SNP MP Mhairi Black has announced she is leaving the party over disagreement with its stance on trans rights and Palestine.
Black, the party’s former Deputy Leader at Westminster, revealed that she ended her party membership in recent weeks because she disagreed with “too many decisions”.
Speaking to The Herald, she said: “There have just been too many times when I’ve thought, ‘I don’t agree with what you’ve done there’ or the decision or strategy that has been arrived at.”
Ms Black made headlines back in 2015 when she was elected as the youngest MP to the House of Commons since 1832, at 20 years old.
She was re-elected in her constituency, Paisley and Renfrewshire South, in 2017 and 2019, before becoming Deputy Westminster Leader of the SNP in 2022.
Black stood down as an MP in the 2024 general election, calling Westminster “one of the most unhealthy workplaces you could ever be in”.
Since leaving politics, she has gone on to experiment with stand-up comedy, including a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with her show “Politics Isn’t For Me”.
Speaking on her decision, Black singled out the SNP’s positions on issues like trans rights and single-sex spaces.
She criticised the prominence of Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes within the SNP, who has expressed socially conservative views and opposed the Scottish government’s Gender Recognition (Reform) Bill, which would have made gender self-identification easier for trans people.
Speaking to BBC Scotland last year, Black said she was “done with party politics” and would have “probably left the party sooner” if Forbes had become the SNP leader.
Forbes was a candidate in the 2023 SNP leadership election, where she ultimately came second in the vote behind Humza Yousaf.
Black claimed she was “still pro-independence”, but that the party has “capitulated” on issues including “LGBT rights, and trans rights in particular”, adding that “the party could be doing better about Palestine as well.”.
Black has also said that she will “throw [her] money behind” the Good Law Project, which campaigns on trans human rights and is trying to fundraise in order to take the UK government back to court over the Supreme Court’s rulings on the legal definition of a woman.
The former Deputy Leader said: “”If anything, I’m probably a bit more left wing than I have been.
“I don’t think I have changed all that much. I feel like the party needs to change a lot more.”
Ms Black’s departure from the SNP comes ahead of her second run of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, this year named “Work In Progress”.
The show promises to focus on her life outside of politics as well as her experience of being nuerodivergent, following an ADHD diagnosis during her time at Westminster.
An SNP spokesperson told the BBC the party was “united under John Swinney’s vision of creating a better, fairer Scotland”.
Featured image via HM Government.
