Nicola Sturgeon’s message to Keir Starmer - Stop making Nigel Farage the next PM
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nicola Sturgeon has a message for Keir Starmer. Stop legitimising Nigel Farage - or you’ll make him the next PM.
Scotland’s former first minister has done a lot of reflecting since she left office. In an extended interview we talk about her fractious relationship with Alex Salmond, her conclusions on her gender ID policy, the police investigation that saw a blue “murder tent“ erected in her garden, and whether she could have won Scottish independence if she’d led the campaign.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.6 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:12.2 | There are real big issues and problems in the UK right now, |
| 0:17.1 | and there's a need to recognise those problems. |
| 0:19.9 | Nigel Farage is tapping into that |
| 0:22.0 | sense of pain and suffering and cost of living crisis, state of public services that people are |
| 0:27.7 | feeling right now. But if you're here starmer, you know, whatever people think about right |
| 0:33.2 | 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 Starmour 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. |
| 0:56.5 | He's legitimising Nigel Farage's central argument. |
| 0:59.4 | And if you legitimise your opponent's central argument, then don't be surprised if people vote for your opponent. |
| 1:04.1 | That is Nicholas Sturgeon, Scotland's former First Minister, with advice for Kier Stama in government, telling him there is no point |
| 1:13.3 | trying to sound like reform, ape the words, the feeling, the rhetoric of Nigel Farage, |
| 1:19.7 | otherwise people might as well just vote reform. She's spoken to me at length about her time |
| 1:25.8 | in government, the mistake she made, and her |
| 1:28.7 | relationship, awkward as that was, with Alex Salmond. |
| 1:33.1 | Welcome to the newsagents. |
| 1:39.2 | A lot of politicians begin their speeches or their sentences or their conversations |
| 1:46.2 | with the words, let's be honest, and then they actually aren't. This book is surprisingly candid. |
| 1:54.1 | It's raw, it's unflinching. You discuss everything from the impact Margaret Thatcher had on you, your relationship with Alex |
| 2:01.9 | Salmon, how it broke down, your electoral failures in government before your successes, your |
| 2:08.5 | miscarriage, and then the extraordinary success of the SMP of you personally, you talk about |
| 2:16.0 | the trans rights issues, gender definitions and what you got right |
... |
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