[Robin McAlpine Blog] Mhairi Black – just another fake

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Mhairi Black – just another fake

I quite often get asked how I spotted that Nicola Sturgeon was a fake before most did (this article is not about Nicola Sturgeon). To answer I give you my number one piece of political advice – don’t listen to them. I mean that pretty literally. I seldom listen to the presentation a politician gives when they launch a new policy or initiative. I wait and read their words so I can scan it, but I focus on the content.

When the adjectives in the speech are not supported by the content, they are meaningless. In the end what a politician does is what counts, not what they tell you they did, not what they tell you they’re going to do and certainly not them criticising others or telling you about their values. Because politics isn’t about rhetoric and our belief that it is is exactly why we have the failing politics we do.

All of this is what was on my mind in the commentary about Mhairi One-Speech leaving the SNP. I don’t use it in the real world but in my head Mhairi Black has long been Mhairi One-Speech. I first heard that speech when she was a young activist talking with me on a panel during indyref.

From the star, she had 110 per cent of my goodwill. The extra ten per cent is my belief not only that we can’t be cutting things down before they have a chance to establish, it’s that I have always hoped that being extremely positive about possibilities can help them to come true through positive reinforcement.

So having recently been told about ‘this young woman who is electric’ during the campaign I listened with great interest. What I heard was what I imagined I’d hear – it was a speech I’d heard many times (often better) from activists young and old. It was a genuinely passionate denunciation of the impact Thatcherite economics had had on Scotland.

I didn’t disagree with a word of it, but I didn’t find a word of it new or revealing either. I’d heard the speech on repeat by socialists since my childhood in the 1980s. I saw nothing that told me Mhairi Black was going to be exceptional, but I saw enough that suggested she had the potential to be exceptional (or at least significant) if she learned and developed some substance.

What I’m asking here is what exactly Mhairi Black did to earn the suggestion that she was the next SNP leader in waiting

So when I heard the speech again after she got elected to Westminster I rather zoned out. It had all been said many times before and really the main differentiating factor in Black delivering it was that she was young and, despite being a thoroughly middle class university graduate, sounded vaguely working class. It was who she was, not what she was saying, that made the impact.

Of course, that was a positive and only increased the sense that she had the potential to be something a bit special. If she knuckled down, learned that it wasn’t about speeches, gained more substance, had a focus on real issues and developed a track record of being effective. That, for example, was the trajectory of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in the US.

Now go and do some web searches. Mhairi Black’s whole thing is that she is a ‘working class’ socialist, so let’s see how effective a working class socialist she is. I start with an easy one – a search containing ‘Mhairi Black’ and ‘housing’. I’ve gone through five pages of search results and the only ones later than 2015 are her whining about what she’s going to do after politics last year.

Then I try ‘Mhairi Black’ and ‘poverty’. Again, there are links for that speech and then her referencing her speech the following year and then her referencing her speech in 2021 – and then it’s her whining about her ADHD diagnosis.

So let’s really dig into this then; the politicians I admire are the ones with principle who speak out against what their own side is doing if it is wrong. So let’s take a shot at ‘Mhairi Black’ and ‘Freeports’, a policy from her own administration. I can’t find a link that has this combination of terms but isn’t in a promo piece for her fringe show.

What I’m asking here is what exactly Mhairi Black did to earn the suggestion that she was the next SNP leader in waiting. She’s delivered one speech and a few variations on that one speech. She does not seem to have championed working class causes in her activity. She has no track record on the big issues that I can find – not on housing, not on poverty, not on the economy, nothing.

This matches what others have told me – that she was bone-idle, had a poor reputation in her constituency where she seemed bored by the problems faced by constituents, that she barely turned up for work, contributed little to either the parliamentary group or the wider party, and that she was rather too fond of what I’ll call ‘the distractions that London has to offer’.

She hasn’t sustained arguments around any big issues I can find, hasn’t championed any big ideas or initiatives I’ve ever seen, was utterly silent throughout the abomination which was the Growth Commission, has never spoken out against either the militarists or high neoliberals in her party and doesn’t appear to have anything you might mistake for a major achievement in her time.

In fact in reality she’s an identikit Westminster backbencher – middle class child of professional parents who graduated from a Russell Group university and who makes speeches sometimes while drawing a salary and prestige it is hard to imagine them getting anywhere else. She’s not worse than most (though they do tell me she was lazier than most), just the same as them.

She was yet another receptacle for the belief of ordinary people that it was possible for politics to be better, or at the very least different – a belief she betrayed

But of course like all the other middle class university types in politics, and particularly those who are gay or lesbian, she is deeply committed to politics that relate to her lifestyle. So she’s vocally outspoken about trans issues in often extreme language. It is a position many Tories comfortably adopt so is this stuff really left? It’s all there is to Mhairi Black other than narcissism.

Because the rest of her presence is standard influencer stuff – a neurodivergence diagnosis so she can talk about herself, mocking and dismissing former colleagues so she can talk about herself, presenting tales of her battles again Westminster which were invisible to the human eye at the time but need to be taken really seriously now so she can talk about herself.

And what’s the purpose of all this talking about herself? Using her platform to change society? Nope, it’s to advertise her fringe show where you can go and hear her talk about herself.

If you want to ask what is wrong with modern politics you could do worse than start with Mhairi Black. She did little for her constituents, did nothing for her nation when given the chance, hardly turned up for her work a lot of the time, used her platform to settle scores rather than make anything better then fucked off for a paycheck which involves her bad-mouthed everyone else.

Now she’s opposed to Freeports when it costs her nothing. Now she’s decrying the Westminster that gave her such a generous salary and such a privileged lifestyle. Now she’s concerned about the lack of radical action by an SNP in which she was in prime position to have pushed for radical action at any time over the last decade.

But even though she was a cookie cutter Westminster pocket-stuffer, she still managed to pull of the trick of being an avatar for why the SNP was different, not like the others. And then, like Sturgeon herself, the rhetoric and the reality collided and she cashed her chips in.

What bothers me about this isn’t that she’s done a runner (which was inevitable), or that she wasted a decade on her own ego at the expense of anything of value (she’s hardly alone among SNP backbenchers there) or that she has been divisive to no positive purpose, or that she is a fake and a chancer, a poverty tourist who did nothing for the poor.

It’s that she was yet another receptacle for the belief of ordinary people that it was possible for politics to be better, or at the very least different – a belief she betrayed. Just like Scotland is still full of dazed and confused citizens saying ‘but I thought Nicola was different’, now there’s another bunch of ‘but I thought Mhairi was the future’ voters who must be starting to think this is as good as it gets.

Why do I have so much contempt for the self-promoting Black these days? Because even though I knew she had done nothing much to earn it, I gave her 110 per cent of my hopes that she might do something of use. I thought or hoped she might deserve the potential she so readily exploited. She didn’t.

If we’re condemned to a conveyor belt of influencer-politicians who think a TikTok video is the same as work, we’re stuck in this world forever. Mhairi Black might have been the future. As it stands, she is barely the past.

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