People person

Lorna Slater

Lorna Slater, the Scottish government’s minister for green skills, circular economy and biodiversity, is perhaps Scotland’s most unlikely politician. Originally from Canada—she still retains her distinct Canadian accent with the occasional Scottish vowel thrown in—she first came to Britain 20 years ago on the promise of a different line of work. “I heard Britain was short of engineers, and I had this shiny new engineering degree,” she tells me. “I thought I’d come over and try my chances. I bought a one-way ticket to Glasgow and the rest is history, really.” Since then she has worked on everything from robotic telescopes to marine renewables.

Before 2014, Slater was “never really involved in politics.” The outcome of that year’s independence referendum changed things. When the results came back showing a No victory, she “had this terrible feeling that we’d missed an opportunity… to make something better, to be part of building a new nation that had a different vision for itself.”

It’s been politics, more or less, ever since. After standing for the Scottish Greens at local and European level, in 2019 she was elected co-leader of the party alongside Patrick Harvie. Even so, she remained working as an electro-mechanical engineer right up until the end of 2020. At the Holyrood elections the following year, she was became an MSP for Lothian; three months after that she became a minister in Nicola Sturgeon’s government under the SNP-Green “Bute House agreement,” which gave the Greens two ministerial positions as part of a loose pact.

How has she found the change from the “hands-on” world of engineering—she spent most of 2020 “on various construction sites and factories across Europe”—to the cut and thrust of politics? “It’s been a steep learning curve,” she admits. “Engineers tend to just lay everything on the table. They’re very open, very earnest… they just want to get the job done.” She says engineering “is very egalitarian. You call everyone by their first names whether they are the CEO or the person who sweeps the floor.” Politics, on the other hand, is “much more hierarchical.”

Although initially an outsider, Slater has clearly become accustomed to the political scene—when prompted by the Greens’ press officer, she could reel off a carefully prepared list of her party’s achievements with ease. But in the world of British politics, so saturated with public schoolboy rhetoric and finger-pointing, what is perhaps most striking about Slater the politician is how she does not have a bad word to say about anyone. Although she admits the Greens and the SNP “just simply don’t agree” on some things, everyone across the Scottish government, she says, is “genuinely really committed to trying to figure out the best way to do things” on child poverty and net zero. This rule of respect even extends, to some extent, to Boris Johnson, who with a

Osman Yousefzada

smile Slater says is “more a symptom of a broken system” than a “broken system in himself.”

And it is clearly systems, not people, that Slater blames for much of our political turmoil. “I think the UK is democratically broken with its first-pastthe-post system, which leads to one ‘red party’ and one ‘blue party’ screaming across the aisle, never co-operating, never building a consensus, just attacking each other,” she says. “That’s not the kind of politics I want for my country.”

Whether the Scottish Green Party can achieve all its aims—such as establishing a new national park, which would be “a wonderful legacy”—remains to be seen. But meanwhile Slater knows politics isn’t everything. She is “an amateur aerialist, meaning I do aerial silks… it’s a sort of recreational circus,” she says. Acrobatics is “a good way to keep fit as well as a good way to clear your mind because, when you’re hanging upside down by one hand, you’re definitely not worrying about anything else but staying alive.” ♦

David McAllister

Osman Yousefzada’s 2018 art installation, A Migrant’s Room of Her Own, was based on his mother’s bedroom. But when he took her to see it at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, she was confused. “She asked me who slept there,” Yousefzada says. “She’d never been to a museum before.”

Yousefzada’s mother emigrated to England from a village on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1970s, following her husband who had left seven years earlier. Both were illiterate and spoke no English. They lived in a tight-knit Muslim community in Balsall Heath, Birmingham. Yousefzada’s mother, a seamstress, did not leave the house. When they hit puberty, his three sisters were taken out of school and the family concocted elaborate excuses for social workers asking about their sudden disappearance.

Yousefzada, an artist and fashion designer whose clothes have been worn by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, describes his childhood in his new memoir, The Go-Between. He would buy fabrics and bring them home for his mother: observing her work, he writes, was “like watching a magician.” He tells me that the book is “a bit of a love letter” to his mother, who died on New Year’s Day this year. Yousefzada looked after her during the pandemic. “It was really beautiful,” he says. “It’s that connection from one body to another body. You’re connected and you have this responsibility for each other.”

He had a more difficult relationship with his father, a “complicated” man who sometimes beat his wife and told Osman he should have killed his younger sister after she ran away from home. When Osman left home permanently after his first year studying anthropology at

SOAS in London, his father burned his belongings. Years later, they reconciled. “I think he understood logically why I left to go to university. He probably tried to understand why I didn’t come back.” After graduating from SOAS, he studied fashion at Central Saint Martins, and in 2008 founded his clothing label, Osman.

Does he ever wonder what he would be doing if he hadn’t left home at 18? “Maybe working in a factory,” he replies. “I do think my life would be quite different.”

The Go-Between depicts Balsall Heath in the 1980s and 1990s, where immigrant families lived in cheap housing on streets frequented by sex workers. “It’s a very workingclass book,” he says. “It’s a very under-class book. The root is from illiteracy—the root is not being able to have the codes to navigate new spaces. And it’s a story of quite a few people.”

Becoming an artist was not a difficult step for Yousefzada. “I come from a family of artisans, so making stuff with your hands comes quite naturally and easily.” But he can see the difference between how his work is now perceived compared to his mother’s. “Most working-class people are artisans, and most middleclass people are artists.”

Yousefzada’s parents used to warn their children that they risked being sent back by the UK authorities to the AfghanPakistani border. He was reminded of those childhood conversations by the recent Nationality and Borders Bill, which would make it easier for the government to strip dual nationals of British citizenship. “I find that makes me quite nervous,” he says. “Where do you redefine the boundaries of where you belong?”

He is furious about the way the UK treats migrants. “We may as well have Priti Patel on the Channel on one of those news boats actually following migrants across. I mean, it’s completely crazy how we treat people… who come here for a better life.” ♦ Emily Lawford