Lucy Beattie

Meet Lucy Beattie, the SNP MP candidate for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross.

Transcript

00:00 My name is Lucy Beattie and I'm the candidate for the Scottish National Party for the area

00:05 of Caithness, Sutherland and East Der Ross. I'm originally from Loch Brom near Ullapool

00:11 at a place called Lechmeln and I was at Agricultural College training to be a surveyor actually

00:17 and I'd done my first year of professional work and in my final year of my degree, very

00:23 sadly my mother got cancer and so I had a lot of travelling back and forth to Raigmore

00:30 and it then became clear that unfortunately it was terminal cancer so I started helping

00:37 with the family business as well as finishing off my degree and came back eventually to

00:42 Lechmeln where sadly she died when I was just 21 and five months later my father died as

00:49 well of a stroke. So I was at 21 years old, suddenly inherited a farm in the North West

00:57 Highlands. I had my basic training and my degree which was very, very useful. I was

01:02 passionate about the area I lived in and I wanted to see the farm do well and I wanted

01:07 to have a good life for myself working on the farm and doing my best to kind of keep

01:12 the family business going. I'm very environmentally conscious and in my younger years I was an

01:17 activist for Friends of the Earth, always trying to promote strategies to help with

01:25 loss of biodiversity, environmental protection and so on and I integrated that into my working

01:29 life to sort of really create my own path on the farm and that was really fulfilling

01:35 for me so I got farm certified as a biodynamic farm. I'm a mother of three, two of my older

01:42 children have left school and so on and they're forging their own paths and career paths and

01:47 my youngest is still in high school, people in Ullapool. That changed my life a bit and

01:51 it also meant I had to step back from being a full-time farmer because I'd hurt my back

01:56 a bit and I needed to stop doing that so I changed into more of an academic career and

02:02 got into teaching and that moved from one thing to another and I worked for the Scottish

02:06 Crafting Federation running training courses and then I really got into educational research

02:12 so I'm just about to complete my PhD and I'm really looking forward to that. When

02:16 people say about independence, you know, the question of independence, it isn't about

02:21 the question of independence, it's actually about the answer. Independence is the answer

02:26 to these problems. Independence will bring a more localised system of democracy, will

02:31 bring a fairer system for budgets to be distributed according to the demographic needs and the

02:38 cultural needs and the social needs of our country and that's why I'm really behind

02:43 Scottish independence and I want to stand as a candidate for a case in the southern

02:49 Leicester Ross at the next election.