The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 149. Nicola Sturgeon: On Margaret Thatcher, Alex Salmond, and the Push for Independence (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

What is the difference between class distinctions in Scotland and the rest of the UK? How did Nicola Sturgeon's childhood in Scotland inform her politics? What was Margaret Thatcher's influence on Nicola's career? Rory and Alastair are joined by former Leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, to answer all these questions and more. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to the rest of politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastair Campbell. And we're absolutely delighted to be joined for the first of two episodes by Nicola Sturgeon. She is the longest serving of the seven people who've been Scotland's first minister since the Scottish Parliament was re-established in 1999, thank you Labour. And so far, she's the only woman to fail that job. Like her hero, Robert Burns, Nicola was raised in a working-class family in Ayrshire. shy, introverted, bullied at school, but nonetheless became obsessed with politics and especially

the Scottish National Party. And Rory and I have both been reading her autobiography, frankly, which is a very personal, often very emotional account of her private and public lives, her rise through the SMP, many election campaigns, highs and lows of the fight for independence, the lows and lows of Brexit, her experience of dealing with no fewer than five UK Prime Ministers, very up and down relationship with Alex Salmon, and finally the police investigation into SNP finances, which led to an arrest that she says she'll never get over, ultimately divorced from a husband, long-time party CEO, Peter Murrell. She describes writing the book, and Rory and I can both identify with this as a form of therapy. So in line with all

good therapy sessions, let's start at the very beginning, Nicola. Childhood. First, First of all, thank you for giving us your time. It's a pleasure. But give us a flavour of your upbringing because reading the book, it didn't feel very political to me. It wasn't political at all. Certainly not in any overt or explicit way. I grew up in a very ordinary,

although in some ways I think these ordinary childhoods are actually quite extraordinary in many ways. My only real memory of hearing my parents talk about politics was the morning after the first devolution referendum. when there was a sense of disappointment over the breakfast table. But apart from that, I don't really remember much in the way of political chat at all. I found out after he died that my grandfather had been a member of the SMP in the 60s, so maybe something in the jeans.

But apart from that, I guess it was my grandfather's job and the circumstances around that, that while I wouldn't have thought about it as politics at the time, shaped a lot of what became my political values. So yeah, it wasn't a political childhood, but it was one that certainly shaped the things that I came on to believe and tried to pursue in politics. Tell us what your granddad did. My granddad was a gardener in a big estate house

in the village that my dad was born in, and my grandparents lived in, a fishing village on the west coast of Scotland called Deneur. He was the gardener there and I used to get taken along to see him at work. And looking back on it, there was definitely a sense of them and us in the relationship between my granddad and his family and those who owned the estate house that he worked in. And my granddad lived in a tied cottage, effectively, a house called Croft. And when he died, my grand, even though she'd lived there for, I think, all of her married life virtually raised three kids there, she lost that house because it was effectively taken away from her. And I remember a real feeling of anger and injustice that she was being treated in the way that she was.

So I think looking back on it, that was probably quite a formative experience. Is that something that you think is something that's still very true of Scotland. today or is that a portrait of a world that's changed a bit? Do you think that's still recognisable that a young girl growing up like you in Asher today would experience something like that? I think it's less likely. I suspect tenants' rights are stronger than they were back then. I think less people probably work in, not less people work in those circumstances, but I suspect the sort of relationships and the manifestation of those relationships would be different. And that said, and I don't think what I'm saying is unique to Scotland, of course, there is still, in my view, far too big a gap between those who have wealth and property and assets and those who don't.

So in many ways, there are aspects of this that are still true in Scotland and I would guess across the UK today. One of the things that I think is interesting across the United Kingdom is two different problems around class. One of them is a problem around kind of traditional ideas of social class, people with posh accents like me and people who don't have them. And then there's the very, very dramatic economic differences, which often don't coincide with those. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But increasingly in Britain, we're living in a very unequal society that's become more unequal than it was actually in the late 70s, early 80s when you were growing up just in terms of wealth discrepancies, income discrepancies. And I wonder whether there isn't something a bit complicated there going on, which is as the old forms of class structure of collapsed and therefore are less visible, less kind of upstairs, downstairs, tied cottages, we're less conscious of the fact that actually our societies become in many ways much more unequal than it was 40, 50 years ago, just in terms of wealth. Yeah, I mean, I think there is multi-layered complexity in that, and I suspect in some respects this debate is different in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK.

I'm generalising here, but put to one side the gap, the inequality in wealth and income, which I think in many respects is growing or has grown in recent times. but the identity issues around class in Scotland are almost separate from that. I mean, of course, there are linkages and it's all integrally connected. But there is a sense of, I mean, I'm generalising here, but it strikes me on the part of many people in England. If you're working class, you aspire to be middle class. In Scotland, if you're middle class, you still aspire in some ways to be working class. There is a sense of working classes that that's the idea.

identity that people have pride in. And so there is a separation between how wealthy you are and how you identify. So you might go on to have a professional job, a well-paying job, be actually quite affluent in Scotland, but will absolutely, you know, fight tooth and nail for your working class identity. I fall into that category, I think. It's interesting. And it's a big contrast with the US where something like 90% of people claim to be middle class. And when politicians in the US, even Democrat politicians, address American voters. They call them middle class. When Alastra and I were at the convention, the Democrat convention,

only one person used the word working class, which was the head of the trade union representatives. Otherwise, it's all middle class. And as you say in Scotland, you have the other manifestation. Yeah, it's almost an insult in Scotland for somebody to tell you, you've kind of moved away from your working class roots, and you're now middle class, even if by any economic definition of class,

that is true. And I mean, it's my perception and impression that, I mean, it's certainly different to the US as you say, but I think that's also a bit different to how people would receive class in England as well. There's a line in the book, Nicola, that really leapt out to me. You said, for schools like mine, it seemed like the job wasn't to raise our aspirations to meet our abilities. It was to lower them to fit our backgrounds. How much is that still the case? I'd like to think that is not the case in the way that it was when I was growing up. I wouldn't sit here and claim that there is no vestiges of that in Scotland or elsewhere. I am a big believer in the comprehensive system of education,

but I think it's important to guard against its potential weaknesses. I went to a good school, and it served me well. I went on to be one of the few people at my school to go to university, but it wasn't trying to do us down or hold us back out of any sense of malevolence. There was a sense of realism or what would have been described as realism about wanting to give us a pragmatic sense of what we could go on and achieve. I mean, I vividly remember a session I had with a guidance teacher careers advisor at school and told her that I wanted to go and study law.

And, I mean, she looked at me as if I had said I wanted to go to go to. to the moon. I think she told me I should think about being a teacher instead as if that was somehow a more sort of, you know, realistic ambition for somebody like me. Now, in my case, that made me more determined to go and do the thing I wanted to do. But I ask myself often, you know, why was I one of just a few people at my school to go to university? I wasn't the only clever person at my school. I probably wasn't the cleverest person at my school. So why was it that There were so many people who were just as bright as me, possibly brighter, smarter than me, who didn't manage to follow a path like that.

Tell me about the bullying at school. You're writing the book about being. I wasn't bullied throughout my time at school. These were sort of distinct episodes. I was pretty quiet, introverted, shy. I still am all these things, although I find it harder to get people to believe it these days. And I was always slightly apart from others at school. But I also was one of these people that kind of always, even when I was younger and very shy, I would pick my side in a debate or a fight.

And there was these girls in my school who they'd be best of pals for a while and then they'd fall out and be sworn enemies. And I don't know, maybe it was because they sensed in me a kind of desire to fit in a bit more. They would provoke me into taking a side. and then I would take a side, you know, fight the corner of the person whose side had taken. And then they'd make up and I'd be the sort of common enemy. On a couple of occasions, two occasions, one of these girls, what would be described in the West of Scotland would still be described in the West of Scotland, battered me, which I vividly remember.

If we were to ask the people who were at school with you, would they say that you'd remain particularly close to them, or would they have felt that you've moved on into a world which is quite different? And what are the people who are at school with you doing now? If you think about your year group, what are they mostly doing now? I'm not really in close contact with people I was at school with. So my closest friends or my oldest friends are people I met when I started at university. There is one school friend that I did keep in touch with and we would see each other

and would still sort of pick up where we left off. But our lives are so different, we don't have that much contact. When I go and visit, my parents still live where I grew up. So I'll often see people that I was at school with. I think a lot will probably still live where we grew up. I know one person I was at school with is a pharmacist and works locally, but the friendships that are close in my life now are friendships that are post-school. As an MP in Cumbria, one of the interesting tensions was that particularly farmers in the Lake District would want their children to stay. in Cumbria and continue to farm and stay in the valleys. Often the teachers were the people trying to encourage children to move out, have bigger aspirations, go to university, go to Manchester, go to wherever. I was thinking about this also in Switzerland, where there is a big focus on vocational training. And there's a sort of positive and negative, isn't that? Because some Swiss

friends will say it's great because it keeps people realistic and embedded in their local community and other people will say it's very restrictive, I want you to do much more. You're presumably more on the side of the teachers that want to expand horizons and encourage people to spread their wings. I'm not sure it's as binary as all of that. I'm a great believer that young people should be encouraged and supported to spread their wings as far and as wide as they want to. I'm a great believer that young people should have the opportunity

if they have the ability to go to university. I don't believe university is or should be seen. as the be all and end all. I don't think we, and this is not just Scotland, I think this would be true across the UK. And there's, you know, governments that Alessor was part of, you know, a lot of the policy that was pursued then, rightly or wrongly, contributed to this. I don't think we pay enough attention to vocational education. But I'm not sure that boils down to, you know, it's vocational education and you stay where you grew up versus you go to university and you spread your wings and travel the world. I also think there is a sense of young people should be

supported to go and spread their wings and develop themselves and find out what they want to do and what they want their place in society to be. And then if they want to find their way back to the kind of community they grew up in. So I don't think we should try to shoehorn people into very defined categories like that. If your sort of politicisation didn't come, as it were, in the home, I'd be interested to know how big a role Margaret Thatcher played in radically making you feel that politics is where you needed to get to. And also whether at that stage, when you were a young woman, you would define yourself and whether you still do as a socialist.

Yeah, I would, I think. I mean, I use the terminology of Social Democrat, left to centre. But if you push me, I certainly wouldn't shy away from the description socialist. And it's how I would have described myself as a youngster. Margaret Thatcher was a huge, huge factor in me becoming active in politics. I remember when she became, well, I vaguely remember when she became Prime Minister. I don't remember it all that clearly. I was nine at the time.

And I do have a kind of vague memory of thinking, ah, there's a woman leading the country. That's brilliant. I remember the Falklands War and thinking, you know, I was on her side rather than whoever was on the other side. I didn't really understand it properly at the time. Fast forward a little bit from that, though, and we're into the depth of the kind of economic pain of Thatcherism. The community I grew up in, you know, unemployment generally was very high, higher in Scotland,

and in my part of Scotland, particularly than the average across the UK. There was a sense of, I choose my words, carefully here, there was a sense amongst some people I was growing up with of hopelessness. You either would end up in a YTS, young trading scheme as it was at the time, or on the dole. I mean, that undoubtedly fueled my desire to get to university and sort of get out of that. But the thing I probably remember, or the feeling I remember most strongly, was a terror of your dad losing his job. Because there was a sense then, unemployment was not some temporary phenomenon. It would be terminal. If your dad lost his job, that was it.

And that started to fuel a lot of anger in me about those conditions and those circumstances. The minor strike was a big moment in developing, I guess, a sense of political tribalism on my part. So Thatcher undoubtedly was a key figure in making me a political activist. I'm very interesting because I think this is true for many, many people across Scotland and the north of England. and actually a lot of people in Britain. But I'm interested in whether some of that is her image, the way she spoke, as opposed to what was happening structurally. For example, I was talking to somebody who, like you, grew up in a new town in Scotland,

and she gave a very similar account, very similar to what she just said. But I know her very well, and her family were not minors. She wasn't directly connected to it. So she must have been seeing it as a child largely on television. your father was working I guess for Chubb so he wasn't in a heavily unionized nationalized industry that he was in quite a sort of growing successful part of the Scottish economy he was a strong trade unionist strong trade unionist yeah okay so so maybe that's part of it I mean I just looking back on it how much of it is that the world changed dramatically

from Jim Callaghan to Thatcher and how much of it is that Thatcher became a kind of horrifying symbol of everything that was going wrong in the 70s and 80s? There's some truth in that. I think for somebody growing up in the west of Scotland, Thatcher presented and spoke and symbolised something that felt very alien. And remember, most people in Scotland had never voted for her. So there was a kind of sense of democratic alienation from that as well.

But she was more than a symbol of what was happening. In so many ways, she was the instigating. of what was happening. And looking at it from the perspective and the distance that we now have, a lot of the economic disruption was inevitable. You know, the profound changes in the economy would have, to a greater or lesser extent, happened whether or not Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister. I guess, and it's something that I was very mindful of in later years as First Minister

about the climate transition. There was just a sense of leaving people to deal with the implicate. of that on their own. So people were chucked onto the, or this is how it felt. People were being, from the old industries were losing their jobs, being chucked onto the economic scrap heap. There was no support to reskill, retrain, get into new jobs. There was just a very, very strong sense that she couldn't have cared less.

And there was a similar sense in the sell-off of social housing, which my parents took advantage of, that, you know, that was fine. she got people to buy their houses. And I mean, it was a aspiration in vain in many parts of Scotland that, you know, it didn't get them to vote Tory. But when people found that they couldn't afford the mortgage, when the interest rates went up or, you know, were faced with a repair bill, there was just a sense that she didn't care. And I think it was that much more than how she spoke or how she presented or even the

economic trends that were underway. It was just this sense of lack of care, lack of care. lack of compassion, lack of any sense of, you know, we're all in this together. And I suppose that was epitomised a bit later on with her.

There's no such thing as society comment, which I think more than anything else, offended. If there is such a thing as a sense of what makes us Scottish here politically, that notion of society is very central to it. And I think that was something that just offended that very sense of who we were.

Okay. Nicola, Rory, quick break and then back for more. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Sauerick here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks, generating.

by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history,

we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in

1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is history wherever. you get your podcasts. You said you define yourself as a socialist and you said you're very tribal. Why was the Labour Party not appealing?

I mean, that is, in a sense, that is the key question of my formative years in politics. I had an English teacher at school who was a local Labour counsellor. When he picked up on my interest in politics, he assumed I would join the Labour Party. I lived in a Labour constituency,

interestingly the neighbouring constituency had a Tory MP at the time but my constituency was David Lambie at the time heavily labour and he actually brought into class one day a kind of form of some description because he assumed I would join the Labour Party so in that

moment there was a bit of rebellion like who the F to see think he is just assuming I'm going to join the Labour Party but it was more fundamental than that so in a nutshell Thatcher was doing all of the stuff that I was so enraged about to my community, my country. Scotland voted Labor, but Labor was utterly powerless

to do anything about it. She was doing all of this in spite of Scotland returning all of these Labour MPs. And that's where, you know, through that sort of sense of democratic disconnect and democratic deficit is where my support for independence came. It seemed to me that the only way we could ensure as a country that we didn't have the Margaret Thatcher's of this world governing us. It wasn't vote labour because Scotland effectively did that anyway. It was only by becoming independent and choosing our own governments. Nicholas, there's just a little moment there. It's quite interesting. It's when you sort of rebel against your teacher, who you think he is. Is that a bit of your personality, along with the introvert? There's a little bit of you that

occasionally thinks, who do you think you are? I'm going to rebel. Yeah. I mean, a bit of my personality that I was probably always a little bit kind of nervous about showing. But, you know, if I go back to the anecdote earlier on about the careers advisor acting with horror when I said I wanted to be a lawyer, there's absolutely a bit of rebellion kicked in at that point. I'm going to show her. I'm going to absolutely go to you need to be a lawyer. And when my English teacher, you know, I assumed I was going to join labour, there is no doubt. So there's always been that little bit of, I will show people what I can do. It's probably also been the bit of my personality that's been necessary to overcome. the introversion and the imposter syndrome.

I've had to channel that, but there's no doubt at all that that's the case. Going back to Alice's point about why not labour, though, it was that democratic deficit point, but it was also at a time when, regardless of what we might assess this like now, back then when I was 18 and Kenuck was taking the Labour Party to the right, the SNP was on a journey more to the, you know, Alex Salmon was in the ascendancy, there was more of a sense of the SMP moving leftwards and it just seemed to me that the S&P was more of a home for somebody of my political outlook than the Labour Party was.

Even although my next-door neighbour at home at the time, always used to refer to the SMP as bloody tartant Tories every time they were mentioned. But that was very much the reputation, not least because it was part of the SMPMPMPs who helped to bring down Calan and Asherd and Margaret. We might argue over the precise kind of, you know... Characterisation of that. But yeah, it was.

And you back Badr and Maastricht? And I talk about that in the book, actually. You were invited me, yeah. The rare occasions that I voted against Alec in a vote of confidence at an SMP executive meeting. But, you know, the bringing down of the Callahan government is obviously before my time in politics. But one of the points I make is that people of my generation in the SNP were still being tagged with that Tory, Tartan Tory description. so many years later, which is why the Maastricht vote I thought was such an own goal at the time. But the point I'm making is that although the SMP were still seen as this kind of tartan Tories,

a bit ideology, light, broad church, if you're being charitable, it was on a journey to become much more firmly established on the left of politics. At the same time, Labour seemed to be going in the opposite direction. Rory is waving his hand vigorously in my eye line. Yeah, no, I'd love for, partly for international listeners, just for you to give us a little bit of a sense of how the S&P changed over time. So people may be aware that there were figures like Robert Cunningham Graham, who seemed to be more kind of traditional, romantic, layered like figures. And then the SMP went on a journey, which seemed to take it away from Highland clans and Kiltz towards more of a social democratic message. But maybe that's not true. I mean, tell us about the 60s and 70s and what happened. It's broadly true. I mean, I suspect, you know, the 60s and 70s are kind of before my time, but I suspect the best way to describe it is that until the very late 70s into the 80s, the SMP really resisted being defined on the political spectrum at all. It was a broad

church of people of the left, people much more socially and economically conservative. It's like the Lib Dem is totally opportunistic. We were never. Can I just absolutely refute the suggestion that the SMP's ever been like the Lib Dems? You're left here right there. That's the most insulting thing you've ever said to me. Anyway, and what united the SMP was a belief in independence, but it had no back then, it had no particular sense of what an independent Scotland should look like. When I joined the SMP, it was still very much dominated by fishing, farming, interests of the northeast.

Gordon Wilson, very socially conservative politician, somebody I was incredibly fond of, but probably quite far removed from where I was in my political outlook. he was still leader, what was called the 1979 group, which Alex Salmon had been part of, had tried to position the SMP much more firmly on the left and they got expelled. But at the time I was joining, they were back in, you know, the first election I campaigned in was when Alec became an MP. So that sort of group of people who were trying to position the SMP on the left was in the ascendancy. So, I mean, obviously I'm a scot with a deep romantic interest in Scottish history,

but I'm a long way from being on the left of the Labour Party where you were coming from. I have noticed yet. So explain a little bit that evolution because of course for me when I was young, my former Scottish nationalism was very, very deeply rooted in history, soil. I was a kind of little mini jacobite. What happened to that tradition? What happened to people like me whose sense of Scotland was very, very historical, very romantic? I mean, there are still people like you.

or maybe not quite like you, but sort of like you in Scotland. And I think in every Scot, and that's possibly an overstatement, but I'm going to stick with it just now, in every Scotland, whether they support independence or not, there is that sense of patriotism

and national identity and that sort of romantic sense of what Scotland has been historically and is today. And that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. But I think over the, certainly over the 1980s, You know, people who supported independence.

You know, Neil McCormick, the constitutional lawyer, former MEP, former president of the SMP, described it as kind of utilitarian versus existential nationalists. The group in the ascendancy back then, you know, in the 70s going into the 80s, was the existential nationalist, those who, Scotland is a country, ergo we should be independent. And then joined by the utilitarian nationalist, which I would describe myself more as, which is independence is the route to a better Scotland, a more socially and economically just and fair Scotland. And through the 80s, 90s and certainly into the independence referendum,

that's the sense of Scottish independence that really took hold of the independence movement. You write, when we get into the 1997 Great Day for the Country, Labour win, and we bring in the Scotland Act and you have the referendum, and away we go and you get the Scottish Parliament. I was very interested. You said that you supported, you thought it was the right decision to have that referendum.

Because at the time we announced that, we were absolutely lacerated. Yeah. Probably including by me at the time. Yeah. So I'm glad that with retrospect, with hindsight, you recognise the wisdom of that boo. I was also very touched. I mean, we can also talk about some of your decisions

that I still think were profoundly wrong if you want, but we'll stick with this one. Let's wait for that. part three for that one. But I was also really touched by your, in fact, you've got some really interesting portraits of some of the other politicians in this story, but your analysis of Donald Deuer and of his speech on the day that the Parliament came into being. You said it's one of the finest speeches in Scottish history. I just wanted looking back, whether you felt, as we did, the Scottish Parliament will probably just about be enough to hold off the rush to independence.

or whether you saw it very much at the time as a step in the right direction for what you were trying to achieve? I saw it very much as a step in the right direction of what we were trying to achieve. There were others in the SMP who thought it would absolutely quash support for independence and that what in the SMP was known as the gradualist fundamentalist divide was quite deep in those days and still lingers in the SMP to some extent, although in the last couple of decades has been overshadowed. I mean, just to take the points of phrase, at the time, we didn't just rail against the notion there should be a referendum before devolution. We remember there was a deep, and probably at the time, not completely unreasonable fear that when Labor 1, when Blair became Prime Minister, they would just quietly try to ditch that. So there was a fear at the time that that was the first step to ditching it altogether.

In retrospect, it was absolutely the right decision because it cemented. the democratic authority underpinning the Scottish Parliament and that might not have felt that important for most of the lifetime of the Parliament. It feels much more important now when there are actually people who would quite like to see the Parliament abolished or stripped quite substantially of its powers. The first election to the Parliament, I think, was a difficult one for the SNP and it probably, looking back, couldn't have been anything else. we were the party arguing that the parliament should immediately go forward and become an independent

parliament before people had at any time to see the devolved parliament in action. But I think, I mean, the sense or the hope or whatever on the party you guys, that it would be enough and support for independence would just wither on the vine. I mean, that certainly turned out not to be the case. Because I think by and large, when people get a sense of self-government, and as long as they feel confident in that self-government, then I think it's a natural instinct to want more of it. And I think that's what kicked in as the early years of the Parliament developed.

Nicola, again, just to sort of step back and the bigger picture for people, could you just paint a picture of the kind of powers the Scottish Parliament got, what kind of devolution this was and how it would compare, I don't know, for an American listener or to someone in Europe, to the kind of federalism you might have elsewhere, What sort of powers did they get? What sort of more powers could they have got? What were the debates there? So the powers the Parliament had was very substantial powers over education, local government, health, transport, economic developments, regional economic development, that kind of stuff. What the Parliament lacked and has a bit more of now, but in my view, it is still the fundamental imbalance in how devolution works, is it had very, very limited revenue.

raising powers. So the referendum that Alasda and I have been talking about had two questions. Should there be a parliament was the first question? The second question, should it have the ability to vary the basic rate of income tax by up to three pence in the pound? So that really was the only revenue raising power the parliament had. And it never used it in those days. Post the independence referendum, those powers were slightly enhanced. My understanding is in the US, for example, if you're the governor of California, you have completely separate state taxes, separate from federal taxes. Is that a route which was considered? Why didn't we go down that route? What was, what's the story in Britain that we didn't end up with that system? I mean, you're probably better to ask Alistair that question than me because it was Labor that designed the devolution settlement that was then voted on in that referendum.

We were rather hoping you'd dive straight into the trap and say, yeah, we want to put up taxes. You didn't do that. of course we did fight the 1999 election on the penny for Scotland campaign of Gordon Brown had just cut income tax by a penny and we said we'd restore it in order to raise revenue. We thought you might go over the full 3P. We were never as daft as you thought we were. But back to why we didn't end up with state and federal taxes. I mean, that was a Labour decision. It is still, even though now the Scottish Parliament has pretty much complete responsibility

for income tax, although there's a complicated. reconciliation sort of model if we use those powers, there is still a real disconnect and imbalance between the spending powers of the Scottish Parliament and the revenue raising powers, which independence would obviously resolve, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, is up to people to decide. But certainly within devolution, that is still, I think, and would be scope to redress that balance with much greater powers. You know, there has been been a debate in Scotland for a long time. It was a debate post-independence referendum through the Smith Commission about whether corporation tax should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

But there's definitely a strong argument, even just in accountability terms, to get a better balance between spending and revenue raising. And is the energy going more and more into really having that debate? Do we want a German system? Do we want a US system? What kind of federal system? Or is the problem that the SMP has been so focused? on independence that the intellectual energy hasn't really gone into making that fission. I mean, I would say this, but I don't think it would be fair to say that that is the case. There is absolutely no sense on the part of the current UK government and certainly the Tory government that preceded that government. There is no appetite to have that debate.

You know, you take the, it's not a tax issue, but the debate that is very live in Scotland and should be activating, I think, action on the part of the UK government is around migration powers. You know, Scotland's demographics are such that the current fixation on cutting immigration in the UK is devastating to our economic prospects. It's devastating right now to the ability to fill jobs in public services. So if there was any genuine appetite to have a debate about where does power best lie between the different legislators in the UK, that's, would be a good place to start. There's no appetite for that. So even if the SNP was to say, okay, we'll park independence for a bit and try to have this debate, there's no sense that

there's anybody on the other side of that debate willing to have it. Nicola, the other thing that happened, of course, around the post-referendum and the establishment of the parliament is you were elected for the first time. But the other thing I found really interesting in the book, and maybe we'll talk about this a bit before we end this part one and then we'll talk much more about the second part of your career, the later part of your career in part two. But it was fascinating to me how the imposter syndrome kind of seemed to deepen because you felt you weren't, as it were, properly elected. You got through not on the votes, but on the list system. I got the feeling that that sort of hung over you absolutely up until the time where you were elected in your

own right. Why did you take that so personally? I think it was a confidence thing in the Scottish Parliament, constituency MSPs and regional list MSPs are absolute equals. I mean, there's no difference in responsibilities or status. And that's as it should be. I am not arguing that being a regional list MSP is somehow inferior. But I think for me, and I don't know, I think possibly for any politician, if you have put yourself forward in a constituency, in a first past the post-election and you fail to get elected, there's always going to be a sense of personal failure in that. And then you find yourself

in the Parliament through another route. And I think for anybody, but particularly somebody who struggled with confidence, who always had the sense of, am I good enough, I think that was always going to gnaw away at me, particularly since I went into that election, rightly or wrongly, as the favourite to win that constituency. So it felt that I had fallen short. I don't think I'd acquitted myself at all points very well in that election campaign. Suddenly the SNP had gone from a minor party at Westminster into being a potential party of government in Scotland. The scrutiny on us was unlike anything.

We'd experienced before Alec bore the biggest brunt of that, but it affected all of us. And definitely at a time when I should have been coming out of my shell and blossoming, you know, elected into Parliament for the first time, I seemed to go in the other direction. And then I did the sort of teething problems of the Parliament that all of the opprobrium that was chuffed at the Parliament in the early days. And I developed a sense of, you know, maybe the Parliament's not up to the task. And within that, maybe I'm just not up to the task. Alex Hammond seems to be a very, very charismatic, dominating, important figure for,

national politics and also within your life. I mean, looking back on him, can you give a sort of rounded portrait for a younger generation that maybe weren't as familiar with him on what his strengths were, what his weaknesses were, who this guy was? You know, he's somebody who, in many respects was the personification of charisma back then, this up-and-coming very articulate, very media-friendly politician that also had a very clear vision of where the SMP should be positioning itself, how we should be fighting elections, how we should be trying to progress the case for independence. And for people of my political outlook, he was absolutely the person to follow and to rally behind. He was brilliant in so many ways, you know, tactically, maybe less so strategically,

but tactically on a day-to-day basis, brilliant. He could dominate clinical debate on-screen, off-screen. There was a magnetism. Being around him was intoxicating. It was, you know, he brought rooms alive. And he was good at what he did in so many respects. The SMP would not have got into government in 2007 without Alex Amund. But there was a darker side to that as well.

He could be really, really hard to work with. He didn't do it to me for some reason, but I saw him do it to lots of people, you know, the hair dryer treatment, the borderline humiliating people that displeased him. And so it was definitely a two sides of the coin thing. But for a long part of my career, the upsides seem to massively outweigh the downsides. Give us an example of tactical brilliance, just that, you know, one anecdote or something sort of bring him alive, something where you watched him do something where you thought, wow, that really is a very nimble, able politician. When we were first elected to government in 2007,

the Scottish governments at that time were called the Scottish executive. There was a sense in the early days of devolution that that actually contributed to this kind of disconnect between the public and its government, because what was an executive, it was abstract, it didn't mean anything. We decided that we would, and this later was done legally, but at the time we would, would just rebrand the Scottish executive as the Scottish government. And literally, he decided overnight, we didn't tell anybody, overnight, every Scottish executive building in the country was suddenly rebranded the Scottish government. So in a stroke, the country suddenly, like today,

that would be seen as a waste of money and just, you know, a vanity project. But back then, overnight, the country stood a bit taller. It suddenly had a government of its own. It also absolutely illustrated in people's minds the change from what had gone before and the Labour Liberal Executive and the SMP government now. And that was the kind of thing he was the master of. That's sort of brilliant, using often symbolism or imagery to create and perpetuate a public mood. And yeah, that was a salmon masterstroke. lest we start to think that this is a sort of peer of praise to Alex Samuel.

I'll just give you a few lines from the book before we end part one. In any leader, the line between brilliance and stupidity can be a very fine moment. We can come back to that. And then we do want to talk about your time as First Minister. We want to talk about the Brexit referendum, about the Scottish independence referendum. And then, of course, it does get very dark with Alex, not least because of the sex allegations and signing up with Russia today. But you ended up saying he would rather have destroyed the SMP than six.

seed without him. I had to face the fact he was determined to destroy me. His claims of conspiracy and betrayal with the cries of a man not prepared to look at himself honestly in the mirror. I also really King Nicholas talked to you about mental health, because the one thing I get a sense of is you really wanting to put your vulnerabilities out there as well. So that is part one. and if you cannot wait a whole week for part two, all you have to do is to become a member of The Restis Politics Plus, and you do that by going to the rest is politics.com. See you soon for Part 2.

We're forward to it.