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