Nicola Sturgeon’s message to Keir Starmer - Stop making Nigel Farage the next PM

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0:33This is a Global Player original podcast. There are real big issues and problems in the UK right now and there's a need to recognise those problems. Nigel Farage is tapping into that sense of pain and suffering and cost of living crisis, state of public services that people are feeling right now. but if you're Keir Starmer whatever people think about levels of immigration or whether it's too high or too low or whatever immigration is not the root cause of the issues that the UK is grappling with right now Brexit is more of a root cause of them than immigration is but if you're Keir Starmer and you're effectively saying yeah Nigel Farage is right, it's immigration so I'm just going to try to be better at dealing with it than he is, I just think that is so misguided.

1:20He's legitimising Nigel Farage's central argument. And if you legitimise your opponent's central argument, then don't be surprised if people vote for your opponent. That is Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's former First Minister, with advice for Keir Starmer in government, telling him there is no point trying to sound like reform, ape the words, the feeling, the rhetoric of Nigel Farage. Otherwise, people might as well just vote reform. She's spoken to me at length about her time in government, the mistake she made and her relationship, awkward as that was, with Alex Salmond. Welcome to The News Agents.

2:03The News Agents. A lot of politicians begin their speeches or their sentences or their conversations with the words, let's be honest, and then they actually aren't. This book is surprisingly candid. it's raw it's unflinching you discuss everything from the impact margaret thatcher had on you your relationship with alex sammond how it broke down your electoral failures in government before your successes your miscarriage and then the extraordinary success of the smp of you personally you talk about the trans rights issues gender definitions and what you got right and wrong there and I think you even described false rumors around a blowjob at one stage I mean reading between I think I've got a go and you end by talking about the police investigation that overshadowed so much of the last years Nicola Sturgeon will come on to all of that but it is definitely Frank and the place I want to start is I think one that will chime with a lot of women which is that sense of image, of having to define your own image as a political neophyte.

3:20And you describe yourself as sort of mimicking those around you, mainly middle-aged men. And you say, as a result, I developed a very serious and austere persona, dark, plain clothes, portrayed as dull, frumpy and unattractive. I came across as a personality-free zone. It's weird to recognise that that's what was happening to you. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't conscious at the time. It's only looking back on it that I recognise that. And I think it will be the experience of lots of women in lots of walks of life, but public-facing roles probably in particular. And if you're surrounded by men as a young woman, there's a confidence issue, regardless of how naturally confident or otherwise you are.

4:02And I wasn't a particularly confident young person. And I think you try to, or at least I tried to overcome that by, what I say in the book, fitting in with my surroundings, mimicking the dress style, the behaviour, the mannerisms, the way of speaking of the men I was surrounded by. And it took me a long time. I was probably into my 30s before I really properly understood that. That didn't get me any plaudits by the men around me. Instead, I was described in the way that you've just read out in the book. But then the thing you then realise is if you decide to go the other way and be really feminine and individualist, that's when you are described as not serious, frivolous.

4:43And so there's this sense that it's really hard to win as a woman because whatever you do in terms of how you present yourself, you're criticised for it. And I guess where I got to, but it took me a long time to get there, was just try to find a way of being comfortable in my own skin, be my own person, not try to be something I wasn't. and it's the advice I will give to young women who ask me these days you know how do you cope with the very gendered you know criticism that women get you've just got to find a way of of being comfortable in your own skin it's not an easy thing to achieve though takes up a lot of headspace I mean just listening to you describing that you know you're kind of I can't fall onto that side and I can't fall onto that side and I've got to be myself but I think as you say when you're studying out in politics you don't really you don't know who that person is and I was really young and I don't regret the career path I took at all I've had an extraordinary career in politics but if I look back on it I probably was a bit too young to get sort of thrust so much into the the limelight I hadn't really worked out who I was and therefore I started to mold myself into something that I probably wasn't in terms of of image but you know right through my career and I think women experience this day in and day out because and this is a sort of additional aspect of this there is so much focus on women in the public eye about what we wear and how we look and hair and tone of voice that inevitably it takes up a lot of headspace that guys just don't have to think about you know the sort of famous quip of Obama that you know he liked to reduce the unnecessary decisions he had to take every day so he would wear the same colour of suit and tie every day, but as a woman you just can't do that.

6:25And Hillary Clinton didn't. And Hillary had to spend, I think she once tottied up the hours that she spent on a campaign just getting her hair and makeup done. So there's these things that just come with the territory, but they make life a little bit tougher. They change how women are seen and portrayed and assessed and judged. You know, it goes deeper than that. I think we still live in a society where certain characteristics and men are seen as attributes. If a man is very decisive as a leader, that's good, strong leadership. If a woman is that way, then they're bossy or aggressive or not a team player.

7:05So is it better now than when I was starting out? In some ways, yes. But I think we've still got a long way to go before any of that really changes. You were very nervous as being seen as Alex Salmond's girl. I And he basically picked you out, plucked you out and said, yeah, she's the next big thing. She's going to be my deputy. And you kind of had to go along for the ride. And yet you're you sort of feel like on every page in the early bit, you're struggling to find your legitimacy, your mandate. So, I mean, the legitimacy and mandate bit came a bit later. You know, when I was first minister initially, you know, I took over when he resigned.

7:47And I did have this, what's the right word to use, obsession about, so it was a year and a half before my first electoral test. I mean, the 2015 general election aside, before the first time I put myself forward as the first minister, you know, candidate for first minister. And I really needed for my own sense of legitimacy to get that mandate in my own right. Nobody else thought I was, you know, lacked legitimacy as first minister, but I did. And going way, way back, you know, Alec really started to push me forward when I was, you know, late teens, about 20. You know, I was 20 when he phoned me up and asked me to stand in the general election in 1992.

8:29And, you know, that was good in lots of ways. He pushed me beyond where my own confidence would have allowed me to go at that time. He saw something in me that I didn't really believe in myself. so that was good and he did it you know he wasn't just being altruistic around me he knew he had to develop strength and depth in the SNP so there was a bit of that at play as well but I guess that that sense that he was always pushing me beyond where I mean it's for other people to say whether he pushed me beyond where my talents would have taken me but he certainly pushed me beyond where my own confidence would have taken me and maybe that developed you know a sort of sense that It lasted right up until just before our relationship broke down, really, of a sense of, even if I told myself it wasn't the case, of still always kind of needing his approval for things.

9:21It was such a complicated relationship, that one. And you write, I mean, you've got a whole chapter on Alex Sam, and you say it was harder to write than you'd ever imagined because your friendship was destroyed and then he died. But there are so many instances in the book, Nicola, where he sounds really toxic. to be quite honest. I mean, long before you get onto the sexual misconduct allegations, he sounds quite a bully. He sounds quite manipulative. And I wonder whether you've... I mean, that's how you describe him. One of the really difficult things about trying to write my relationship with Alec was...

10:02Well, you know, he was dead by the time the book was published, well, by the time it was going to print. and I agonised over the inclusion or excision of the chapter about him and I decided to keep it in because up to the moment he died he was accusing me of being part of a conspiracy. I needed to put, I was going to say my side, the facts of the matter in the book. But because our relationship had broken down, the other really difficult thing about writing about the relationship was it would have been so easy and very tempting to kind of rewrite history and to say he was always this malign influence in my life and that's not true and this is where yes it is complex he for much of my life was a positive influence he achieved more than I might have done if he hadn't bolstered my confidence but yeah it was it was complicated he did have bullying tendencies he didn't bully me certainly not in a way that I would describe as overt but he was in terms of the hair dryer treatment that he would give people the rough treatment.

11:06You describe it at your own wedding, that he kind of arrived late, left early, was just a bit miffed that you hadn't asked him to make the speech. There was a sense of having to be the bride at the wedding, as they say. Yeah, I mean, there was elements of that. But, but, but, but, but, we, for long, long periods of my life, we had a good relationship. We achieved amazing things together. And maybe, I mean, he's unfortunately no longer here. And maybe I just need, for my own sake, not to have that all kind of tainted, because we did achieve extraordinary things together. And if now I was to try to say, well, he was terrible at every single stage, I don't actually think that would be fair to him.

11:49But it also wouldn't be fair to me, because it would sort of undermine the things that we did together and achieved together. So you're absolutely right to describe it as complex. I sometimes think, even having written about it in the book, I sometimes think I will, for the rest of my life, be a bit of my brain trying to process that relationship. When we fell out I never feel that is quite the right way to describe it. Well I mean spell it out. You say fell out but he actually accused you of a conspiracy against him. Yeah I mean that's how people describe it and it often irritates me when, because it's almost like we had a political disagreement or something and it wasn't that.

12:24He was He confessed to the behaviour to you, some of the behaviour that he was being accused of, he'd confessed to you. Well he would have he basically gave me a description of one of the things that in my mind was an admission of deeply inappropriate behaviour. He would have described it as not an admission as you know he was it was all a misunderstanding but he was accused of something. He definitely wanted me to help make it go away. I wouldn't do that and instead of just he was acquitted of every criminal charge that he was tried for so I think it's always important to say that but in the course of his trial in the course of what he said to me there is no doubt in my mind he behaved towards women at times that was deeply inappropriate and instead of I guess reflecting on that looking at himself in the mirror trying to you know be a better man in future he had to turn it into something in which he was the victim of a conspiracy so he accused me of orchestrating this conspiracy against him that is so ludicrous you know why would I have done that how would I have done that it would have involved but it is it is not true and but that's what he accused me of so when I hear it described as we fell out it just somehow feels just an inadequate description of what happened but when it did happen I went through I've described it in the book because it is the best description I can think of it was a grieving process I used to have vivid dreams about him and everything would be fine and I'd wake up and that kind of way you wake up from a dream and it takes you a few seconds to remember it's not real and then went through that again when he died even after everything that happened felt you know hit by this wave of loss when he died so because your fortunes in your political careers have been so entwined I wonder when you think about the 2014 the independence referendum that you fought together I mean does a bit of you wonder whether he set the cause back I mean do you think if you had been leader for that referendum would you have got independence over the line?

14:30I don't know part of me would love to think that and sit here and say yes but I don't know I really don't and I don't think I would sit here and claim that. I talk in the book about the times I was frustrated with him during that campaign when he didn't appear to apply apply himself in the way that I know he was capable of. At other points, he was absolutely brilliant. I still, to this day, I chop and change my mind about whether if only we'd done a bit better, we could have got it over the line versus actually given where we started, maybe where we got it was as far in that moment in time that we could have got it.

15:07He definitely, in the course of that campaign, I think could have done things better. And there's no doubt. Would that have made the decisive difference? we had some yeah we had conversations you know i was i talk about the the process of producing the white paper on independence when we had a very strained period in our relationship when he just wouldn't engage with it decided to piss off to that's not the right way go on a trade mission to china just before it was due to go to print hadn't read it you know me having to i was having to fax copies of it to china so to try to get him to read it so yeah we had some pretty tense exchanges around that time.

15:50I mean, did he ever blame you? Did you ever? No, he never blamed me for, yeah, no, no, he didn't. I want to go on to some of the stuff that happened later in the last few years. The question of gender self-ID. This was a big moment in the Scottish Parliament. It essentially ended up being blocked by Rishi Sunak. and you again super frank in this chapter you say I failed to engage substantively enough with the concern that making it easier to legally change gender also made it easier for dangerous men to access women-only spaces why do you think you failed to engage substantially enough um so I I try to sort of give a sort of rationale for that in the book and I think it is rooted in when we embarked on this proposed change it was back in 2016 rightly or wrongly it wasn't controversial at the time there was total cross-party consensus i talk about a hustings a leader's hustings that happened in in 2016 where the leaders of all of the main party said we're going to do this it wasn't something scotland was doing as a groundbreaking experiment and this legislation was on the statute book already in the Republic of Ireland and many other countries.

17:14So I think I didn't see it as the great big controversial thing that it later became. And I think that's probably why I was slow to recognise that there were concerns there, that even if I thought they were unfounded and could be answered, I didn't properly engage sufficiently in order to do that. Did you just hear bigotry rather than concern? So I didn't just hear bigotry, but I think there was also, at the point, and I say in the book, I mean, I haven't changed my view on this issue and I will argue my corner and argue my case on this view, but when I realised it had become as divisive and polarised as it had, I should have paused and seen if we could find a different way of achieving the same outcome.

17:58I think at that point, one of the reasons... Why would that have been different if you essentially were still achieving the same outcome? And maybe that's one of the reasons I didn't, as I didn't know that it would make any difference. When I say achieving the same outcome, what I mean is a world in which, I've fought for women's rights all my life and will continue to do so, a world in which women's rights are not just protected but enhanced and we fend off some of the real threats to women's rights that are all around us right now and trans people get to live with respect and dignity in a way that they often haven't and trans people have always existed.

18:32That's what I mean by the same outcome. Could we have come at that differently? And I think in that moment, I doubted whether a pause would deliver that. And maybe that's the point, coming back to your question, that I thought there was... And I remember your colleague Lewis interviewing me when I was still First Minister about this, and I said something then that has, I think, been misrepresented, because it's taken as me saying everybody who has a different view on me on this is transphobic and racist and misogynist. I wasn't saying that. I don't think most people are. But I do think this whole debate has been kind of hijacked and weaponised by some people who very definitely are.

19:12And maybe I just thought there was too much of that in the debate for any attempt to make a difference. So that's my... I mean, isn't the truth that most people sit in, the vast majority of people sit in the middle of kind of trying to muddle through and trying to make sense of something with the most humanity they can. But there are extremes on both sides. I think that's the point I was trying to make. And there are extremes on the other side as well. That's what I'm saying. Absolutely. So the thing is, I think it is undeniable that on, and yes, it is on both sides, but let me just talk about the side I was talking about in the interview that I referenced there.

19:49I think it's undeniable that this whole debate has been picked up and co-opted into the wider culture war, battle against wokeism, all of that. And there are some people who see pushback against trans rights as the kind of entry to pushback against other rights as well. And I think that is undeniable. Do you think that J.K. Rowling has been corrupted? No, I don't have any animus towards J.K. Rowling. I don't think that's the same in reverse, but I am not accusing her of anything. I do think, and I don't doubt the sincerity with which she holds her views. if I have an issue with how JK Rowling goes about this debate there does seem at times to be a or it seems to me an attempt to sort of just be gratuitously you know cruel to trans people sometimes and I don't think that is I don't think that's warranted I think if we all could take a step back from that and try to say what I didn't do a few years ago is look because you're right most people want women's rights to be protected and want trans rights to be protected.

20:58So instead, the whole climate around this right now is awful for trans people. I mean, it's really difficult for trans people to live in any kind of sense of peace and dignity right now. And I don't believe the majority of people want that to be the case. So can we get back to some kind of, how do we find a way of depolarising this and achieving both these things? Because the one thing I really, really believe really strongly, and I'm not going to just kind of change my mind on this is that women's rights and trans rights are not irreconcilable. So that t-shirt, I mean let me just ask you about the t-shirt because this is J.K.

21:37Rowling putting a t-shirt on which called you a destroyer of women's rights. I don't know if you saw that. I don't know, how did that make you feel?

21:49I, that for me is, she disagrees with me vehemently on this issue and that's her right. I don't have any animus towards her because of that but it just seemed to me that when you go there and I was the first minister of course I should have got really robust scrutiny and pushed back to things I was doing but that just seemed to me a move that was about increasing the temperature and raising the sort of toxicity around the debate and personalising it to a degree that was not likely to help find any common ground. Now, she would say, and I'm not going to try and put words into her mouth, but no doubt she would say, I wasn't trying to find common ground.

22:37And maybe there's a bit of truth in that too. Well, she might say, I mean, I guess the flip side is she thought the temperature was raised and that the marginalised, in her mind, would be the women. Let me just put the Irvin Walsh thought to you. He comes at it from a different place, but he says he basically accused you of forcing the trans issue down people's throats and pushing them into the arms of the likes of Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, etc. Pushing back the cause of independence. He says something that should have been a fringe issue was allowed to leak into the whole independence debate.

23:09I mean, I just I don't accept that characterization. I, you know, comes back to this. Did it get too big, I suppose, is the question. Yeah I think it did but was that and I take my share of the responsibility of that but was that entirely down to me this was not an issue that I spent all that much time on when it as I said earlier on it wasn't something that I unilaterally decided to do and to push down people's throats this was something that all parties in 2016 Scottish election all parties had some all of them use different formulations and different wording but everyone had a commitment on this in their manifestos.

23:47So it wasn't some obsession I had that I, and that's where I, and then, yeah, it got too big. But, you know, it is where it is. And I don't know, it sounds, it feels to me sometimes as if people will just, they're desperate for me to say, I was wrong. I changed my mind. I admit that on this issue. And I will, as I've tried to do, I will analyse and process and try to reflect on the things I could have done differently and better. But I'm not going to, I didn't come into politics to, you know, just to make my own life a little bit easier, just to, you know, dump all over a stigmatised minority.

24:28I will always stand up for trans rights. I will always stand up for women's rights. And, you know, while I've got breath in my body, I'll argue that these two things are not in the tension that some people think they are. So if you were in power now... Thank goodness I'm not. Well, I'm sure it's been so... For all sorts of reasons. But talk me through the Supreme Court ruling. I mean, how would you interpret that? Like, what would be happening in Scotland now? Well, I mean, the government is reviewing right now how to give effect to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruling is the Supreme Court ruling.

24:58And for me, it comes back to something I said earlier. I wouldn't be arguing against what the highest court in the land said. I believe in the rule of law, and the Supreme Court adjudicates on what the law is and that's what it's done. I mean, Isla Bryson, and I know you'll call this a gotcha question, and it's not a gotcha question, it's just a sort of simplification question. Isla Bryson, who is the convicted rapist, you would call a man, not a woman, right? Yeah, the reason I, apart from just my communication skills desert me back in the day when that came, Isla Bryson was in a woman's prison, I think, for a day, being assessed in the same way trans prisoners had been assessed for years and years and years and ended up in a male prison.

25:40And the reason I hesitate to get pulled down, talk about who Isla Bryson is, is because I know that anything I say in Isla Bryson doesn't stay with Isla Bryson. I don't care about Isla Bryson's feelings one iota. Isla Bryson is a rapist. But I know that anything I say about Isla Bryson immediately gets transferred onto the whole trans community. And I'm just... It comes back to this thing, you know, that might make my life easier. It might make it easier to get through an interview, but I'm not going to be part of this kind of pile on from some quarters on a stigmatised and vulnerable community.

26:21So on your question about the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court is opined on what the law of the land is. If the implementation of that does mean, and I don't think it should or has to, but if it ends up meaning that trans people can't live their lives with basic dignity and respect, then the job of politicians in Parliament is to decide how to deal with that and how to make sure the law allows trans people to live with dignity and respect while also protecting the rights of women. I watched your resignation speech. Was it the 15th of February? Yeah. I mean, we were all transfixed. because no one saw that.

27:01Except everybody had been predicting it. And then everybody's in Scotland. I mean, there had been so much. Oh, she's going to quit soon. She's going to quit. She's off to do something. And then you said you weren't. I mean, you made that very clear. And you said, no, I'm not going to go. You know, plenty of gas left in the tank. And you talked about, you said you'd been doing this for nonstop for 25, 30 years. You wanted time to go and have coffees with your niece and nephews, I seem to remember. I think they had different ideas. And that's what you said in the speech. you said if they're still around for me you wanted a normal life what was the thing that just the bolt that suddenly made you go I want out I mean was it the gender debate or was it the length of time you've been in or was it I mean you were asked about the police investigation and the SNP finances and everyone made that connection and I totally given what happened eight days later if I'd been watching that I would have said well there's the reason but it wasn't it absolutely wasn't I had no I swear that it wasn't.

27:59There was a month between me announcing my resignation and actually stepping down. And anybody who was around me in that time says I was happier, more relaxed, looking forward. If I had any inkling of what was coming down the track of me, I would have been unable to function. But you knew the money was missing from the coffers, didn't you, at that point? I think I need to be careful, given the live proceedings of how I characterise this. I knew the investment. If anything, I was more irritated at that point than worried about why it was taking so long. But I didn't know what was coming down the track.

28:31I absolutely didn't. So the gender recognition debate wasn't that other than I felt that was an example of one of the things I was starting to feel that I had become a polarising figure and people would come at issues of substance through a prism of whether they liked me or not rather than look at it on its merits. But fundamentally, it was COVID. I was, and it took me a while to realise this, I was utterly exhausted after COVID, mentally, physically. I'd lost a bit of my appetite for the cut and thrust of politics. I just... So you were part of the workforce that didn't want to go back to work after COVID.

29:08I went back to work after COVID. I won an election after or during COVID. But, you know, it was... There was something, obviously, working away in my subconscious and then just suddenly it burst into the front of mind. and I did an interview at the start of that year with Laura Kunzberg and it was just after Jacinda Ardern had announced her resignation I mean yeah Jacinda Ardern was that was it a sort of contagion? it wasn't a contagion but it was maybe it maybe was what helped bring it from the subconscious to front of mind because when Laura asked me the question because she used the Jacinda phrase have you still got you know plenty of gas and I was like of course I do but do you know what I thought about that after that interview and it just suddenly dawned on me that I remember getting up that morning and reading or seeing on television that Jacinda had said she was resigning and when I started to think back a few days later to that I suddenly realised that my primary emotion at that moment of hearing her make that speech was envy.

30:11I thought, I wish that was me. I think that was the moment that it went from just somewhere deep in my subconscious as to, no, actually, this is time for me to go. So you imagine this lovely bucolic time when you're going to be left alone to have coffees with your niece and nephews, and then eight days later, the police investigation starts, and before we know it, there is a blue tent erected in your garden that looks like a murder scene. Do you think the police overreacted? I, do you know what, I want to say no, and I'm going to say no because if I ever thought that that was the case then it would raise such fundamental issues in my head about the operation of justice in my country and I don't want that to be the case.

30:59So I'm going to... The very way you're spelling this out now suggests that you do think that you're... I don't know, it was a very... And I'm also... We know there are proceedings still live so I am going to be and I have to be careful what I say. It was a pretty brutal thing to happen but I've got to trust that that's what they thought was necessary and they did that for good reasons. Do you think the tent was performative? I mean, was there a reason why you need to have a blue tent? I think if the police were answering this, I think what they would say was, and this sounds a bit bizarre, but equally I can see why they would say it, that it was about privacy, it was about trying to do whatever they were doing in the house without people seeing it firsthand.