Nicola Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon
Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon PCis a Scottish politician who is the fifth and current First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the Scottish National Party, in office since 2014. She is the first woman to hold either position. Sturgeon has been a member of the Scottish Parliament since 1999, first as an additional member for the Glasgow electoral region from 1999 to 2007, and as the member for Glasgow Southside since 2007...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth19 July 1970
CityIrvine, Scotland
Ed Balls has made it crystal clear that, left to its own devices, a Labour government would simply carry on with the same budget policies as the Tories.
Not once in my life has the Tory Party come anywhere close to winning an election in Scotland, and yet, for more than half my life, we have had a Tory government. That is wrong and undemocratic.
I'm not going to do anything that heralds in a Tory government.
The Scottish Government will continue to do all it can to get people into work.
Scotland has been re-energized, and people all over the country have become involved in - and informed about - politics and government in a way that I have never known before. In short, we have put ourselves firmly in control of our country.
A minority government can't govern without support from other parties.
Parties that win elections should form the government, not parties that lose elections.
For the Scottish government, the practice of having meetings in different parts of the country is well established, but for the U.K. government, it is a much rarer event.
Under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, it is possible for other parties to change the direction of a government without bringing a government down.
It would be a very odd chancellor of any UK government that insisted on a course of action that cost their own businesses hundreds of millions of pounds, that blew a massive hole in their balance of payments and, because assets and liabilities go hand in hand, would potentially leave the rest of the UK shouldering the entirety of UK debt.
The U.K. government sets a cap on how much can be spent on discretionary housing payments.
Taxing people for having a spare bedroom and forcing them into rent arrears or the possibility of losing homes they have lived in for years has always been a cruel and heartless measure, and so it is good that the Scottish Parliament has been able to step in.
Tax credits are designed to help people who work hard but who, through no fault of their own, don't earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.
We already know that social security is more affordable in Scotland than it is in the rest of the U.K. - spending on social protection takes up a smaller share of our economic output and our tax revenues than is the case in the U.K. as a whole.