YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicola Sturgeon

lines on the record: 52
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Have a period of maybe living life a bit back to front and just taking the luxury of enjoying certain things, of finding fulfillment and happiness in other ways, and just enjoying the kind of luxury of being able to pick and choose of where I happen to be in the world at any given time, what I want to do, and find not by trying to force it, but through a process just finding where I can make a difference what I want to use the voice I've got such as it is to try to influence and what things make me a happy person.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of some of that, I think so a couple of random thoughts on this, and I think a fair bit about it. I think being First Minister, being Prime Minister of a country, it's so unique. You can't replicate that in anything else you do. And looking, I think, at some leaders name and no names, I think the ones who possibly struggle most are the ones who try to replicate that. And so I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. For me, it's about finding or discovering or rediscovering what else in life gives me fulfillment and happiness. And I use that second word very deliberately. I don't regret anything about the career path I took. It's been a huge privilege and I don't regret a second of it. And this has been my choice. I sacrifice certain things along the way. I didn't do a lot of the things people of my age and stage in life would have done. And I sometimes think I'm going to.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm coming for you. I'm going to basically launch a rival podcast. I'm not. So I think because the last couple of years have been so tumultuous and unexpected and unusual, I kind of need a bit of time to rebalance myself and just, I guess, just enjoy being”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sense that if you had a few years ago put in front of me this scenario that would unfold, I would have said, I won't survive that. I just won't be able to get through that. And yet I have. And it's been, I've had really low dark moments along the way, but through inner resilience, through recognising I needed professional help at one stage, through friends who have been much better friends to me than I've ever been to anybody else in the past, something I hope to put right in future, I've come through a really difficult time and can say hand on heart that I'm probably happier than I've ever been before. And so there's something in, I'm not a different person, I'm the same person, but I've got a different perspective and outlook on life today. And while I wish that certain things hadn't happened, that's probably a healthy place to be.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said to me, You should talk to somebody, and I've always maybe West of Scotland kind of mentality about these things that, and wrongly I should say, I'm utterly wrong about this. But I suppose I've always had that sense of going to seek professional help is a sign of weakness. But the friend taught me into it. I went to see a counsellor and it helped me hugely. And it didn't take long, a few sessions of actually talking to somebody with a bit of distance and obviously training for me to bring myself back out of the kind of whole I'd fallen into. And I suppose that's maybe the sort of, I don't know, sharpest illustration of what I've kind of learned over the past couple of years. Because the past couple of years for me have been the most testing of my life. And a lot of it's played out across the media, so I don't need to go into it all. And I'm often struck by...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of see it now as almost the straw that came close to breaking the camel's back in that period. I think if all the other stuff that I had faced since standing down as First Minister hadn't happened, then that COVID inquiry experience might not have had that impact on me. It was accumulation of things and it brought me to that point. And it was a friend who...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll fight for the rights of minorities for as long as I've got breath in my body. It's when this became so toxic. And I don't know that this would have made a difference incidentally, but if I could have my time again, I think I would oppress the pause button instead, like, okay, let's all take a breath, take a step back, and see if we can find a way of moving forward on this issue that avoids or reduces that polarisation and sense of division. Might not have worked, but I wish I had done that.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe that trans people should be respected and protected. There have always been trans people, there always will be. We should try to take away the discrimination and the stigmatisation, afford greater dignity and respect. I'm a feminist to my core and always have been and always will be. The risk to women comes from abusive men. In any group, and I'm talking to the trans group here, you'll find bad faith people, bad people. You know, there are some biologically born women who abuse children. In no other group do we say the bad people should define the rights of the whole group, which seems to me what we started to do with trans people. So I believe the rights of trans people and the rights of women are not in conflict and shouldn't be in conflict. If I have an overarching regret about this, it's not that I believe something I shouldn't have believed or should have changed my mind.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commitment to reform in our manifestos at that election. And also, we were not doing something groundbreaking or not proposing something groundbreaking. Many other countries had already done this. The Republic of Ireland has this on the statute book for a long time. And that sense of consensus, no great controversy around this continued right up until, I don't know, 2021, 2022, at which point it became mired in the culture war. Part of that was that many people had concerns that they genuinely hold and I do not take away from that. But there was also a sense that it was being whipped up from certain quarters as part of that bigger culture war.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them have. I've got many friends and colleagues on the feminist progressive left who are of that view. I'm not going to deny that, but I've got many, many who are not of that view. So I think they're, and fair play to any campaign that manages to make people believe they are the overwhelming majority representation of an issue. I think with the help of media along the way, I think they've managed to do that. It's an interesting thing. You know, when we first, or the issue of gender recognition reform was first mooted in Scotland, it was back in the 2016 Scottish election. And at that point, every party was committed to it. So it was myself, for the SNP, Ruth Davis, and for the Tories, Kes Dugdale for the Labour, Willie Rennie for the Liberals. We're all at a hustings in that election campaign. The question was asked, are we all committed to it? And all of us in one form or another had a”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find it astonishing that anybody would take issue with that statement. Now, what people, because literally everything I say on this issue is misrepresented and twisted in some way, I am not saying, and I've never said that everybody who opposes trans rights or the gender recognition legislation that I took through Parliament falls into that category, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm sorry, I think whatever side of this debate you're on, it is a simple statement of fact that there are many people who have attached themselves to this debate, you know, people who would support Trump or in America or Farage here being opposed to trans rights is at the moment the acceptable form of bigotry. And if you scratch the surface of that, you'll find that these people are also homophobic and sexist and misogynist and maybe racist as well. Even people who fundamentally disagree with me on this issue, I, I, I...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I say in the book, and I've been careful in what I say, and I'm going to be careful here for obvious reasons, because getting anywhere into the rights and wrongs substantively on this issue would take all of us into legal waters that we're not able to get into. So if I even put a toe into the substance of this, then that's a problem. I can see why people think that is what I've said in the book, and I think that's probably as far as it's safe for me to go at the moment.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Period where I thought I was getting more grief and being scrutinized more for what I knew when than he was for what he was actually alleged to have done.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've searched, I've really searched my soul in this over the years since of, you know, should I have known? Was I willfully blind to this? But I didn't know that there was any sense of inappropriate sexual behaviour. I've spoken openly about what would be described as sometimes bullying behaviour. I'd heard rumours over the years about consensual affairs and always took the view, rightly or wrongly, that that was none of my business. What consent adults get up to is up to them. But no, until all of this came to light, I did not think or I certainly did not know and I didn't think he was somebody that acted inappropriately around women. And again, going back to the whole issue of women being treated differently, there were times, and I don't want to put, I don't want to overstate this, but there were times around that.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Electorally stupid because if you say to people with farages actually right, then I suspect they're going to vote for the real thing rather than the person that is seen to be playing catch-up. In Scotland right now, one of the biggest economic challenges we face is a population that is not big enough for all the things we need to do. We need immigration. So I just want to see progressive politicians have the guts to stand up and argue the case on some of these things. It might be electorally uncomfortable for a period because these things tend to go in historical cycles. But if you abandon the ground and cede the argument to your opponents, as I think is happening too much just now, then frankly, I think we're all in a pretty sticky wicket on some of this stuff.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economically, it's all down to women's rights or gay rights or trans rights. And that is fine in terms of there are people in this world who want to argue these things because that's what they want to believe. My real despair, and at times right now it is despair, is that people on the progressive left or centre left of politics are just abandoning that territory. So for me, it's not that the Democrats in America or Labour or the SNP in a UK sense should be abandoning these issues to focus on issues more relevant to people. The challenge is to show people why these issues are so relevant to their living standards and to the health of the community that they happen to be living in. And instead, you take immigration. I deplore the way in which Starmer is effectively abandoning this argument to Farage.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely feel that. I think that's you boil everything down. And my big, biggest worry about the state of democracy, the state of humanity right now is that these issues that I think are so vital, you know, the planet is burning. I'm sitting here in Glasgow in early August and we've got an amber warning for wind and rain. Climate change is happening right now. There are parts of the world that are becoming uninhabitable because of climate change and yet we seem to have slipped into this belief or large parts of the populations of the world have slipped into this belief that it's the action to tackle climate change that is impoverishing people, not climate change itself. And similarly on equality issues, we've slipped into the sense that the problems that a working class man is facing.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know asking about it. But going back to misogyny and sexism, I mean, that's undoubtedly an aspect of that. Women in politics are treated differently to men in almost every respect. You know, the focus on what we wear, how we look, the tone of our voice, things in men that are seen as attributes of leadership, in women, their character flaws. And that different treatment was true when I was growing up in politics it is still true today. And then you add in the factor of social media and the toxicity of social media. And I think while there are more women in politics today, I think the sense of public life being a bit of a hostile environment for women is actually greater today than it was in my earlier days in politics.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I've often wondered because it was an episode I won't go into just now in the 2015 election of a story that came out of a discussion between me and a French ambassador, a different French ambassador. And I just often wondered, is this some kind of bot factory that's taken all these little ingredients and thrown up the story that had no basis?”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's so ingrained and embedded that women, or maybe everybody, but certainly speaking for myself, you don't always recognize it as sexism, misogyny because you kind of internalize it as just how the world is. And I tell a story in the book about a kind of episode of that I suffered from an MSP of another party in the early days of the Scottish Parliament of effectively sexual bullying. But it took me until 2017 in the wake of Me Too and the Scottish Parliament was doing a survey of staff and members. It took me till then to actually recognise what that had been. Back at the time, I just thought, well, that's what we have to put up with in politics because that's its rough and tumble. That's how it is.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ep the Trumps and the Johnsons of this world rather than offer an alternative and then even when they're trying to offer an alternative they're not able to communicate it in a way that people are able to relate to and connect with.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Voting for them in many ways are the examples of the problems of the financial and economic elites that have done so much damage. I think there is a straight and I always tried as a leader to speak straightforwardly. It's what I tried to do during COVID. People could agree or disagree with me, but I try to communicate clearly and directly. And I think they do that as well. I think there is something, if you listen to the likes of, and I'm not I don't want to single out Keith Starmer and have a go at him gratuitously here, but you listen to people like Keir Starmer and you get to the end of his sentence and think, what was he saying? What was he trying to say? Because it's all buzzwords and political jargon and it's all mangled up a bit. And so I think there is, and obviously the problems of the world right now are much more than communication. But I think politicians on the left, they're trying to...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scotland, of course, we didn't vote for. I mean, obviously, some people did, but in Scotland we didn't vote for them. I think, you know, why is Trump president? I think, and I think for progressives, people on the left of politics, I think there's some really big questions that we have to ask ourselves, that there are, and arguably I was able to do this from a very different political perspective than these guys of kind of just tune into the kind of sense of a population and make them feel, and in my case, I hope it was genuine, that you're kind of one of them and on their side and there's a sort of authentic connection. But people at Boris and Trump are doing that. And how are they doing that? We have to ask ourselves that because they are, in many ways, you know, both Boris and Donald Trump are the polar opposite of being of the people that are.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He became Prime Minister Liz Truss. Well, we know what happened with Liz Truss. Boris, you know, a message, something emerged during the COVID inquiry where I had, in a message to one of my advisors called him an effing clown. I mean, it wasn't the most polite way of describing somebody, but here's a clown, a charlatan, somebody who should never in a month of Sundays been anywhere near down street. And there was nothing about how Boris approached the job that said he took it remotely seriously. Everything for him was reduced to an opportunity for a gag. And that basically was my experience of him. And yeah, I don't know, maybe some people have got different experiences, but that was mine.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a reasonable summary. Cameron was the one I got on easiest with, and I think that was partly the kind of eaten charm sort of, and yeah, I quite liked him. We had our moments of, we disappeared in a lot, but we had some moments of shouting at each other and such like. But I always got on well with him. Teresa was undoubtedly of the five prime ministers I interacted with, the one that seemed to me to take the job most seriously, you know, was always on top of our brief knew what she was about. And she would say the same about me, maybe. So it's not all one way. It was just impossible to build a rapport. And it frustrated me at times because I instinctively thought her and I should have been able to build a better rapport. And undoubtedly my feeling is much as hers, but it wasn't possible. Rishi, I didn't really have much to do with Rishi because I stood down not long after.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Magickick it. To get round the legal reality, but I'm not sure there is a way to get round. I'm pretty certain there's not.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issue that we have to reckon with, which is the Scotland Act, reserves the Constitution and with it the determination of whether or not there's going to be a referendum to Westminster governments. Now, my party had got into the point of believing is, well, actually, if I was just braver, if I was just more able to give two fingers to Westminster, that would change. But we couldn't just magic that away. We can't just magic that away. What we've got to do is shift the political balance of advantage and disadvantage. We have to not just get to the point where a majority of people in Scotland clearly want independence, but they want it badly and urgently enough that there is a sense that Wismissa can't stand in the way of that. And that sounds like, you know, long, hard work. And it is hard work and how long it is depends on how well we do it. But there's no magic.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In short, yes, there must have been things I could have done differently because I gambled more. The thing is I don't know what that means. And I've searched my soul over what that means. Gambling more would have been to say, right, I don't care what you say Theresa May or Boris Johnson, I'm going to start the process of legislating for an independent referendum. I think I would have struggled to get that past my law officers at the time because of the legal position, but say I had managed to do it, it would have ended up in court because it would have been challenged and we would have got to where we got to with the Supreme Court anyway. So gambling more, yeah, it might have made people feel better in the moment. Would it have actually delivered a different outcome? I think that is a much more open question. You know, we have a fundamental...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sage that they had created of while there's chaos around Brexit so we don't want to add to that at the moment and then of course COVID comes along and there's a sense that you know for that reason it's not the time to do this. So they found that politically they were able just to say no. Now I don't think that will sustain forever the task for my party and those on my side of the argument is to sooner rather than later get to a point where that position for any Westminster government is politically unsustainable.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think ultimately that will prove to be the case. I don't think in any democracy people can be prevented forever from making a choice that enough people want to make. But in that moment, and this was a question that had never been definitively answered, could the Scottish Parliament have done it unilaterally or did it legally need Westminster to exercise the power or transfer the power that has now been answered through the Supreme Court, which actually in some ways is better for the independence movement because we've got a sense of reality rather than delusion about what is possible and we know that we have to build the case and strengthen the pressure for a referendum for that to happen. In that moment, I think it was easy for the Tories just to say no. What was the price of that? There wasn't much of a price to be paid. We were, they could play into...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had secured a referendum, we would have won that referendum and that can't be disproved because it didn't happen. But I believe with every fibre of my being that would have been the case. And therein lies the answer to the question, why did we not secure a referendum? Because Westminster just decided it wasn't going to let it happen.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the hours after the result in 2014, Cameron's pronouncements on the doorstep of number 10 about English votes were English laws, that was, I mean, from our perspective brilliant and helped fuel that post-referendum sense of Scotland's not being put back in its box, but from Cameron's point of view, the most tone ref speech in a crowded field, the most tone-def speech I've ever heard. It sounded as if he was punishing Scotland for daring to dream as opposed to saying, okay, we've heard that you might not think the union is working great for you. How do we make it better?”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not being able to be convincing enough because we were trying to prove the unprovable on the big issues. We didn't get enough or a fast enough momentum from the soft no Tesses. We got some of the way, but we didn't get quite there. And that was partly our own feeling, but partly it was because of that weight of the sky will fall in if Scotland votes to be independent. Final week of the campaign, you know, the banks all, I think, probably under significant pressure from the Treasury were all pressed to come out and say we'll leave Scotland if there's a yes vote. So that weight of everything being against us was definitely felt emotionally and practically. But in some way, you know, as an underdog often will, it allowed us to really rally and rally our troops as well”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that makes it okay then, Alison. I take all back. It was East Enders instead of Doctor Who. I'm not sure that is the Germain point at the heart of... This debate, but anyway, so there was, and you know, you won't get to use the pound, you'll get chucked out of the European, and it was, and actually that started to play in our favour because people started to feel insulted that intelligence and sense of self was being insulted and there started to be a sense of, well, if in the UK we are so we have no rights to shared assets, we have no right to determine our own future, then actually, well, good is this union doing us. So it played in our favour. And that's, we reached a point, I think, where once people decided to vote yes, there was no shifting them. So Alex, the first debate performance where in the moment I thought this is going to be disastrous, people are going to, you know, hemorrhage away from yes. That didn't happen. People were solid once they made that decision. I think what we didn't do effectively enough, obviously, because we lost and things like the debate performance.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gordon here, but he was one of the voices that decided to argue the case that people in Scotland would not be able to watch Doctor Who if we voted for independence. So there was a sense of just trying to scare people.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we felt, I felt, you know, it was a David and Goliath situation and we were the underdogs. We were, you know, the kind of upstarts against the whole weight of the British establishment and of course there were other voices from outside Britain weighed in President of the Commission, Obama opines at some point. So we felt absolutely that we had this massive weight establishment weight against us. There was also a sense that they were every fear and smear. So it wasn't on the no side that debate, you know, the issues were being debated in a proper, realistic sense. It was a fear campaign. And, you know, the no campaign referred to itself as project fear. So, you know, and you talk about Gordon Brown's big speeches and he made some very influential speeches in the course of that. I'm not knocking.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This point, and I thought, well, you know, I've got a good sense of what's coming at us, what works best in our, but I was frozen out for reasons that I didn't understand at the time and don't understand to this day. But there you go. That is all history.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really pointless. I'm not an advocate of spin rooms. I've not because more of my experience has been doing the debates rather than being in the spin room of the debates, but I've been in a spin room at debates probably less than a handful of times. This was the most miserable experience I had ever had in one. And it was that sense of I thought in that moment we had blown the whole thing because at that point it was still an uphill struggle but there was a sense of a growing sense of possibility that maybe just maybe we could pull this off and in that moment it felt we'd blown the whole thing. Didn't turn out to be the case. The polls didn't show a hemorrhaging of yes support but you know that was just a it's a moment in the referendum campaign period I will never and I don't have the opportunity now to work out what was going on but I didn't I wasn't allowed to take part in any of his debate preparation I'd been doing most of the debates by the”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They probably didn't. But it was, you know, looking back. But anyway, the sort of low point of this was, because as well as having to do, I was having to stand in for a McFirst Minister's questions on this particular day, the MOD had done a big announcement around shipbuilding, which was actually about reducing shipbuilding in Scotland, but it turned out to be more of a problem for the yes campaign than the no campaign. You know, my constituency interests meant, you know, I knew lot about shipbuilding. There had been a shipyard in my constituency for much of my time in Parliament. So I'm getting ready to go down to the chamber to do First Minister's questions for Alec and the phone rings and it's Alec. He'd spent the afternoon at horse racing in Hong Kong. He was not sober and he just phoned helpfully to give me a few tips for first minister's questions. I think I told him to F off and put the phone down.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably after the Commonwealth Games that summer, so quite late summer. I knew I had to get him to kind of, he was the person who had to effectively sign it off before it went to print. He hadn't read it. I knew I had to get him to read it. And just at the point of knowing that I was going to have to force this, he told me it was often a trade mission to China. And I'm like, how am I, how on earth am I meant to get him to read this thing when he's pissing off to China? And he said, I'll read it on the plane, Nicola. And I'm like, yeah, until you have the first glass of in-flight champagne and then, but, you know, we were faxing copies of this to China. I'm like, you know, he's probably under covert surveillance.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would unfold. And Alec at that point, he was first minister, so maybe this was justified, he was running the country, but he wasn't taking much to do with the white paper. Alec didn't really properly engage in the referendum campaign till...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was very long. But it was really trying to do so many things in the same document. It was a really, really tough task to get it from conception through to publication. I had a big team working with me in the civil service, but I was personally, very personally invested in it. I was reading every draft myself, kind of rewriting bits of it myself. By the end of this process, it took hours and hours and hours just to read it from start to finish. And I reached this point where I just I had this sense of impossibility. I can't get it from where it is just now to where it needs to be. And it goes to print in a few weeks. And I remember, you know, ended up on the floor of the room. I'm in right now, actually, crying and struggling to breathe. And it was just this.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's the first time in my life I remember having what I would describe as a genuine panic attack. It was just a matter of weeks before the white paper had to go to print. The white paper, and I think, and I would say this, I think we did a really good job in the white paper. Whatever people think about, you know, the content of it, I think we put out there something that was a pretty weighty perspective for how independence could be achieved and what it would deliver.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just speak personally here. I think what I didn't take enough account of was the kind of emotional impact on the part of people who opposed independence of this sense that it was part of their identity that they were at risk of losing. And I look back and feel a bit ashamed that I didn't pay enough attention to that. in the sense of changing my mind, but being more sensitive to that. wasn't until Brexit ironically when I felt a part of my identity, European identity, was being taken away that I really understood that. And that was my deficiency, I think, looking back.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Union. So the nationalist movement in Scotland is not just civic in the sense of it doesn't matter where you come from, if you live in Scotland, you have a stake in our country, but it is deeply internationalist in terms of independence is yes about making Scotland a better place domestically, but it's also about Scotland playing a bigger role in the world. So that's always been something that we fought to define and to avoid some of the more negative connotations of nationalism globally. I've said before, and I would say again, if I could go back to the founding of the SNP, I wouldn't call it the Scottish National Party, because I think that name conjures up some of that stuff that is not justified, but can't do that, obviously. But I don't think that was a huge issue in the referendum campaign. I think what...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that's something we, and certainly I have always been conscious of. I don't think that became a bigger issue in the referendum campaign. I think at the referendum been a year later, that would have been different, but I think at that point it wasn't really. But that was something that had always been a worry because the Scottish Independence Movement, the SNP, is not a nationalist party in the sense that you have described and that we see in many parts of the world today. And of course, in many of these countries, these nationalist parties are not, you know, they're not fighting independence campaigns. It's about a vision of the country that that is. Ours is a civic movement. It's about self-government. In the context of this debate, ironic that the SNP is probably the most pro-immigration party in the UK. And I see that without fear of contradiction. We wanted Scotland to remain in the European Union.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although the outcome was devastating for people like me, in some ways, when you think about it in those terms, that we got so close to a different outcome is actually remarkable and a tribute to the strength, not just not of the political leadership necessarily, but of that grassroots democratic awakening in Scotland that blossomed over that summer into referendum day.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been able to negotiate independent membership of the European Union, but convincing people of that in advance was always going to be really difficult. Add into that the sense of, you know, the referendum was effectively a choice between what will happen on taking your membership. It should have been a debate about what will happen to EU membership if we stay in the UK versus what will happen if we vote for independence. Instead, it was all of what would happen if we stayed in the UK was treated as neutral and benign and all the risk was on the independence side. Now, in retrospect, you can see how unfair that was because on EU membership it was actually rejecting independence that ended up with his out of the EU, not the opposite. So there was just a structural imbalance in the debate. Now, maybe inevitably. Maybe it can't be any other way. And I think given that...”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me try and as candidly as possible answer this. I think at the outset, when the referendum debate went from being kind of almost hypothetical big picture into, well, there's definitely going to be a referendum, so the level of scrutiny and the granularity of scrutiny went up several gears. We were playing catch-up, I think, in the sort of preparation on some of these big questions. I think we got ourselves into a much stronger place, but that stronger place was always going to be a difficult place to argue. What were essentially in advance unprovable things? Scotland will keep the pound. Now, I will argue to my dying day that had”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change that the status quo has always got a bit of an advantage because it's the devil people know whether or not they like it or not, they know it, whereas people who are arguing for change as we were are always kind of having to get people to sort of accept the unknown and the unprovable in things. There was definitely a sense, and this was through UK government, I would say, through the BBC and a lot of the British media that anything, you know, anything David Cameron or the president of the European Commission or the president of the United States said was taken as gospel. Anything we said was assertion and couldn't be trusted. So there was an institutional imbalance there, in light of which the fact that we came as close is probably actually a bit of a triumph.”
2025-08-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source