MPs Harriet Cross and Cat Smith limber up for London Marathon
"I'm hoping for something in the three hours mark, but we'll see how it goes on the day. Mid-three hours would be a happy result."The MP for Gordon and Buchan is an experienced runner - in 2023 she won a 50km (31 mile) ultra marathon - but still admits to a bit of nervousness about London. She has done plenty of mountain marathons, but this will be her first on a road surface. "This is different because it's flat... when you're going up a hill you get to walk, so this is a lot more daunting."And then there are the crowds. In Scotland, where she usually runs, she says there are normally a few hundred people gathering to watch.Running in front of 50,000 people will be "daunting", she says.
'Maranoia'
For Labour MP Cat Smith, Sunday will be her third London Marathon, yet she also has a few nerves. She says she is "fully diagnosing" herself with "maranoia" - the anxiety and fear that can hit a runner as marathon day approaches. "The last few days before you do the run you start thinking back to all the training runs and thinking 'maybe I should have done another one, or maybe I should've tried harder or worked harder, and maybe I need to go back to the gym and do a few more weights because are my knees really strong enough?'. "You start questioning everything, but I think that's totally normal and I recognise that from previous times," the Lancaster and Wyre MP adds.Unlike Cross, she is not looking to break any political pavement pounding records. Last time, she managed six hours six minutes. "I'm incredibly slow - I am the tortoise who will get there in the end," she says."When you compete a marathon, that is the real prize."
Political parallels
As an experienced London Marathon-er, does she have any words of wisdom for her fellow parliamentarian?"I have absolutely no advice at all that is worth having. Just keep one foot in front of the other," she says.The pair will be among 16 MPs running the race on Sunday - and Cross thinks there are some parallels between running a marathon and a political life. "It needs determination, needs focus. You need to not be distracted by what other people are doing around you," she says."If you go off at the start of the marathon with someone who is trying to get a two thirty and you're nowhere near, that you're not going to get very far."Cross is raising money for Kayleigh's Wee Stars, a charity that raises money for families of children who have terminal illnesses.Smith is running for the Bay Hospital charity, which she says raises money for the "nice extras" that the NHS doesn't provide, as well as some medical equipment. You can listen to the interviews on BBC Radio 4's Today in Parliament at 23.30 BST on Friday and after that on BBC Sounds.
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Future Focused MUCH of the dismay about being trapped within the Union is the overwhelming sense of decay and decline that pervades late Britain. If this feeling reached its apogee at the death of the monarch, it can be seen daily in the appointment of ridiculous people to the House of Lords, the overarching power of the government within [[Westminster]] (as witnessed by the actions of Keir Starmer's whips' office against his own party last week) or the immersive deference inculcated by being subjects of a monarch in the 21st century. The feeling of being trapped in an ancient regime that is unreformable and corrupt at its core is overwhelming and debilitating. Beyond this fusion of cronyism and decay, though, is the reality of collapsing living standards, grotesque social inequality and elite grandeur. The response is a populist movement of the far-right that eulogises a mythical past. 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Framing an independent Scotland as a project for future generations would be a reset for the entire independence movement, and would require a complete overhaul of thinking. But somehow, somewhat improbably, Swinney has stumbled on an idea: "During the next parliament, we reach the point where there will be one million people eligible to vote who, last time around, were too young to do so or not even born. A generation has now clearly passed.' This has two consequences. First, we begin to sweep aside the fragile excuse that the Unionist community has hidden behind for repressing basic democracy in holding up the phrase 'for a generation' and assert that that time has passed. Second, we go to, engage with and inspire the generation that are now eligible to vote, and who are overwhelmingly pro-independence. To do this properly, and to begin to explore the generational issues I touched on, would require a break from 2014 and an effort to re-imagine the case for independence in a much more expansive timeframe. This wouldn't be another 'campaign' with slogans and attack lines, it wouldn't be a politics of resentment, it would be a politics of imagination and possibility. That Britain is in a morbid state is plain for anyone to see, but that must be contrasted with a movement that offers not just a constitutional off-ramp but an alternative to the politics of fear and resentment that activates the populist right. In this sense, we need to rethink the case for independence and recast it entirely. In the words of Marshall McLuhan: 'Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.' Remaining in this Union means being engaged in the 'slow cancellation of the future'. For Scotland to be 'reborn' demands that we step out of that paradigm and away from the hyper-nostalgia and denialism that characterises the most regressive elements of British and American nationalism.
