Black: Government ‘more out of touch than Thatcher’
THE Commons’ youngest MP, the SNP’s Mhairi Black, has launched an attack on the Conservative Government in her maiden speech, as well as a damning assessment of Labour’s direction of travel.
The new MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South received rousing applause from her own party in the chamber as she sat down after telling members that “I feel it is the Labour Party that left me, not the other way about”.
Ms Black, 20, said speeches from Labour MPs she had witnessed so far demonstrated “how deep the lack of understanding about Scotland is within the Labour Party”, adding the SNP triumphed on a “wave of hope”.
She said her comments were intended to “hold a mirror to the face of a party that seems to have forgotten the very people they are supposed to represent”.
Britain, she said, now had “one of the most uncaring, uncompromising and out of touch governments that the UK has seen since Thatcher”.
Ms Black said she had “very deliberately stayed quiet” and had listened intently to Commons debate for the last 10 weeks.
She said: “I have heard multiple speeches from Labour benches standing to talk about the worrying rise of nationalism in Scotland, when in actual fact all these speeches have served to do is to demonstrate how deep the lack of understanding about Scotland is within the Labour Party.”
Coming from a Labour family, she added that she had not been quiet in pointing out that the party had “left me, not the other way about.”
She added: “The SNP did not triumph on a wave of nationalism, in fact nationalism has nothing to do with what’s happened in Scotland. We triumphed on a wave of hope, hope that there was something different, something better to the Thatcherite neo-liberal policies.”
Ms Black added she was just three when her predecessor Douglas Alexander was elected in 1997.