Nicola Sturgeon has blasted the “nasty” fringe of the independence movement in the wake of a BBC journalist getting verbally attacked outside an event. The First Minister claimed the same hardline nationalists would have called her a "traitor" for not being “pure” enough on independence.
In a light hearted moment speaking to football journalist Graham Spiers, she also mocked Twitter lies about her by referring to the “parallel lives” she was supposedly living. Pro-independence campaigners were condemned after yelling “traitor” and “scumbag rat” at BBC Scotland Editor James Cook outside a Tory leadership hustings.
Cook’s treatment again raised the issue of the behaviour of a small minority of pro-independence supporters. In an interview at the Edinburgh Festival, Spiers raised the abuse with Sturgeon.
She said: “I believe fundamentally in democracy, in civilised respectful debate and about the fact that in Scotland, whatever direction we choose to go in as a country, it should be a collective decision to take through democratic means.
"There is a nasty, unpleasant fringe on the movement I represent, and there is a nasty, unpleasant fringe in the movement on the other side of that. I have no hesitation in calling out, condemning [it] - where it is people who are in the SNP - [and] ensuring we do not tolerate that.”
She added: “One of the hardest things to do is to call that stuff out when it is on your own side. It’s easy to call it out when it is on the other side.” But she also said: “We all do a disservice to the country if we try to pretend that this is one way. It’s not. That nastiness exists everywhere in politics.”
She also said of the people who harangued Cook: “I have a suspicion that, had I walked past these people that night, they would have hurled abuse at me as well. They would have called me a traitor.
"That kind of minority, on the fringes of the independence movement, think I am not a pure enough independence supporter. These people don’t represent me. They don’t speak for me.”
In another exchange, she referred to lurid lies that are regularly posted about her on Twitter: "I’d find several parallel lives that I am supposedly living, all of them a damn sight more glamorous than the life I am actually living."
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