An interview/chat with the Paisley and Renfrewshire South MP who was elected to the UK parliament in 2015 aged just 20. After a brilliant maiden speech she has gone on to become one of the SNP's best speakers and a personality who has wide appeal, especially to younger voters. She's also attracted more than her fair share of vituperation, especially online where her politics, and even more so her gender and sexuality, are the target of irrational abuse from the political right.
Journalist Graham Spiers introduced her to an enthusiastic (and strongly pro-Indy) audience and undertook the questioning. Her early life, earliest political memories, the environment that influenced her views, moving swiftly on to her selection as a candidate and subsequent election. She loves the aspect of being an MP that involves helping constituents, but hates the "crap" of being in parliament. And it's her experiences of life at Westminster that are the most illuminating, an insider's view confirming just how out of date and out of touch the House of Commons is, "a club masquerading as a parliament". Her description of the voting procedures was hilarious, but highlighted what a waste of public money they involve and that this supposedly democratic institution is simply not fit for purpose.
She talked about other MPs. Jacob Rees-Mogg was always civil, polite, honest, and easy to talk to, but a man of vile, bigoted views and very dangerous. The only thing she feels in common with May is that neither of them knows how brexit will end, and Corbyn has been a huge disappointment in compromising his beliefs to bend to the perceived views of the English middle class. Black sees no need for a second EU referendum, when there was such a clear result in the first - this country voted convincingly to remain in. It's clear her belief that Scotland suffers from being in the union has only been strengthened from the evidence her job has given her.
Black remains, as yet, largely unaffected by her time in the artificial bubble of an archaic establishment, still as fresh and funny and sharp as she was 3 years ago, but with that added experience informing her views. We need more like her.
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