‘We’re not yahs’ says Edi student behind the Nicola Sturgeon TikTok riling up boomers

‘Nicola would probably last three days in Edi halls and then scamper back to Holyrood’


Yesterday Edinburgh Live reported on a viral TikTok featuring a bunch of Edinburgh students playing a game of “put a finger down if”, lowering their fingers for statements such as “you came for blended learning and now everything is online” and “Nicola Sturgeon ruined your life”.

The Edinburgh Live article has successfully pissed off “everyone above the age of 18” according to its creator, who is now facing the brunt of boomers across the country calling her “spoiled”, a “snowflake” and telling her and her flatmates “grow up”.

But she doesn’t really care. Tizzie Robinson-Gordon, who made the video, told The Edinburgh Tab: “It doesn’t really bother me too much. Because ultimately, it’s been well received by the audience I intended it for. And actually, I’d use all the energy and the speculation its caused to justify my actions. If they actually watched the video, they’d be well aware that we’re playing in the stereotypes, we’re playing into problems every Edinburgh student is going through.”

Tizzie says that if she got a chance, she’d invite Nicola Sturgeon to “come and go through the university experience herself”. “I’d invite her to spend nine and a half thousand pounds on an education that isn’t worth that,” she said, “and I’d invite her to come and spend 8000 pounds on our accommodation when we can’t leave a six-foot by eight-foot sterile block.

“I think she would last a couple of days and then she’d scamper back to Holyrood.”

And as for the younger critics calling her and her flatmates “yahs”, Tizzie disagrees. “We’re satirising those stereotypes. We’re not denying that those stereotypes exist at this uni, but if you actually watch the video we’re saying things nothing to do with the stereotype – we’re talking about problems that all university students, regardless of social class, wealth, what they’re studying or where they’re from would know.

“Every student across the university has had issues with having food delivered in accommodation when they’ve had to self isolate, every student has got to the uni expecting it to be hybrid learning and finding out its online. We’re not creating problems here, we’re establishing the universal faults of the uni. Most of us are from state schools anyway, and we’re not even in Pollock!”

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