Youngest MP calls for end to austerity
Print Edition
AT the age of just 20, Mhairi Black has become Britain’s youngest member of parliament since 1667 in a victory which symbolized the nationalist landslide in Scotland.
Black still has to complete her final exams at Glasgow University but will now be putting her politics degree into practice as the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South.
The no-nonsense blonde won a majority of more than 5,000 in Thursday’s election to topple Douglas Alexander, the Labour Party’s 47-year-old foreign affairs spokesman and campaign chief.
Black vowed to improve life for ordinary Scots.
“We will work to put an end to the austerity cuts that are hurting people in communities both north and south of the border,” she said.
Black grew up in a family that supported Labour but, like many in Scotland, has turned her back on the center-left party that she says has become too distant from its supporters and left-wing roots.
Black says her hometown has been in decline for decades, with one in five people in Paisley now living in poverty and one in three families forced to use food banks.
She campaigned for Scottish independence in last September’s referendum. The vote was lost but she said a few weeks later: “It doesn’t mean the dream has died.”
To those who criticize her lack of experience, she responds by saying she is old enough to pay taxes or fight in a war.
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