By winter 1982, when she was 12, a quarter of workers in her home town were unemployed. “We can’t make that mistake.” The daughter of a dental nurse and an electrician in Irvine, North Ayrshire, Sturgeon spent her formative years witnessing Margaret Thatcher’s reforms destroying much of Scotland’s industry. I saw the impact on the people I grew up with, in the community I lived in, of a government that allowed an economic transformation to happen with no concern for the impact that had on people,” she explains. “I grew up in the West of Scotland in the 1970s and ’80s.
She now feels that the country must wean itself off its reliance on fossil fuel extraction, but that is easier said than done. “It’s a massive opportunity, but I think there will be a real difficulty if that opportunity is not taken.”Īlthough Sturgeon now talks keenly about the climate emergency (as of August 2021, the SNP has been in a power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens), her side leant heavily on the importance of the North Sea oil fields during the independence referendum of 2014.
“It probably is the last chance the world has to reach an agreement that is specific enough to meet the Paris 1.5 degrees target,” she continues on Cop26, sounding both worried and passionate in her unmistakably West Coast Scottish accent. Hours before our interview, Sturgeon was addressing her party at its annual conference, vehemently arguing that Scotland should be given a new vote on independence in 2023. Following the SNP victory in the Scottish Parliament election in May this year, she is the first-ever First Minister to form a third government, and while her party didn’t quite manage to gain an overall majority in Holyrood, it did win a record number of votes. It doesn’t look as if she is on her way out any time soon, either.
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