THE sun is rising over Glasgow, the kind of crisp, clear morning that doesn’t happen enough around these parts.

I remember back in ancient history, my coach Jimmy Dorward used to consult a battered notebook as we’d make our 5am start to get across the country to race.

Every time trial course in Scotland was there, and a good few besides. Reminders of weather conditions over the years, and copious notes of split time results, not just by more recent juniors like myself, but by riders that seemed legend to me at the time. People like Billy Bilsland and, going back even further, Ian Steel.

Ian won the Peace Race in 1952, with far-reaching effects on cycling in this part of the world. He had been part of a British team sent to compete in the stage race — sometimes referred to as the Berlin-Warsaw-Prague — one of the few occasions up until then that a team from the “West” had raced in the socialist states.

Jimmy told me the story on one of those long drives, how Steel lived up to his name, how he was light-years ahead of others in training, and how the fastest way to get the daily results from the race was to pick up a copy of the Daily Worker — a copy of the Morning Star was usually waiting for me on the passenger seat to read on the way.

Currency controls at the time meant the prize for Ian’s victory was not cash, but thousands of pounds worth of gadgets like cameras, watches, and, of course, a bike, being awarded to the British team — but a bigger prize was to await them at home.

While the Scottish Cyclists’ Union managed to be unitary, the rest of British cycling had been hopelessly split between an official governing body, which banned massed-start racing, the National Cyclists’ Union (NCU), and the British League of Racing Cyclists, which positively supported it.

The victory inspired more at home to defy the NCU ban, and drove the world governing body to force the various parties to enter into dialogue. And so by the end of the decade, the British Cycling Federation was born.

A race that promoted peace and understanding at home and abroad, a truly beautiful thing! A little lesson to the teenage me that unity can grow or be discovered in the most unexpected ways and places.

That’s not a lesson that always comes easy. The impulse for total victory in all circumstances is also drummed into you as a racer, but it runs alongside a camaraderie of the road and the certain knowledge that there’s nothing in life so insufferable as a bad winner.

We talk a lot about unity on the left, right before we confect impediment after impediment to it actually occurring. I expect the surviving Monty Python team has had a good week. Do they collect royalties on that People’s Front of Judea scene from the Life of Brian?

Perhaps they should. Not because they need the cash, but simply as a tax on the lazy analysis on the formation of a new left party. The scene might be funny, but the reality is not.

When poseurs take to social media to dictate terms on who is sufficiently socialist, we end up with a thousand varieties of liberal absolutism popping out of the kind of rabbit-holes which lead people to the most bizarre conclusions. I laughed out loud when my timeline informed me that Jeremy Corbyn is a zionist now, apparently making him unfit to be associated with a party he’s helping to form.

The willingness to jump from zero to 11 when faced with a view that is remotely challenging doesn’t exactly scream socialist to me. It seems to me that there is a fundamental misunderstanding abroad on what “unity” actually is.

Back when I worked in Royal Mail at Govan Delivery Office, Orangemen and republicans managed to stand together on picket lines. They stood there, sometimes for days on end, in all weathers, eventually leaving the pickets to buy each other rounds in the “wrong” pubs. The arguments and slagging-off didn’t stop for a moment, of course.

Neither ditched their fundamental beliefs, neither abandoned their ways of seeing our world, but we managed a unity.

While a great deal of human progress — in fits and starts — has been brought about by unity of purpose, it seems to me that very little is brought about by unity of thought. To live with views unchallenged is to live without learning, and to live without learning is no life at all.

Circular firing squads composed of ever more inbred tribes might make good spectacle, but they make lousy agents for progress. People are tribal, that’s fine, but the problems come when you choose to identify more closely with your tribe’s aristocracy than the working class of the tribe next door.

Our beloved Prime Minister — who in a poll this week was found to be less popular in Scotland than Donald Trump — doesn’t do class, not by any measure. He’s become almost the dictionary definition of the bad winner, suspending those guilty of the mildest dissent, unable or unwilling to actually meet with the parliamentary group he hand-picked, squatting in Number 10 as the windows shrink.

Flailing around for a policy that can save his bacon and combat the rise of Reform UK, he decided to compulsorily issue every adult in Britain and Northern Ireland with a digital “Brit Card.” What could possibly go wrong?

Sir Keir has managed to find unity of purpose. Against him. Sinn Fein, Reform UK, SNP, Tory, Liberals, a few of the braver Labour MPs, and even the nascent Your Party have all come out in opposition.

Still, he can rely on the support of Sir Tony Blair, the last prime minister to have had a go at it; he got 15,000 cards issued before the Tory-Lib Dem coalition scrapped it in 2010.

That pilot is thought to have cost a staggering £4.6 billion, which may explain why Sir Tony has been plugging the idea ever since; after all, he’s down to his last £100 million.

The arguments about it securing borders or preventing unscrupulous employers from hiring people in the country without documentation are, of course, completely spurious.

Employers already have legal duties to carry out those checks; what is lacking is any resources for enforcement. ID cards won’t change that, and it will still leave some of the most vulnerable people on this earth open to exploitation and serfdom in our unofficial economy.

What’s it all for then? It’s a multibillion-pound gesture in identity politics; once again attempting to play to the immigration concerns whipped up by the far right in a way that could never win back the support it fumbles for.

For a fraction of the cost, the Prime Minister could scrap the two-child cap, putting money back in the pockets of the families of the 1.7 million children affected by it and lifting 300,000 kids out of poverty at the stroke of a pen.

That material act would do wonders for people, the economy, and challenging the far right.

It’s so much easier to nod along with the absurdities of nationalism, though, and if your friends get a little richer? Well, job’s a good un.

But the lazy road of zeros and ones, heroes and villains, and the tribe is a dead end.

You don’t need to read this in Marx and Engels; you can learn it by existing in the material world, negotiating and negating the real obstacles and contradictions we face every day of our lives.

Ask questions, try to answer a few. Talk.

You might even enjoy it out there in the real world.

The point, after all, is to forge the unity to change it.