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.
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