Mhairi Black (; or /vaɾʲɪ/ in Scottish Gaelic; born 12 September 1994) is a Scottish politician who has served as Deputy Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the House of Commons since December 2022.
She has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Paisley and Renfrewshire South since 2015, when she defeated the Labour Party's Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander. She was re-elected in 2017 and again in 2019.
When elected in May 2015, she was 20 years and 237 days old, making her the youngest MP elected to the House of Commons since the Reform Act of 1832, the previous record having been held by William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, who was 20 years and 11 months old when elected in 1832. Black was the youngest member of the House from 2015 to 2019. Black remains the SNP's youngest MP.
On 4 July 2023, Black announced that she would not seek re-election as an MP at the next general election.
Early life
Born in Paisley in 1994, Black was educated at Lourdes Secondary School, Glasgow, and the University of Glasgow, where she was awarded a first-class honours degree in Politics and Public policy in June 2015. At the date of her election in 2015, she had not completed her undergraduate degree, with a final exam on Scottish politics still to be undertaken.
Political career
Black became a member of Parliament for Paisley and Renfrewshire South in the 2015 general election while still a final year undergraduate student at the University of Glasgow. Her defeat of Douglas Alexander, a Labour MP and Shadow Foreign Secretary, was described as unexpected and an example of a collapse of popularity for the Labour Party in Scotland at the 2015 general election.
Although she was reported to be the youngest MP since Christopher Monck, Earl of Torrington, who entered the House of Commons at the age of 13 in 1667, Monck was followed by other teenagers until the Parliamentary Elections Act 1695 established 21 as the minimum age of candidacy. Furthermore, until the Reform Act 1832, underage MPs were seldom unseated, not least because in those times it was easy to fabricate one's age due to lack of records today commonplace, and patronage usually prevented their unseating. For example, Viscount Jocelyn was 18 when elected in the 1806 general election. Since the Electoral Administration Act 2006 reduced the age of candidacy from 21 to 18 years, Black is the first person to be elected under its provisions.
On 1 July 2015, it was announced that Black had been appointed to the Work and Pensions Select Committee. She made her maiden speech on 14 July 2015 and this included some criticism of the government's approach to unemployment in her constituency and the growing need for food banks. She said, "Food banks are not part of the welfare state. They are a symbol that the welfare state is failing." Black also criticised the government over cuts to Housing Benefit. Within five days of her giving this speech, it had been viewed over 10 million times on various media. Black was later made aware of the change in the state pension through her constituents, and has since endorsed Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) on several occasions.
Black is a long-standing critic of Westminster. Two months following her election, she commented that the practice of making MPs vote in person, instead of electronically, was "outdated and wasted time". In a 2016 interview with Guardian journalist Owen Jones, Black labelled Westminster as an "old boys' club" and "so excluded from reality", while expressing concern about the arrogance and sexism from other MPs.
In June 2016, Black introduced a Private Members' Bill entitled Benefit Claimants Sanctions (Required Assessment) Bill. It received its second reading in December 2016, but did not proceed to any further stages.
At a public meeting in November 2016 in Aberdeenshire, Black said of the EU referendum: "If I'm honest, there was an element of holding my nose a bit when I voted Remain." One member of the audience told The Daily Telegraph, "I'm not sure she would have said it in Glasgow. She was sitting in the most Eurosceptic corner of Scotland."
She also dismissed the claim of the pro-independence campaign in 2014 that Scots would be £5,000 better off if they voted Yes as "mythical".
In 2017, Black considered not standing for a second term in the next general election, expressing her frustration that "so little gets done", and that "it is a pain to come up and down every week". Despite this, Black stood at the 2017 general election and, despite a backlash among voters to Sturgeon's plans for a second independence referendum, was re-elected with a reduced majority.