Mick Hartley

Mhairi Black isn't just some loud-mouthed young politician with offensive views: she's the Scottish nationalists’ deputy Westminster leader. And she's very keen on insulting anyone – particularly gender-criticals – who disagrees with her:

Gender-critical campaigners are comparable to white supremacists, the SNP’s deputy Westminster leader has claimed.

Mhairi Black said that “bad actors” and “50-year-old Karens” were responsible for the debate over transgender rights and suggested those who vocally disagreed with her views on such issues could not be “decent” people.

In comments likely to deepen an already bitter divide in Scotland, she said those who made “intellectual” arguments against extending trans rights were akin to past generations who claimed non-white ethnic groups were inferior….

Ms Black, who was Britain’s youngest MP in 350 years when she was elected in 2015 aged 20, announced last month that she was stepping down at the next election.

She blamed Westminster’s “toxic” culture, which she claimed had harmed her mental and physical health.

The toxicity will be notably less once Mhairi Black has left.

Susan Smith, a director at For Women Scotland, said Ms Black’s comments were a “damning indictment of her intellectual capacity and her fitness to act as a legislator”.

She added: “Her inability to grasp why highly vulnerable women in prison, fleeing domestic violence, or being cared for in hospital might not want to share intimate spaces with someone of the male sex suggests that it is long past time she got out of her highly cosseted, gilded bubble.

“Women who disagree with her should not be forced to be silent like some latter-day scold, nor are they the racist or religious fundamentalist bogeywomen.”