Referendum Connections Referendum Documentaries

Have you ever wondered about the big beasts in this referendum debate?

Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, Alistair Darling,

Alistair Carmichael and Johann Lamont.

Where did they come from?

What dark secrets lurk in their past?

And how did they get to where they are now?

If you have, then Referendum Connections could be the most

important show you will watch between now and September 18th.

Well, if they can use outrageous propaganda

to try and sell their product, why can't we?

If you go to Holyrood, everybody knows everybody.

They maybe don't get on, they're maybe no' the best of pals

but everybody knows everybody.

And not only that, everybody knows everybody's business,

and everybody knows where everybody else has come from

and who they've stood on to get there.

People look at the Labour Party and they say, "Humbug and hypocrisy."

He's a great risk taker.

He's been gambling on horses since he's been about ten.

What are the risks, what are the costs and, ultimately,

what is the justification for such division and upheaval?

I remember Alistair Darling at parties in the 1980s

with his leather bomber jacket on,

trying to look a bit like Che Guevara.

That memo obviously didn't get to Johann Lamont.

It sounds as if she's even more out of the loop

in her own party than we thought.

I would say she is probably the most

effective politician in Britain today, bar none.

A Scottish government minister was on the phone to his employers

saying he should be silenced. That is deplorable.

He's an extremely funny man. He's serious about his politics,

he's serious about his friends and he jokes about everything.

What do you not understand?

My first meeting with Johann was more like an exocet entering the room.

What does the First Minister not understand about his proposal

to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom?

Over the last year, they've become a feature in our lives,

so we thought we'd find out some more about them

and perhaps even help you make up your mind come September.

So much for the quality debate of Johann Lamont!

And where better to start than with the cheerleader-in-chief

of Scottish independence,

First Minister and leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond.

Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond

was born in Linlithgow on Hogmanay, 1954.

A talented boy soprano, I kid you not,

he starred in Amahl and the Night Visitors,

playing a child who tells tall tales.

Hmm, that's interesting!

And he was described as a fine, wee singer by no less an authority

than the Falkirk Heralds opera critic.

In 1974, this aspiring Pavarotti left Linlithgow to cut his

political teeth and lower his golf handicap at St Andrew's University.

Where he crossed swords with political heavyweights

Michael - now Lord - Forsyth,

Michael Fallon, the UK's Energy Minister,

and Labour MP Mark Lazarowicz.

Also witness to the activities of the student prince

at St Andrews was the editor of the university newspaper, Brian Taylor.

Alex Salmond at university was always advancing the cause of independence.

The guy had two characteristics.

First of all, deadly serious about politics.

But also motivated by mischief.

It's not bluff, it's fact and you should realise the difference.

You can see that in his student days. Frankly, you can still see it today.

Apart from a degree, an SNP membership card

and a love of the gee-gees, St Andrews also gave the aspiring

First Minister a unique experience.

Electoral defeat.

In the race for the presidency of the SRC,

just 11 votes separated Salmond from his Tory opponent, Peter Bainbridge.

I think it scarred him for life.

He never quite recovered from that.

Wounded, he temporarily rejected that deceitful mistress,

politics, for the more ethical and virtuous world of banking,

becoming chief oil economist at RBS.

But he couldn't stay away forever.

He was a talented individual, had a great career ahead of him as an

economist if he'd wanted it, and here he was hitching himself to the SNP.

There was something steely, something determined,

an ambition there, a drive there.

Almost like a challenge, he was challenging himself.

That love other challenge is something

he shares with the man charged with making the case for the union

and convincing us that we are in fact Better Together.

Former Chancellor and Labour MP Alistair Darling.

But he wasn't the union's most willing volunteer.

Thank you very much. I'm not used to that.

LAUGHTER

I remember being with Alistair in Pitlochry one night.

He'd been through the whole banking debacle and he was tired

and fed up with all these things and was looking forward to a rest.

I said, "Well, if you want to make a case for the union,

"you're going to have to lead it because who else is there?"

And he was definitely not for doing that at that point.

We are Better Together.

He may have the credibility

but he does have a reputation for being a teeny-weeny bit dull.

That wasn't always the case.

Comrades, Alistair Darling, Edinburgh North CLP.

I remember Alistair Darling at left-wing parties in the 1980s

with his leather bomber jacket on,

trying to look a bit like Che Guevara.

Long before he popped up as the poster boy for the union,

our Alistair had already enjoy the colourful political history.

The great nephew of Sir William Darling,

a wartime provost of Edinburgh and a Unionist MP, Alistair was

educated at Loretto, one of Scotland's top private schools.

Where, as a first year, it's reported

he was the personal servant, or fag, for senior pupil who

turned out to be none other than ex-Chancellor Norman Lamont.

After school he headed to the Granite City to study law,

becoming president of Aberdeen University SRC.

And no doubt to the horror of Great Uncle William was rumoured to

be a supporter of the International Marxist group.

Surely not!

Anyway, four years later Alistair left Aberdeen

and his Trotskyist politics behind and headed home to Edinburgh,

where he secured a seat on Lothian Regional Council.

Essentially his politics were always very, very straight.

He flirted with the Labour left I think in order to get on.

But he's always been a pragmatist in my view.

He's always been someone who quite rightly tried to do the job

and get things done.

People had a high regard for him them.

He always looked older than he was, which is quite an advantage

in a young politician.

Belonging to the same political party as Alistair Darling

but inhabiting a completely different world

from the privately educated Edinburgh councillor was

a young, working-class Glasgow activist, Johann Lamont.

You're in danger of bringing out the school teacher in me

again to get you to sit down and be quiet.

I didn't realise that there were these viragos,

these women committed to liberal politics, to human rights,

civil rights, women's rights that would come in

and blast you out of the room.

Johann was so fearsome and so committed at that that

when she stood up at a constituency meeting and said

anything about anything, no-one who followed her dared disagree.

Born to Gaelic-speaking parents from Tiree in July 1957,

Johann McDougall Lamont grew up

in the tough Anderson district of Glasgow.

She attended Woodside Secondary before studying English

and immersing herself in the Glasgow University Labour Club.

A club with a long tradition of producing party notables,

including John Smith, Donald Dewar and Wendy Alexander.

At university she met and formed a lifelong political

and personal friendship with Margaret Curran,

currently the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland.

Johann was very much a leading figure of the biggest university

Labour club in Scotland.

You have to remember this was the mid-to-late '70s

and that was a time of super activism in the Labour Party.

There were millions and millions of things going on.

Johann was very much a super activist.

On a Friday at lunchtime there would be a gigantic lunchtime meeting

where major, major speakers from the party,

Neil Kinnock, Michael Foot, Denis Healey, John Smith

would come and address people in the Queen Margaret Union.

No doubt many of those guest speakers discussed

the burning issue of the day.

Labour's Scottish devolution bill,

which was then inching its way through Westminster.

Although it was Labour's Bill, not everyone was on board with the idea.

Whisper it.

Neither Johann Lamont nor Alistair Darling

were what you would call enthusiastic supporters

of devolution back in the day.

Maybe they'd have been a bit more receptive to the idea

if only they had known what was coming.

Just weeks after Scotland said a big "aye maybe" to an assembly,

but with insufficient fervour to actually get it.

Like a whirlwind in May 1979, Maggie Thatcher arrived at Downing Street

leaving her political opposition looking a bit behind the times.

ALL SING TOGETHER

The Tories were in and nothing would be the same again.

To oppose Maggie, Labour lurched to the left.

A radical young Darling, sporting a rather natty, unkempt look,

made an impassioned

if somewhat doom-laden address to the party's 1981 conference.

They don't tell you that the Army is going to impose

a curfew on the country.

That phones will be cut off, they'll be roadblocks and that CS gas

canisters have already been issued to the Army for the control

of the population, when they find out what's going to happen to them.

There'll be riots, raping, food shortages,

people friends will be set against each other

over the last can of food that they can find.

It wasn't the constitution that triggered young Alistair's angst

back in 1981, it was Mrs Thatcher's civil defence plans.

But it was her offence plans that exercised the normally

laid-back Alex Salmond.

We face a Tory Government with less than a third of Scottish MPs,

less than a quarter of the Scottish electorate behind them at the last election.

One recent opinion poll put it as low as 12%.

It's a government of occupation we face in Scotland,

just as surely as if they had an army at their backs.

And when you think about it, perhaps they have.

To fight against Thatcher, he helped set up the 79 Group,

whose aims included a Scottish Socialist Republic.

Leading lights included Salmond, Jim Sillars, Margo MacDonald,

Roseanna Cunningham and Kenny MacAskill.

But this new group very soon found themselves on a collision course

with the more traditionalist SNP leadership.

'In that very unhappy period, I think

'it was inevitable that there would be a sense amongst the other'

party members, particularly the leadership, that these

Young Turks needed to be put in their place.

I am now convinced that the party will not recover its unity

until all organised groups are banned.

APPLAUSE

And put in their place they were when, at the 1982 conference,

things came to a rather ugly head

when the SNP banned all internal groups,

a move that eventually led to the expulsion of Alex Salmond from the party.

It was defections rather than expulsions that were hurting

the Labour Party when four leading lights left to form the SDP.

And joining this new venture was a community activist on Islay,

Mina Carmichael, mother of a future Scottish Secretary.

His mother, I think, didn't start as a Liberal,

but by the time Alistair was in his early teens,

she'd have been very active in the Liberal Party in Islay.

I'm told that there would not have been a family meal that went by

without a robust discussion of what was in the news at that time.

And I have no doubt that his mother inculcated

a sense of liberalism in him.

Born in July, 1965, on the family's farm on Islay,

Alexander Morrison Carmichael isn't the first political heavyweight to come from the island.

George - now Baron - Robertson of Port Ellen, and Glenn Campbell...

No, not him, the other one! Yes, him, the one from the BBC.

..they're also sons of Islay.

By the early 1980s, young Alistair had left the farm

for Glasgow University, where he played a leading role in the SRC

and became president of the university's Liberal Club.

These were heady days for young liberals on campus.

Roy Jenkins had just been elected MP for Hillhead,

the seat that took in Alistair's university.

'He had a rare old time to himself at Glasgow University.

'The political life of Glasgow... In Glasgow, debating fused in him.'

He had a fabulous two years at Glasgow University.

Maybe not academically, but otherwise.

By 1984, Carmichael's ability to address a half-empty conference hall

was marking him out to the Scottish Liberal leadership as one to watch.

I think this motion shows us how we as liberals can start to use

local government as effectively as possible in the process

of repopulation of Highland and rural areas.

And I commend it to you well worthy of our support as liberals.

-Thank you very much.

-APPLAUSE

Among Scotland's endangered species in the 1980s was the lesser-spotted Conservative politician.

In a game attempt to reverse the eventual extinction of the breed,

Mrs Thatcher would occasionally venture to her northern outpost.

Scotland's response was to vote Labour in ever-increasing numbers,

even in the Tory heartland of Central Edinburgh.

I remember there was a lot of effort going into winning it,

but by no means was it a safe seat or clear we were going to take it.

'Even then, Alistair Darling knew how to talk to the "Edin-bourgeoisie".'

Alistair Maclean Darling...

In fact, for three of our big beasts, 1987 was their first foray

into national politics, with Alistair Darling's victory being

a welcome surprise for the SNP's parliamentary leader,

Margaret Ewing.

-Labour... Fletcher's out.

-Fletcher's out!

With this kind of swing to Labour, there was never going to be a seat

on the overnight train to London for the plucky young Lib Dem

fighting the solid seat of Paisley South.

But there was a seat on the train south reserved for another first-time candidate -

Alex Salmond, who headed to Westminster with a mission.

What sort of disruptive tactics will you adopt in Scotland

and in Westminster, do you think, in the coming session?

Well, we've got a plan of action for how Scotland could oppose

the Tories effectively and not the powder puff opposition

we've had from the Labour Party over the last eight years.

-..Will both be at their lowest level...

-True to his word,

during the following year's Budget speech, all hell broke loose.

..Remains in place.

POLITICIANS DISAGREE RAUCOUSLY

Then, the Budget was treated with absolute sanctity

and they sat and listened in silence.

Order!

Alex Salmond disrupted it and disrupted it

and disrupted it again until he was kicked out.

I beg to move that Mr Salmond be suspended from the service of the House.

His party leadership went along with it,

but his parliamentary leader at the time, Margaret Ewing,

was tugging at his arm, saying, "You've done it, now sit down."

But he was determined to carry this through.

Oh, he'd done it all right, and in the process, he went from being

a relative unknown to a household name overnight.

Which of course is exactly what he wanted. Very astute thing to do.

But that was Alex Salmond, he was an opportunist of considerable talent.

Salmond was becoming the darling...

No, let's say blue-eyed, er, brown-eyed...

Och, you know what I mean! ..boy of the SNP.

But had he pushed his luck too far

when ran for leader against Margaret Ewing in 1990?

'Here he was taking on SNP aristocracy,'

and that's a dangerous thing, because if you lose,

you've gained nothing except a lot of enemies.

In what was expected to be a close fight, the underdog, Salmond,

secured the overwhelming backing of the party's youth and student wing.

Round about that time, you had a generational change

in Scottish politics.

'You had this group who have now become the golden age of the SNP.

'I think they were kind of starting to come to the fore then

'and they wanted something different from what the SNP had been.'

They wanted it to be a new, dynamic and interesting party,

and they knew they weren't going to get there

unless they got someone who they felt was a bit like that themselves.

Alex Salmond MP, 486...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

With the backing of the young team,

Salmond's margin of victory was bigger than anyone could have

imagined and doubtless instilled in him the belief that winning,

even against the heaviest odds, is possible in politics.

In that campaign, another of our connections was made.

One of Salmond's most enthusiastic supporters was

the secretary of the Young Nationalists,

a 20-year-old Nicola Sturgeon.

I think he saw a very sharp political intelligence,

a great deal of self-discipline,

in as much as she's always in control.

She has a certain spontaneity about her,

but she never misses a beat.

I would say that she is probably the most effective politician

in Britain today, bar none. I mean, I really...

That's high praise, but I think she's just exceptional.

Nicola Sturgeon was born in Irvine, North Ayrshire, in 1970.

She grew up during the SNP's heyday.

The party even captured her local council ward in 1976.

So, by the time she left Irvine to study law at Glasgow University,

she was already a committed nationalist.

In 1990, she was part of the young team that backed Salmond

along with her now Holyrood colleagues

Shona Robison, Angela Constance, Richard Lochhead and Alasdair Allan,

as well as MPs Stewart Hosie, Angus Robertson and Eilidh Whiteford.

And in return for all their help, Alex Salmond

rebuilt his party around them, particularly Nicola Sturgeon.

'What became very, very clear was'

that this young woman was a class apart.

She was remarkably talented, she was incredibly effective in the media.

I am campaigning in favour of this girl, Nicola Sturgeon.

Do you know her? That's Nicola Sturgeon. This is the one here.

So it was kind of inevitable that she would be THE key figure that he

would want to encourage and almost adopt.

It's the kind of ambitious, transformational, life-changing

policy that independence gives us the ability to do.

And if the opposition would raise their sights and their ambition,

they might find it within themselves to support it.

Interestingly for our story, while at university,

Sturgeon was a constituent of Jim Sillars' in Govan which,

by 1992, had become Labour's number one target seat.

So the party asked Johann Lamont to mastermind their campaign to

turn local councillor Ian Davidson into the local MP.

I think he turned to Johann for a number of reasons.

First of all, she was at that time

from exactly the same part of the party as he was -

'very left wing and radical, and they could work comfortably together.'

She had also proved herself by that time as an excellent organiser.

'She had been on the Scottish Executive

'and she knew how to handle big events like that.'

Pull the various strands of a campaign together.

Skills no doubt honed while working as an English teacher in Glasgow

and serving on Labour's Executive in the 1980s.

Sexism is not the exclusive province of one political party,

and the different standards operating for women in politics

know no political boundaries.

Her love of both politics and teaching came in handy

for this performance in a 1987 party political broadcast.

I think it should be remembered that one of the reasons we can point to

deficiencies within the state system is simply because this government

is not and never has been committed to a public sector of education.

After a performance like that,

how could she fail to become chair of the Scottish party in '93

and Labour delegate to the Scottish Constitutional Convention?

She had previously regarded constitutional politics

as a completely unwarranted diversion from the politics

of class and gender and poverty.

She came to believe that you could use the constitutional model

of a devolved Scotland to advocate those causes.

By the 1997 general election, Scottish devolution had become

a main plank of Labour's manifesto.

Devolution is a way of modernising the UK for today's world.

In Tony Blair's general election landslide, Alistair Darling

was returned in Edinburgh and Alex Salmond in Banff and Buchan.

But Nicola Sturgeon lost out to Mohammad Sarwar in Govan,

where Johann Lamont's bestest buddy, Margaret Curran,

was his election agent.

Within months, Scotland went to the polls again,

this time to say either "Yes, Yes," "No, No," "Yes, No," or conceivably

even "No, Yes" in a two-question referendum

to establish a Scottish Parliament.

At precisely 3:37 this morning, confirmation came

that the yes campaigners for a parliament were home and dry.

In the elections to that new parliament,

it was Labour who emerged as the big winners.

Johann Lamont saw off a determined attempt by local hero

Tommy Sheridan to win in Glasgow Pollock.

Fortunately we had a candidate who could give as good as she got.

It was a great selection to put her in there.

Other people would have lost that election to Sheridan

because of the power of his personality.

But she was able to match that.

At the new parliament she joined her best friend and old Glasgow

university comrade Margaret Curran.

As another Glasgow old boy, Donald Dewar, set up a coalition government

with the Lib Dem leader Jim Wallace.

Also heading to parliament

were the biggest number of SNP-elected politicians

in the party's history.

In the election to that first Scottish Parliament,

Alex Salmond was reunited with his old '79 group colleagues

Kenny MacAskill, Roseanna Cunnigham and Margo MacDonald.

While Nicola Sturgeon hooked up with

all her chums from the now all-growed-up SNP youth wing,

including Fiona Hyslop, Shona Robison and Richard Lochhead.

On becoming the brand-new Deputy First Minister,

Lib Dem leader Jim Wallace decided he would not seek re-election

as the Westminster MP for Orkney and Shetland.

So to replace him, the local party in the Northern Isles

turned to a boy from the Western Isles, Alistair Carmichael.

He's recognised as somebody who just works hard.

He's the guy who goes out with leaflets in the pouring rain.

Well, maybe a bit less nowadays.

But he certainly was. You don't have a campaign manager?

Alistair will be your campaign manager.

You need a leaflet in the middle of the night? Alistair will do it.

He is extremely highly regarded.

I've been given this job.

It's probably the most important job in politics for the next 12 months,

and I'm absolutely relishing it.

Alistair Carmichael is quite a rare thing,

not just in Scottish politics but in politics generally.

Alistair Carmichael is a real person who happens to be an MP,

and a senior MP, a Cabinet Minister at UK level, for all that.

Perhaps it was the potent mix of union debates

and local party politics, but for whatever reason,

Alistair didn't complete his course at Glasgow

and went to work as manager at the Ewington Hotel in the city.

But in 1988 he returned to academia, and again involved himself

in student politics, at Aberdeen University.

This time he did graduate,

and armed with a law degree, he practised as a solicitor

under the watchful eye of Eilidh Whiteford's dad.

It was while working as a solicitor he was selected to defend

the safe seat of Orkney and Shetland in the 2001 General Election

when Jim Wallace stood down.

This time there was a seat on the train heading south

alongside his soon-to-be Better Together pal Alistair,

who'd been re-elected once again in Edinburgh.

So by 2001, all of main players had been elected

either to Holyrood or to Westminster,

or in the case of Alex Salmond, both.

Since then, they've all clambered to the summit,

or as near as makes no difference in their various parties.

As Chancellor in the last Labour government, Alistair Darling gained

a reputation for being a reliable, solid, bank-managery type of guy.

Perfect chap to defend the status quo.

I think what Better Together have needed throughout,

which is why they've got Alistair Darling,

why he's been the best appointment for that job,

is they've needed to prove the stability

that Scotland has from within the UK, and he is that kind of figure.

You know, he just looks like a safe, secure pair of hands.

Because he is.

Last year, Alistair Carmichael was welcomed to his job as Scottish

secretary with longest handshake in the history of British politics.

And this relatively unknown Highlander

is already the subject of a press corps gag.

When Alistair Carmichael was first elected an MP

in 2001 for Orkney and Shetland,

he went down to Westminster, and he was staying in a hotel

for the first few weeks that he was there before he found a flat.

And in the hotel bar, he was being chatted up by a young woman,

and he thought, this must be because I'm an MP.

I'm powerful these days. It must be attractive to women.

And halfway through the night, after a couple of drinks, she said,

"You do know that I'm a call girl?"

And he said, "A Coll girl?"

"I would never have guessed from your accent."

"I'm an Islay man myself."

Hey, come on! I didn't promise it was a good joke.

Since 2007, Nicola Sturgeon has been Scotland's Deputy First Minister,

and she's widely tipped to replace her boss as the SNP leader

if and when he ever hangs up his boots.

She is someone who is deeply respected

by all who come into contact with her.

She's someone who's truly on top of the detail of her brief.

But she's also got that charisma, that ability to speak

to a broader audience that very few politicians have.

After the 2011 election, as one the few senior

Labour members left at Holyrood,

Johann Lamont assumed the role of leader,

and since then has surprised quite a few,

even among her own supporters.

I think she has kind of grown into the job.

I think people increasingly know who she is,

which is a not unimportant thing.

In that 2011 election, Alex Salmond's SNP

broke the system by securing an overall majority

in a parliament everyone believed would produce coalition government,

thereby setting in course the events

that have taken us to this referendum.

We've been told for 300 years

that we mustn't be independent, that we must remain in this union

which is critical and crucial

and indispensable to the future of Scotland.

And here is one individual saying,

"No, it's not. We can do better on our own."

If we choose to do it his way, he's got a place in history

alongside the great heroes of Scotland.

He'd love that, wouldn't he?

But it's true.

So there you have it.

That's the overlapping and interconnecting world

of the five major Scottish politicians

who have been and will continue to try to persuade you

that their vision of Scotland's future is the one

that deserves your support on September the 18th.

Good luck with that!