Yi-Pei Chou Turvey: 'I don’t believe a London MP understands the life of rural Scotland'

Yi-Pei Chou Turvey has a clear idea of what the biggest challenge will be for her party this session: “To be heard and to be visible in the media.”

“Reform have way more visibility,” she says. “In Westminster, Reform have seven MPs and we are 71. When do you hear them? The media should give balance or pro-rata visibility to every party.” 

In fairness to Malcolm Offord’s party, the scales tip in the other direction in the Scottish Parliament, where Reform UK returned 17 MSPs to the Lib Dems’ 10.

Still, that 10 is more than twice the 2021 tally and has seen the party win in constituencies and on the list, where Chou Turvey represents the north east. “A bunch of people” in there were “waiting for us to be back,” she says. “We have a history of really great Lib Dem MSPs and MPs in the area.” 

She remembers when she got her first inkling of success. “We had a great launch with Alex Cole-Hamilton in Stonehaven,” she recalls. “It was a beautiful day, a beautiful place, and it felt like ‘hey, we’re going to win it back’. We’d been out for five years and just wanted to be back on the scene.”

Highly rated by her party, Chou Turvey has been made its justice spokesperson and has spent her summer recess genning up on the brief. A former law student – she did two years of constitutional and Roman law but didn’t finish – she’s determined to be across the finer details. “I told them, ‘give me everything’,” she says of her office staff, miming a stack of paperwork and enthusing about the role with characteristic energy. “The prison population doesn’t get votes but nothing should be left at the bottom of the to-do list,” she goes on. “It’s so important to get it sorted for people’s human rights, for rehabilitation. If people aren’t supported properly they’ll fall back into their old habits.”

It’s an area in which she hopes to achieve consensus, despite the parliament’s obvious ideological differences. “It’s hard to get cross-party agreement with everyone from the Greens to Reform. We have to find that – otherwise we are just going to drag each other down constantly. 

“When we have a spectrum of voices in the chamber compromising, being able to work together, finding common ground, that’s important. Dig into the common ground. In Brussels every government is a coalition because it’s the only way you can have a majority.” 

Born in Taiwan, Chou Turvey grew up in the Belgian city and exposure to its politics has informed her support for federalism. New PM Andy Burnham’s vow to “rewire” UK politics doesn’t go far enough, she believes, and says federalism “can give more power to Scotland”. “The prime minister wants more devolution, so what does that mean? Is it just for England or everywhere? I’m a strong believer in federalism, I grew up in a federal country.  

“I don’t believe that a London MP understands the life of rural Scotland. Decisions should always be taken with knowledge.” 

She remains, however, unconvinced of the independence argument, and has “a tonne of questions” for its proponents. “We have Russian subs on our doorstep, who is going to pay for defence in Scotland? What are you going to cut to pay for it?” she asks.

Most often seen with a trademark headband, the Star Wars fan is a guitar player who hopes to convince fellow MSPs to start an in-house rock band. Raised by art teachers who promoted reading over TV, she stretched the bi-weekly borrowing limit at her local library as a girl and recently moved her sizeable French-language sci-fi collection to her “wee house in Edinburgh” as a bit of home comfort. 

And hers is a political home. Elected to Aberdeenshire council in 2022, on which she represents Banchory and Mid Deeside, Chou Turvey is the first East Asian to enter the Scottish Parliament, and husband Michael Turvey is a fellow councillor who has run for the Scottish and UK parliaments. Conversation with her three children often includes discussion of the latest current affairs, she says. “We are constantly in campaign mode,” Chou Turvey explains. “It’s a bit exhausting. Sometimes it can be amazing.  

“I sometimes tell Michael ‘we have to switch off’. The teachers tell me my kids are the most aware of the world around them. My 10-year-old understands what’s going on in the world better than some grown-ups.” 

The couple met through friends in Brussels, where Chou Turvey had begun her life of public service at the age of just 11. “I was a human shield back in the day,” she jokes of her stint as a child crossing guard. “I had to go to the police station and take an exam, practical and written, and I worked the walking bus from school.” 

It’s amongst a number of unglamourous tasks she’s undertaken, which include scaling a ladder to remove ivy from the roof of a local library and distributing toilet roll to portable toilets at the North of Scotland Pipe Band Championships. It all seems very Lib Dem of her. After all, Cole-Hamilton has said his is a party that will “sweat the small stuff”, suggesting that if you want something done, you want a Lib Dem. “You get what you pay for,” Chou Turvey quips. 

Her efforts caught the attention of Alde, the 50-year-old alliance linking 70 liberal and democratic parties in 40 European nations, which named her its ‘rising star’ this summer. The first UK politician to get the gong, she walked on stage in Vienna to collect it wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the legend “nae pasaran” – a reference to the 1974 boycott by Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The trade unionists refused to work on plane parts for the regime, which was in office until 1981 – the year of Chou Turvey’s birth. Their actions were inspirational, she suggested in a speech which emphasised unity. 

“We are going to fight violence and division,” she said, and debate must be “peaceful and constructive”. 

The speech was delivered weeks after Chou Turvey took up her seat, giving her oath in the Mandarin of her Taiwanese birthplace, the French of her childhood, and the English of the UK, where she’s lived since 2013.  

With the trilingual oath, she was “doing something cool”, she says. And while some social media commentators agreed, footage of the moment also triggered a torrent of commentary to the contrary, often focused on where she was born and raised. While much came from anonymised accounts, some was from figures like right-wing activist Laurence Fox and former Ukip candidate Mark Meechan. Otherwise known under his YouTube persona of Count Dankula, Meechan was fined at Airdrie Sheriff Court in 2018 for uploading footage of him using phrases like “gas the Jews” to prompt a dog to raise its front paw in the style of a Nazi salute. 

A single clip of Chou Turvey’s oath, posted by Holyrood on X, has been viewed almost 600,000 times. 

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she says of the reaction. “I couldn’t sleep one night and started reading it, and then I really couldn’t sleep. 

“I’ve invested the last decade of my life in this country,” she goes on. “People say ‘people coming from abroad get everything’ and they change the culture or faith,” she says. “I go to church probably more than most of them. I’m a regular in volunteering at church as well. 

“We are going through tricky times,” she concludes, and points also to changing contexts in Europe, where convicted embezzler Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally is set to run for the presidency next year. “I want to be more positive in the campaigning, not just using anger at politics or other people,” she says. “I want to do what I preach – positive communication.”