Its president was Tom Cook, Labour MP for Dundee. By 1936, 12 million cyclists were riding British roads (compared to only 2 million motorists). At that point the Clarion Club as a whole boasted more than 8000 members.

A revival came after the Second World War with an inaugural meeting at the Clarion Rooms in Queen’s Crescent, Glasgow, in December 1946. And the club has continued to flourish right down to the present time, now going under the name of the Scottish Cycling Union with about 200 affiliate clubs.

The most vigorous appears to be the West Lothian Clarion Cycling Club, the current Club of the Year and holder of the Tom Groom Trophy. The headquarters of the whole lot is at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in London Road, Glasgow, which opened in 2014.

It has altogether been a great success story and, right till last week, the club was still defining its aims in the same old-fashioned way: “To protect and further the interests of cycling and cyclists. To promote mutual aid, good fellowship and support for the principles of socialism.”

BUT times change, and today these aims do not seem to sum up the members’ outlook on life quite as cogently as they used to do. At the recent annual general meeting, they voted to remove the word socialism. The most persuasive speaker slammed it as “divisive” and “non-inclusive”. The concept was now “outdated,” he declared.

Certainly it would be hard to define Sir Chris Hoy, a man of tough discipline and devotion to public duty, as well as capitalist enterprise, as any kind of socialist. He is at the same time typical of a sort of Scotsman seldom commended in our public discourse. There are many businessmen and bankers socially concerned and willing to help the wider community. Some are at home in the public sector, too. They run quangos and advise civil servants. But from one or two of the other columnists in The National they may learn they are ruthless exploiters intent on impoverishing the working class.

It is not as if Scottish socialism has set a superior example. Labour have now been turfed out of running Glasgow, and other burghs in the west of Scotland, after decades of corruption and jobs for the boys. True, they have also long been subject to abuse by socialist fringe groups, but to no great effect because these groups are themselves feeble and disunited.

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It is easy for gurus of the 21st century to bandy about and even wax emotional over a term so abstract as equality. Somewhat harder is the generation out of it of practical political and economic programmes.

Spokesmen in both government and the labour movement complain of inequality, but it is hard to give them any credence. They will not define equality or say how to enforce it in what is still, in most ways, a free market in labour – though with many rigidities enforced by government and the trade unions themselves.

Apart from that, clever people tend to earn more than stupid people. Hard-working people tend to earn more than idle people. Those who have taken the trouble to acquire professional experience and qualifications tend to earn more than those who have not. People who have laboured for a long time at a particular job tend to earn more than those who have just been taken on.

It is more exciting to be a world-class innovator but not always that lucrative. I find these differences to be perfectly rational, and I doubt if they should really be regarded as examples of inequality ready to be corrected. They merely reflect human difference and human diversity. They are therefore the opposite of equality, and thank heaven for them. To those who believe they can plan something better I only say, “On your bike”.