WHEN the nights are long, the days short, and a gale howls outside, it gives a little time to reflect on the year gone by.

I’ve always had a thing for numbers. A few decades and several stone ago, I was a pretty useful time trialist. It’s an odd kind of bike race, just the road, your breath, the thump of your heart as you race against time itself.

On the best of days, 50 miles seems to pass in a few minutes, an otherworldly experience that sends you floating above the road and yourself, and all the time, every pebble, bump, and curve on the highway noticed, noted, and understood in minute detail.

Asked at the time and since what you actually think about during such an experience, all I’ve ever really been able to say is “maths.” Starting out, I decided that bike computers (as they were known at the time) weren’t for racing, they were for training. Riding on restricted gears, I used to work out how many times I’d have to pedal to get around the course and how fast I’d have to do it to beat first myself, then anyone else out on the road.

Other calculations would swing by on the way, and the result, I can see now, was something akin to a mantra, a self-hypnosis of sorts. The only thing that ever broke the spell was a man standing at the side of the road with an arrow pointing up or down, a speaking clock to my internal tick.

I found out later that my dad pointed the arrow down as I passed, even if I was up by a minute, but it did me no harm. In every other aspect of life, he used to criticise me for being in a rush, a case of the pot calling the kettle. He never stopped, every second counted.

Thirty summers later, we sat in the hospital, engaging in our other joint pastime, watching the news. Bulletins were dominated by the tale of a super-yacht sinking with the loss of seven lives off the coast of Sicily — the crew who lost their lives barely mentioned as pics of the entrepreneurs and investment bankers who died filled the screens.

“There’s people dying every day in that sea trying to find a better life, and this … this is what’s reported?” My dad was incredulous.

A few days later, he’d gone.

He’d had the best care in the world from his beloved NHS as he did his bit to get the CWU’s New Deal for Workers on the government’s agenda. Another baby step on the road to a renewed working-class confidence, but the seeds of equality won’t plant themselves.

I’ve still got tools made by my grandfather, great-grandfather and even older. Don’t worry, this isn’t another toolmaker speech — they were blacksmiths — but a step forward in law for working people is just a tool, no more. It’s as good as the person wielding it, as good as our imagination, as good as our ability to use it to forge the next upgrade.

The balance of forces still runs against us — laws and rights will only take us so far — what good there is to come for us lies in the place that law began its life, in the workplace, the community, the union branch.

These were my father’s natural habitats, but for many, the many, such meetings and organisations don’t feel like home, and we’re all — literally — the poorer for it.

I’m still in mourning for him, I suppose. For weeks in hospital, every tick of the clock, every cup of tea from a nurse, every detail of the gadgetry, the medicine, the care, and every single word seemed to occupy the universe. Collapsed in an instant.

It’s hardly a unique human experience, people go through it every day and try to figure out what they do with the tools once the worker has left.

My profound luck is to have had the chance to share the same space with him for a minute or two; others are less lucky.

While I sat with my Dad, the sun blazing in the window and onto my back, uncounted thousands of people scrambled in the dust, hauling shards of concrete in the forlorn hope of finding life or, at the very least, a loved one to bury.

More than 45,000 people are known to have been robbed of a chance at life by Israeli forces, but some medics estimate this is just the tip of the iceberg, predicting the real figure to be closer to 186,000 if the dust ever is allowed to settle in Gaza.

Still, our broadcast media clings to the lower figure, with the ever-present preface that it comes from the Hamas government, the implication, of course, being that it’s inflated — the very same broadcasts that gave us wall-to-wall coverage of the super-yacht disaster that so appalled my Dad.

Over 100 people are known to have drowned crossing the Mediterranean this year in crafts that wouldn’t even be considered as a life raft for that yacht, and another 52 died in the channel this year, barely meriting a footnote in some television report about numbers of small boats coming to get us.

Those small boats, or the desperate people on them, aren’t the reason a record-breaking 10,000 children in Scotland and 150,000 in England will see in Christmas in temporary accommodation this year.

They aren’t the reason Scotland still leads Britain in zero-hours contracts, that pensioners across the country will die for the want of heat this winter, or millions will have to rely on foodbanks to fill their stomachs and toy banks to fill their children’s Christmas stockings.

It should be clear enough by now that it is not enough to try to shock with the awful numbers I’ve rhymed off here, though, they have a sad tendency of bouncing off people like the ticker-tape stats at the bottom of the 24-hour news — not that many of them would ever make it onto that tape, of course.

Even the numbers marshalled can be made not to count through the sheer sensory overload of our time, as well as good old-fashioned censorship or its more dangerous cousin, self-censorship, while large tracts of our media are as scared of incurring the ire of Nigel Farage as they are of a rogue, genocidal state.

That’s why this paper matters, why trade union branches matter, and why every community activity we undertake in the coming year must be placed in the context of something bigger than any of us — class.

There have been many notable victories for workers in this country this year, from trade union recognition agreements to decent pay raises and insourcing, and they must all be celebrated, but without an understanding, they were delivered through class solidarity, they risk melting like snow off a dyke.

That solidarity must be more than understanding that the old mantra that “workers united will never be defeated” is true, it is the job of the socialists to make the case to their fellow workers in Glasgow that the worker on the small boat is our brother, that the bereaved mothers of Gaza are our sisters, and that we better get on being each others’ keepers, because the men on the super-yachts aren’t coming to the rescue.

The challenge we will face in 2025 is the challenge we have always faced: to unite the struggles for dignity and the sanctity of life around this globe, to replace the white noise of the world’s Farages, Trumps and Musks, with hope-rooted knowledge of ourselves, our class, and in the strength of our deeds.

Let’s make the uncounted millions count this year.