THERE’S no point in getting on the start line unless you want to win. No matter who you are up against, no matter the odds, no matter how tired you really feel. There’s a fine line between geeing yourself on and kidding yourself on, but that’s one moment when it’s blurring lets us step forward and step up.

Much of what we take for granted today was won by folk with no real chance of winning, sometimes without the chance to enjoy their moment drawing breath in peace and in the sun.

Last week I ventured cross-country to Edinburgh and into the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. A building designed to resemble upturned fishing boats, apparently. I’m not sure that’s so obvious unless you’ve scaled the nearby crags, or you’ve managed at some point over the years to hitch a ride in the Sturgeon-copter. On entering, it brings to mind the undercrofts that hide beneath the buildings in ancient towns and cities, with grain, with booze, with booty, and, just occasionally, with gunpowder.

No such luck. Instead, we queue on the polished concrete, dozens of us. Waiting to be issued with the correct lanyard, herded under letters and then wait again for the shepherds to lead us, after a quick check, to our destinations. It’s a busy evening in Parliament, all sorts of receptions hidden away in the cubby-holes built to house meetings and committees that litter the warren.

For a place that was to be the hope of transparency, it’s very easy to get lost, but our shepherds do a great job of making sure no-one wanders off as we go up stairs and round blind corners getting little glimpses through the glass of suited, serious men — all men — staring into space as if their lives depended on it. Maybe they do, maybe ours do.

Suddenly, there’s space, the Garden Lobby. It marks the point where the concrete is stitched onto the old streetscape of Queensberry House, and right on that boundary, on a plinth in the distance, a new face has arrived. A familiar old face squinting out the window at the crags.

The face is former Scottish NUM President Michael “Mick” McGahey, immortalised now in a bust in the parliament he helped nurse into life. Socialist MSP Richard Leonard had made it something of a mission for him to be openly remembered, even celebrated, in Holyrood, as we did last week.

The “great man” theory of history is something that I find problematic, but McGahey described himself as “a product of my class and my movement,” as we all are — but what a class and what a movement.

As a miner, he and his comrades knew what it was to be robbed of education, light, and breath by being sent into the bowels of the earth as little more than a boy. That’s why he and the movement he helped lead cherished them all.

Leonard reminded us of McGahey’s seminal speech to STUC in 1968, demanding the trade union movement call for a Scottish parliament “neither parochial, nor chauvinistic,” but a “workers’ parliament, with horizons which are internationalist, outward-looking, forged on class, part of a worldwide movement, a movement and not a monument.”

On the centenary of his birth, many of us wondered what McGahey might have made of how things have worked out.

Chauvinism is endemic in Scottish politics, and by no means restricted to those who seek to carve out a separate state. The sense that Scotland is somehow inherently more progressive pervades discourse, from government press releases to opposition pleas for attention.

I spoke on a platform last weekend on the subject of tackling the far-right. I had the unenviable job of following human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar. His contribution was as thought-provoking and challenging as ever, and delivered with the kind of passion reserved for those who have lived it. He has.

He’s lived with racist attacks for years, and now faces police harassment and surveillance as he fights for some semblance of justice for the family of Sheku Bayoh, who died after being shackled hand and foot while having the breath crushed out of him by six police officers.

“That’s the kind of stuff that happens in the US, or London, not lovely liberal, cuddly Scotland,” folk tell themselves, supporting the liberal delusion, the national curse.

I pointed to a lack of housing, a lack of teachers, a lack of social services and a lack of hope as the fertile ground the far-right plant their poisonous seeds in. All aided and abetted by an endless supply of fertiliser from the mouth of the Prime Minister as he panders with increasingly implausible deniability.

Not exactly rocket science. Yet on the same platform, former first minister Humza Yousaf — himself routinely a target for appalling racist abuse — pointed to Westminster, to Labour and Tory governments with only the slightest acknowledgement that the SNP had been in power in Scotland for 18 years.

I’m afraid no-one gets off the hook here. In a recent council by-election in Easterhouse, one of the most deprived communities in Glasgow, the SNP won with 689 first preferences, to 573 for Labour and 472 for Reform UK Ltd.

If replicated in 2027 at the council elections, Reform UK Ltd will win a seat there. In the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse Holyrood by-election this week, Labour scored a surprise win on 8,559 votes, to 7,957 for the SNP, and Reform UK Ltd on 7,088.

This outcome is better than a Reform UK Ltd victory every day of the week, but if everyone goes back to Holyrood on Monday, sticks their heads back in the sand, and reverts to the idea this is a “down-south” problem, we are no further forward.

On both occasions, as the vote collapsed three-ways, we were told the outcome is a rejection of the far-right. Maybe they feel the need to say that, but I hope they don’t actually believe it.

If they do, we are truly sleepwalking into the abyss.

The first step to dealing with a problem is accepting it exists in the first place, then doing something about it — ideally addressing the cause. Neither of these things seem to be occurring.

Instead, a reversion to the chauvinism McGahey warned us of, one that, in the darkest corners of their minds, anyone who practices it must surely now know, fuels what they claim to stand against.

McGahey knew who the enemy really was; he knew what working people needed, what they wanted, and he had a worldview ready to back it up.

It’s the kind of worldview that took McGahey and Scottish miners hundreds of miles to the picket lines of Grunwick to stand with female migrant workers under attack; it’s the kind of worldview that offered the open hand of friendship to others in struggle instead of the fist.

Not talk, action.

What he’d have made of his commemoration, I can’t say, but in the end, what he will be remembered for are deeds. Inspiring young trade unionists to “read, read, read,” organising workers to resist “nothing less than a declaration of war” from the government, and taking his union out of the pit gate and into the community.

He drew his last breath on January 30 1999, 13 weeks short of casting a vote in the first Scottish parliamentary election, his ashes later secretly placed in the foundations of Holyrood.

The man who declared “we are a movement, not a monument” is now trapped in a monument to managerialism, but the story isn’t over while somewhere in those undercrofts his ashes wait for the spark.

Until then, his bust looks out that window, urging us to raise our sights — a reminder not of one man, but of what fires of class ambition can forge and must again.