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Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens.

My guest this week on political thinking won gold medals at all of them.

Over her career, she won 11 Paralympic goals and broke 30 world records in the Paralympics and the World Championships.

Yet Tanny Gray Thompson,

Baroness Gray Thompson, as she's been for the past 15 years, has said she loves being in the House of Lords more than she loved being an athlete. Since one of Britain's most decorated

Paralympians gave up wheelchair racing, gave the others a bit of a chance, she's campaigned for the

rights of disabled people and now finds herself at the centre of two of the most high-profile

debates in Parliament, the debate about assisted dying and whether to cut welfare benefits

for disabled people. She warns about what she calls some really horrible rhetoric about benefit cuts,

which she says will make some disabled people's lives intolerable.

Tanny Gray Thompson, Baroness Gray Thompson, thanks for joining me on political thinking.

Thank you.

Is it really true that you love being in the House of Lords more than you loved being an athlete?

I do. I mean, it can be frustrating at times. You know, you're not sitting there at 2 o'clock in the morning when you've been in the chamber for 10 hours thinking, yeah, this is amazing.

But I think partly it's about trying to make change. Sport, I mean, I loved my career in sport, but it's inherently selfish,

and it's about you and trying to beat everybody else. And my plan always, you know, when I retired,

well, I was going to do law conversion and become a lawyer, and then I sort of slightly got distracted into politics.

But for me, I think I had so much privilege growing up compared to other disabled children.

It's about trying to make that more even.

And to be honest, I thought some of the fight would have been done by now,

that I wouldn't still be fighting for the same things.

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