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It’s one of the most profoundly disappointing things about the last decade of Scottish politics that for about five minutes in 2015 we all thought that this awful dunderheaded foghorn was a bright new hope for the future.
But you live and learn. At least, some of us do.
When you see who’s interviewing Mhairi Black for the fluff piece in today’s National, obviously you don’t expect any sort of interrogation or introspection. But even going in with super-low expectations it’s a pretty gross example of the sort of insubstantial yet manky “dust bunny” you find under a sofa that hasn’t been hoovered in a few years.
It starts off pretty wretchedly:
Well, isn’t that nice? Black’s enjoying being a “celebrity” instead of having to do any actual work. Because sometimes work is difficult, not fun, and that wouldn’t do, would it? Not when you could turn your back on the people who elected you three times to win their nation back for them, and just gallivant around the country getting paid to laugh and joke about how miserably you failed at it.
Black basically admits that she just wasn’t cut out for the life of a politician.
And that’s fair enough. She got elected when she was 20, with no life experience or chance to build some mental strength before being thrown into the bearpit. And it turned out she’d been right all along in 2015 when she said it was “a ridiculous idea”.
Because as it transpired, she wasn’t “capable” of handling the demanding job of an MP at all. All she’d done in her life up to that point was serve fish and chips. After just a couple of years of gruelling travel and taking the flak that inevitably comes from being in the public eye (nobody can credibly claim to be surprised that politicians get a lot of stick), Black was already burned out.
But something about the (then) £76,000 salary, perks and attention persuaded her to stick at it, despite the toll it was taking on her mental health, the apparent futility of trying to achieve anything in the House Of Commons and her inability to carry out even basic duties like holding constituency surgeries.
And sure enough, almost immediately after being re-elected she took several months off work sick from the stress.
Which might have come as a bit of a let-down to the people who’d voted for her, after she’d told Positive News a month into that second term that “I’ll be happy if, in five years’ time, I can say, ‘The place I am representing has been better represented than it ever was before.’”
But after not representing them at all for a substantial chunk of the next two years, remarkably she still hadn’t learned that – to quote the title of her 2025 stand-up show – “Politics Isn’t For Me”, and remarkably stood once again in the 2019 election.
Successfully returned a third time, she threw herself not into arduous and thankless constituency work but into the internal wars of the SNP, complaining that the party was over-centralised and that there were “four people in a room deciding everything” and handing down policy to be unquestioningly adopted without consultation with its own MPs, let alone the wider membership or – God forbid – the general public.
And yet oddly, when it came to the most polarising, divisive and under-debated subject of all – gender reform, which was NEVER agreed or even meaningfully discussed by SNP conference – Black wholeheartedly went along with the leadership’s diktat and in today’s National piece accuses anyone who questioned the policy of being an ignorant, uninformed bigot.
Readers might be forgiven for wondering what happened to the principled young woman who just a couple of paragraphs earlier was advocating “bringing in different viewpoints”. But we know this isn’t a sudden Damascene conversion, because she’s been consistent – it was infamously Black who in 2019 smirkingly called gender-critical feminists a bunch of “Jeremy Hunts”.
Black makes no argument whatsoever in favour of gender reform on its own merits, just rages like a loyal apparatchik at those who refused to blindly obey “party policy”, and demands that they should be “disciplined”. But then that’s not very shocking, because there’s no such argument to be made.
That’s a shame, because out of curiosity we’d quite like to know what the “thorough research, professional opinion [and] lived experience” Black cites in support of the GRR and the SNP’s support for self-ID was, and we’re certainly not aware of the Scottish Government commissioning any scientific research into the subject.
Indeed, there is no research proving human beings can change sex, because human beings cannot do so, and the Cass Review found conclusively that there’s no reliable evidence whatsoever that so-called “gender-affirming care” has any benefits, let alone ones outweighing the serious mental and physical harm it can cause. And even as the rest of the world slowly starts to wake up to that fact, Black is still brimming with unrestrained, condescending hatred for the “bigots” telling the truth.
But then we get to the part of the interview that really got our teeth grinding.
Having previously moaned about the impossibility of achieving anything worthwhile at Westminster, Black suddenly pivots and says it’s the only road to independence. Now, Wings would be the first to admit that we’re in a pretty nihilist sort of place regarding the indy movement right now, but that’s a level of hopeless defeatist capitulation beyond even our darkest hours.
The SNP secured the first indyref entirely via Holyrood. It had just six MPs looking out over the Thames when the Edinburgh Agreement was signed. And every UK party at Westminster now is implacably opposed to granting a second vote, because they were terrified at the closeness of the first one.
(In any event the current government has a majority of 174 for the next four years, against which the SNP’s nine MPs are unsurprisingly utterly impotent, but we already know from 2017-19 that the party is toothless even in the vanishingly rare times when it has arithmetical leverage.)
Most of the SNP politicians who achieved that referendum had spent decades of their lives fighting for it, often against seemingly hopeless odds, enduring unending mockery and abuse. Black has run away squealing “it’s just too hard!” before she’s even 30, but then has the temerity to assert that the main vehicle for the SNP’s spectacular success of the last 20 years is actually just a waste of everyone’s time.
Still an SNP member, she’s fired a cannonball into the leaky, rusting wreck that is the party’s entire ostensible current excuse for an independence strategy (“secure a pro-indy majority at Holyrood, something something mumble something, independence!”), but has no constructive suggestions for what to replace it with, other than to keep sending MPs to a place where nothing can be achieved.
Oh, and to keep screaming abuse at anyone whose views are in line with the public’s, a cunning strategy which has seen the SNP shed 70,000 members, 40% of its support and 75% of its trust in the last five years.
(Ironically and hilariously, Black told a BBC podcast this week that if the SNP switched to Kate Forbes’ more socially-conservative policies it might risk a “mass exodus”. It adopted gender self-ID in 2021 when it had 125,000 members. It now has 58,000. Presumably she thinks that’s just a minor adjustment and/or unfortunate coincidence.)
As the interview limps towards an underwhelming close, Black’s witless, infantile lack of political acumen is strikingly exposed.
We suppose it’s nice that she at least recognises the existence of “reality” in SOME contexts. But wait, what? We have to wait for the very concept of referendums to be outlawed before we can seek any sort of alternative route? And her solution is to just wait until whoever is in power in London either does that or spontaneously changes their minds about granting one? (Neither of which things will ever happen.)
We suppose that if we’d trousered the best part of a million quid when we were still in our 20s we’d feel pretty relaxed about the future too. But not everyone has the luxury of so casually having a break on the journey back to Scotland’s nationhood.
We’ve been too despairing about the state of the indy movement to get angry about very much of late, readers, but this feckless child’s cretinous proclamations would rile a saint. Politics certainly isn’t for her, and it really would be a great service to the world if she’d take her own advice and shut her mouth about the subject once and for all.
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