Kirsty Blackman, the SNP’s deputy leader at Westminster, believes the sexual harassment scandal should help change British politics for the better – and she has started by rejecting hugs in the workplace.

“We have got this massive opportunity to change culture now. We can change culture in the House of Commons, we can change culture across society, if we take this opportunity – so I don’t think we should let this go quiet,” says Blackman, perched on a green leather chair in her Westminster office.

The wave of allegations crossed political parties following the claims against Harvey Weinstein and contributed to two senior cabinet ministers, Michael Fallon and Damian Green, losing their jobs. Several investigations have yet to be concluded.

Since the allegations emerged, “the conversations I’ve been having with people have been really different”, Blackman says.



“Somebody that I met, we had a conversation about whether or not they would give me a hug – and actually I don’t particularly want people to hug me.

“If somebody goes to hug me and I don’t want them to hug me, I should say: ‘Excuse me, I’d rather shake hands.’ If we keep talking about it when it comes to more minor things like hugging, then maybe they will check themselves and they will think more carefully before they lunge in and snog someone.”

This no-nonsense approach is characteristic of the 31-year-old, who has represented Aberdeen North since 2015. As well as being deputy leader of the SNP group in the UK parliament, Blackman speaks for her party on the economy, and caught the public’s attention when she was censured by the parliamentary authorities in 2016 for bringing her two young children to a Commons committee hearing, underlining the challenges of balancing parenthood and politics.

She would like to see a formal maternity leave scheme for MPs as well as local councillors. “When I was a councillor and I had my son I went back to work after four weeks. Who would represent my constituents if I wasn’t there?”

A relative newcomer to Westminster – which is dotted with drinking holes for MPs, peers and their staff to let off steam, or await late night votes – Blackman also argues much more could be done to professionalise parliament as a workplace, starting with its bars.

“I don’t think that the problem is that we have bars, because I think it is reasonable that people have somewhere that they can go in an evening and have a drink after work. What I do think is a concern for me is the way that those places are managed. I’ve worked in pubs before. There are people that come to any one of those bars that there’s no way I would have served. I would have said: ‘You’re too drunk. Get out of this place.’

“If you have them run as professional bars, rather than some kind of social club, then you have a situation where everybody is much safer.”

The SNP has been somewhat less prominent at Westminster since last June’s snap general election, when the party lost 21 of the 56 seats it had won two years earlier, including those occupied by some of its more colourful parliamentarians such as Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson. But Blackman, whom the SNP believes is the first woman to be any party’s lead spokesperson on the economy, has been steadily building a reputation as an understated but effective Commons performer.

“We’ve been trying to regroup a bit since that election, but actually it feels like we have made a really positive start,” she says.

Blackman rejects the idea that being a woman shapes the way she approaches economic issues, pointing instead to her past and her family as key influences.

“I think whatever gender you are, the experiences that you have had in the past probably shape the approach you have in the future. I was a local councillor for eight years, and I saw lots of people coming through my door talking about their concerns,” she says.

“Unlike some people, who left school and went to university to do PPE and then came to this place having rarely met a real person in their lives, I have been in there, speaking to people, and therefore I think I have a pretty good idea of what matters to people – compared with some MPs.

“I’ve got two young kids as well, so obviously that shapes how I approach things.”

Like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, the SNP is resolutely anti-austerity, but Blackman says she makes a special effort to talk about economic policy in a way that addresses voters’ everyday concerns.

Her party’s other preoccupation is Brexit, on which the SNP believes it has a clearer policy than the constructive ambiguity of Labour’s.

“I think the key thing that’s differentiating us from Labour at the moment is their policy on Brexit, because they are in an utter shambles,” says Blackman. “You’ve got those divisions within Labour, where some of them agree with Keir Starmer’s much more sensible position about a softer Brexit, and some of them very much don’t.

“We [the SNP] have that absolute consistency that we believe we should be members of the European Union; if we’re not going to be members of the European Union we should be members of the single market and the customs union.”

She is markedly less keen to talk about Scottish independence, the SNP’s founding principle. The slide in the party’s fortunes in June follows its leader Nicola Sturgeon’s political gamble of demanding a second independence referendum before the final Brexit deal is done.

The Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, ran a pro-union campaign in the election, accusing the first minister of opportunism and urging her to “get back to the day job” of governing Scotland.

Blackman says she is not in Westminster to pressure the government for a referendum. “I don’t think most folk in their daily lives give two hoots about whether Scotland is a member of the union. The constitutional issues are not the biggest concern for an awful lot of people and, in fact, I very rarely talk about Scottish independence in the chamber, because I talk about things that matter to the people of Aberdeen.”

Having cut her teeth as the organiser of local activists in the 2014 independence referendum, Blackman insists the SNP, which has now been in government in Holyrood for a decade, can keep voters’ enthusiasm alive – despite recent criticism over schools policy and planned tax increases.

“Keeping interest in a political movement is difficult for all parties, and it’s something that every party grapples with. We need to keep doing new and exciting things; we need to keep being progressive. We need to continue being a competent party of government, and we need to keep giving people things to look forward to.”

And as MPs prepare to come back to Westminster after their Christmas break, the dogged Blackman will add her voice to those of MPs across all parties – including Labour’s Jess Phillips and the Tory leader of the House Andrea Leadsom – who are determined not to let the sexual harassment scandal drop.

“I think there were a lot of people who came out and said: ‘We’ve got zero tolerance of this,’ and then it kind of fizzled a bit. I would like to see this stay on the agenda - I would like this to stay as something that we’re talking about on a regular basis,” she says.