Clarion call from cyclists to carry on the fight for socialism on two wheels

Those behind the recent “coup” in the National Clarion Cycling Club (Keir Hardie’s cycling club jettisons socialism, 14 June) have, like so many others nowadays, misunderstood the concept of inclusion, treating it like a mantra to be trotted out without actually thinking. Inclusion can only be invoked in order to remove irrelevant obstacles to joining an organisation.

For almost all organisations, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and many other attributes are irrelevant, so they should not be an obstacle. Not so when it comes to political leanings in the context of an overtly political cycling club. One might as well try to persuade the Spurs supporters’ club to admit a card-carrying Arsenal fan. Those who are so unaware of the current political situation as to think socialism “irrelevant” should do the decent thing, leave the Clarion and form their own club, to which they would then be free to invite whoever they wish.
Jim Grozier
Brighton & Hove Clarion Cycling Club

• Many years ago, I joined the National Clarion Cycling Club because it was a socialist organisation. I didn’t expect to talk about the theories of Marx and Engels while out on club runs, or have lengthy discussions on dialectical materialism at the weekly club night. What I did expect, and I was not disappointed, was a comradeship of cyclists who were interested in their fellow human beings and whose behaviour, based on the principles they held, would provide something far more meaningful than a mere love of cycling.

The Clarion Cycling Club and the wider Clarion movement helped to make history. In the days when the working classes were overworked and underpaid, Clarion men and women were in the forefront of those who expounded the theories for a new way of life and who helped to bring about the material benefits we enjoy today. They dared to dream of a new society, a socialist society.

I was secretary of the National Clarion Cycling Club for three years until 2006, when I helped to set up a new organisation, the National Clarion Cycling Club 1895, to protect the founders’ commitment to “combine the pleasures of cycling with the propaganda of socialism”. The Clarion ideal that socialism is the hope of the world has survived for more than 125 years and the link between cycling and socialism will, for some at least, remain unbroken.
Charles Jepson
Secretary, National Clarion CC 1895

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