10 things about Mhairi Black, Britain's youngest MP since 1667

BARELY out of her teens, 20-year-old student Mhairi Black is Britain's youngest person to be elected to the Westminster Parliament since 1667, when a boy aged 13 became knight of the Shire for Devon.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) candidate for Paisley and Renfrewshire South defeated experienced Labour politician Douglas Alexander, who had held the seat since 1997, by a comfortable margin of 5,684 votes.

Here are 10 things to know about the young history maker:

1. She is a final­-year politics and public policy student at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and has yet to complete her final exams.

2. She is a native of Paisley, a town in Scotland's west central lowlands 11.4km from Glasgow.

3. The young MP pronounces her first name as "Mary".

4. She has always been politically minded and took part in protests from a young age, including marches against the Iraq War in 2005.

5. Ms Black is also the first person under the age of 21 to be elected to Britain's Parliament since the minimum age for candidates was lowered from 21 to 18 in 2006.

6. She grew up in a family that supported the Labour Party, which is traditionally strong in Scotland. But like many of her Scottish compatriots, she became disillusioned with the party that was perceived as too far away in Westminster to be concerned about the Scottish, and whose policies had moved too close to the Conservatives.

7. She campaigned for Scottish independence in last September's referendum, where the Scottish voted to stay in the United Kingdom.

8. She had based her campaign on the "pursuit of social justice", saying that she had "witnessed first hand the level of poverty and injustice prevalent in our society" while visiting poor areas with the Margo Mobile campaign, which toured housing estates and working communities across Scotland.

9. She was criticised for an emotional speech during a rally after losing in the Scottish referendum, where she said she want to "put the nut" in one of the Labour councillors, accusing them of "goading". The incident raised questions over her maturity.

10. She is a passionate fan of Scottish Premiership football club Partick Thistle, which is based in Glasgow. She also plays football, being one of the first girls to play on the football team in her primary school in Paisley. She was once criticised for a Twitter post she made as a teenager after a football match between Partick Thistle and rivals Celtic, where she used a vulgar word and called Celtic "scum".

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Scotsman.com. The Independent, wbaltv.com, The Daily Mirror