Yes to save the Union

Vote Yes to be sure we will stay in the EU. So the Sunday Herald and Nicola Sturgeon portrayed it.

That is how it may well turn out, but they are being too sure too hastily. Spain's capacity for wrecking vetoes in the EU remains. Reasonability is never to be relied on. Nor is "oh but you want all our luvly oil."

If England drifts as clearly anti-EU as the tabloids there are now trying to take it, which will be a sinisterly deliberate drift to racism in our politics like we are supposed to believe can only happen in Germany or South Africa, then even with the concerns of wrecking by Spain it will still be a better choice to take the pro-EU path of voting Yes. The referendum would then be a choice between 2 ways of having our EU membership interrupted, and Yes would be the choice that says we want it back. But it won't wash without specific answers from the Yes side explaining how we could trust our new state, explaining how they can bind it ahead now, to keep upholding the EU citizenship we already have and the secure place here of all our European friends who have come to live here. e.g. I have been greatly helped in some medical work by a Polish friend who came here without the type of already lined up employment that racists would demand, and who now has employment doing key good in the field concerned. Whether we end up back in the EU or in a Norway position in both EFTA and Schengen, just as good because it keeps the European open borders, we need to know what safeguards that no racism will be pandered to during the long haul.

It is being talked up that the British major parties will all come behind a EU referendum for 2015/6. That deprives Scotland of a properly informed decision in its own vote. It is happening the wrong way round, and no journalists yet are challenging that. But by becoming better at dialogue with voters than they have been, the Yes side have an opportunity to show they will be the safest choice. Only if they take said opportunity will they be the safest choice.

die of debate

According to the Sunday Herald's last front page, reckless new workfare rules for disability/sickness benefits are going to cause a lot of health damage from pushing folks into unsuitable placements they can't cope with. This comes from the British end, under whose powers the welfare system still rests. The Yes campaign will say this is a good humanitarian reason to leave Britain. Become a state where both major parties are progressive, "no more Tory governments" as had been on the SSP's Yes voting posters in Edinburgh.

But look at the independence timetable. It is actually longer than the British government's term, Salmond the reluctant seceder will take until 2016!! to actually do it. Clinging to every crumb he can on Britain's table. All this suffering will still happen while we are still waiting.

Oh but me must have a good long debate. So if folks die under pushing around by the benefits system and Atos, under 3 1/2 years of us still subject to this new system, they die to give us something to debate, do they?

the nat clearances?

The long term Nat maverick Jim Sillars who finds the SNP totalitarian, and their former leader Anti-Gay Gordon, now want us to leave the EU. In the wake of Salmond's mess up of the Scottish EU membership issue and doubt, they have jumped on the same Euro-angry bandwagon as the British right wing and tabloids.

This when the sudden mushrooming to seriousness of a chance of Britain leaving the EU had become the strongest looking reason for voting for independence. Instead the contagion has spread to both sides. That is bandwagons among the political class for you.

How do they expect our European friends and guests, living here and playing a welcome and often major role in many of our lives, to feel safe? Anti-EU voices on both sides need to be challenged to clarify what they intend for the future of EU citizens living here. The obvious fear is of a new clearance, a mass expulsion from the country of people who are friends or workers with real lives intertwined with ours. Thanks to Sillars and Wilson the question now exists against both sides. Before, it was a question for the No side. Salmond too, who you have noticed never clashes with the tabloid racist vote, should have made clear that our friends can stay here if our EU membership is interrupted. Pandering to the British tabloid consensus against Schengen in a way that is absurd for a movement to separate from the country where that nasty consensus is strongly rooted, neither has he ever touched the option of joining Schengen even from outside the EU, like Norway and Iceland and Switzerland. That would secure our friends here. Would Spain veto that too? Even if it would, it is right to propose the option and put Spain under an isolated pressure on the issue.

Both sides, tell us our friends are safe. Otherwise, the referendum will be like poker! We are not informed enough on both futures if we don't know what the EU membership outcome will be with either of them. That is why we fairly need any voting on the EU to be done before on independence. But it won't be, neither side is offering to do it that way round. What a spiral. Sillars and Gordon have said vote on the EU after a win for independence. No, we need to already know what our own decision is on whether we would be in the EU before we can vote for our own state in the first place.

SACC adds an African country to the reform SACC won't acknowledge

On Sep 27, when the deportations of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad to America's supermax solitary confinement jail system were still preventable, I had to post on here how the campaign most prominently fighting their cause to Scottish supporters, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, was wilfully ignoring an outstanding multi-country democratic reform that it has never denied is real and that could help fight their case.

The court change, which is also explained in my submission to the first independence consultation in 2010 whose non-publishing prompted this blog. So that if the same Scottish government as this week has been caught wasting many thousands of public money on a now abandoned court fight to hide legal advice that never existed, had been open that the court change exists and had ended its now 13 year long cover up by the media and the political class, it could have prevented the deportations too.

Incredibly, today SACC has circulated to its Facebook supporters a link to a Daily Mail story telling another really important story that the court change contributes to - and by it SACC has added another country to the list of those whose people can lay claim to the court change. Mahdi Hashi is a British citizen of Somali origin who has been stripped his citizenship arbitrarily whole abroad, by Theresa May by a dangerous power of decree that she does not need to take through the courts. In the past he had refused pressures to join MI5 to spy on his own community to monitor which way their geopolitical sympathies were going. It is feared he is being secretly held in a rendition camp in Jibouti.

By rebuffing enquiries into this, both (1)by the action of rebuffing them and (2)by it being part of Hashi's case consequently that there is unrefuted potential evidence he is there, Jibouti has taken part in Hashi's case. It is a legal case that overlaps into 4 countries that are already court change: Britain, the US, Somalia, Somaliland. By this, the open ended non-finality of case outcome that the court change carries is introduced into a matter of Jibouti's legal system dealing with. By this, Jibouti too becomes a court change country. The court change now applies to Jibouti.

It may be that Jibouti was already court change through an unpublicised earlier case. But that Jibouti is a court change country as from now, from Hashi's case, we know thanks to SACC. Yet SACC still won't refer to the court change in its own writings or say a word acknowledging it is real, will it?

EU mucked up

Nobody needs telling that Salmond has not had a happy day in the newspapers. Or in his party. Blink and savour having a majority government while it lasts, it may be over any minute.

Just when the SNP's years of tabloid law and order nastiness towards the young seemed to be starting to thaw, as he pledged a bill to make the voting age 16 properly. How will all that young bashing, the tightening up on pubs and their under-18 licensing, look in hindsight if the same party that did it makes some breathtakingly ironically British history by turning out to drive votes at 16 into place across all Britain's elections? After the half generation of nasty reluctance and faffing there has been by the British major parties, continuing not to do it, all through the new era of reform opportunities since Thatcherism ended in 1997?

Just when Salmond seemed to start turning a bit nicer to the young again, now that he needs their votes, he had to go and spoil his whole enterprise by the sneakiness over our continued EU membership, where the SNP has now been tripped up. To try to be popular he persisted in saying he would go along with the existing British system's narky old racist line of not joining Schengen. If we had to rejoin the EU as a new member we might have to join Schengen: GOOD - I want to join Schengen. So does any rational and humane person who fears the losability of travel documents and finds covering the world in apartheid passport barriers an obstacle to common sense life. Though Schengen only exists because the EU does, you can even belong to Schengen without belonging to the EU, like Norway, which is worth knowing if our membership gets interrupted.

It was not worth telling fibs and blowing trust for the whole Yes campaign when it was falling behind in support already, to get out of joining Schengen and pander to Tory passport racism. That will be a mortifying mortal failing for the Yes campaign to be remembered with in history.

OCT 26: Newsnet Scotland here has posted a story that was in the Herald, of the European Commission Vice-President saying EU citizenship once given can't be taken away. Yes supporters on Facebook can criticise the BBC for not majoring on this story, but they are seizing on it too eagerly, it does not establish Scotland would be in the EU, only that we would not lose our citizenship for travelling to the EU.

You've Been Trumped

"You’ve Been Trumped", the award winning documentary by film-maker Anthony Baxter, will be broadcast across Britain next Sunday 21 Oct at 2200 on BBC2 and BBC HD (2255 in N Ireland) and repeated at 0020 on Tuesday 23 Oct.

You've Been Trumped tells the story of the extraordinary confrontation between the tycoon Donald Trump and a proud tightly knit community of Scottish residents, following the controversial approval of the Trump development at Menie by Alex Salmond's government, gratefully for which Trump is now talking of suing them over a wind farm. The Trump golf course has been built on a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) after the government decided the "economic benefits outweighed any environmental concerns."

scarred by 10 months and a random bit

An awful lot of 16 year olds are going to feel damagingly betrayed, from the British end not Salmond's, and alienated from politics yet again, as the media now will spend 2 years keeping telling us they have been given the vote. When the great day comes they will find they have still not been after all. For Cameron has forced the trick device only allowing Salmond to use the electoral register complied with the 18 age limit, so that 16 and 10 months and a random bit is the actual age the referendum franchise will be given at.

Unless of course, unless the agreement now gets the fight for a lower voting age won within the next 2 years. We must all try for that.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/votes-at-16-a-seminal-moment-for-scottish-democracy.1350307449

Another bad day for SACC

If we were independent, if we already were now after not waiting until 2014, would the American-British extradition treaty of 2004 apply to Scotland? not unless we signed up to it in our own right. So can we get all the pro-independence parties' intentions on that?

This is the treaty signed as part of the War on terror, that allows America to demand extradition of British citizens to be put on trial in America for actions committed in Britain, while no equivalent power exists in the reverse direction. it lies behind the news, on Monday, of the European Court of Human Rights rejecting an appeal application to review in Grand Chamber the decision it had already taken, to allow 5 British citizens to be deported with the prospect of life sentences in the ADX Supermax jail at Florence, Colorado.

The media have concentrated on the one who has a racial hatred conviction and is easily linked with terrorism in public awareness, Abu Hamza, and by this they have made the whole decision sound good. But less publicised, you would only hear of them at all if you read the Independent, were Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, who the CPS in England had earlier decided it lacked evidence to charge for anything, who have never been charged with anything in Britain, and what America wants them for concerns entirely the geopolitical views of a website in the late 1990s that has no longer existed for years.

Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, a local campaign in the Central Belt that originated to defend the asylum seekers sent there and to publicise some other personal injustice cases that seemed to have happened because of racism, has taken a strong interest in the Ahmad-Ahsan case and its implications for the safety of us all, it has led the awarenss campaigning on it in Scotland. It has written on its own blog on the bad agenda the media is purusing this week, this post called "Another bad day for the media". It shows really well, anyone who doubts should read it, how it is implausible to think there was any actual error by the BBC in exposing the queen's views, that exposing them suited the impression the media wanted to give, of turning the public mood against all 5 of the folks in the case.

BUT - get this, BUT.

SACC has been told all about the court change, many times. The court change originated in the ECHR. The court change is what Ahmad and Ahsan most critically need now. The court change, itself deliberately ignored by the media and political class for 13 years, measns no court decision is any longer final. Every decision is faultable, and nobody any longer needs to apply for permission to appeal anything, the entitlement to fault the content and basis of every court decision is an absolute. Including this one. That is what Ahmad and Ahsan's supporters need to keep doing - speaking out that the court change exists and how, and laying claim to use the faulting power it creates. Telling as many ears as possible that the ECHR acts knowingly illegally every time it ignores the court change's existence, including every time it rejects any Grand Chamber application at all.

SACC writes "Why do journalists leave their best stories for their children to write? We need the truth now, while there is still time to act upon it. Why then does SACC not share the truth about the court change? SACC has never offered any argument against the reasons why the court change is real. Nor has anyone else, and that is unsurprising, because to deny the court change is real you have to be willing to claim that a factually impossible finding, a finding that 2 dated events happened in reverse order than their dated order in time, stands as a final decision by a court. By saying that you would abolish all factuality for any court outcome ever, you would openly abolish justice entirely. But the only alternative to that is to admit that the court change is real. I have explained this on this blog many times before.
SACC know all this, and expresses strong views on betrayal - yet in the blog post linked to, it still described the ECHR decision as final!!!

Work that out. What does that say about SACC itself having an agenda?

Back in May, SACC told me the court change "just hasn't been raised as an issue in cases going through the courts that we've been concerned with. We're not lawyers and we don't get to to decide how cases are argued. It's a bit abstact for a group like ours unless/until it comes up in a case we are concerned with." It was already as obvious then as it is now, that the court change comes up right in the heart of this case. It is part of the facts submitted to the court, emailed to the court president Nicolas Bratza, so that whether the court responded to it is key to whether its decision has any legitimacy as a decision or ignored part of the facts put in front of it. It is a tool for laying claim to prevent the deportations - DOES SACC WANT EVERY TOOL TO PREVENT THE DEPORTATIONS, TO BE USED, OR BY ANY CHANCE NOT?

WHY DOES SACC DO THIS? ARE THEY CAREERIST ENOUGH TO BELIEVE SCRATCHING POWERFUL BACKS WILL GET THEIR BACKS SCRATCHED IN RETURN? WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.

Oct 8: Amnesty International: USA must respect rights of individuals extradited from the UK

rallying call?

The unionist press today are all jubilant that the rally was so small. They are bound to be, but they are probably right. The audience fitted into the close vicinity of the Ross Bandstand under Edinburgh castle, slightly overspilling the actual seating. I was there, not in the audience of supporters, but in the outer watching fringes suitable for agnostic voters.

Much as the rally was filled with typical SNP history-patriotism, it was very clearly a fearful occasion. In over 2 hours of speeches and music, never was one word said about the zionist return entitlement for all the Scottish diaspora. Instead of the historical reawakening claimed, it was a historical betrayal to watch that omission happen. It meant the rally was not addressed to the Scottish people in our full number 25 million. It had the same most serious omission as the Yes campaign as a whole has. This is even though there was a "New Scots" speaker speaking up for the racial pluralism of our new state and the adopted Scottish identity of folks who have come to us from elsewhere. That is good in itself and one way our political culture is less nasty than England's at present - but see the contradiction between this and the total omission of talking about all the Scots in exile and their opportunity to come back.

A song about that silly lump of monarchism the Stone of Destiny said "How can anyone wipe away the tears of 700 stolen years?" - as if the centuries of statehood we still had during the stone's captivity don't count! Far more practical to real lives is the personal question for the disapora, about growing up in exile: How can anyone wipe away the tears of 26 stolen years?

The best point was made by the Green leader Patrick Harvie, who said the Yes campaign can't expect to sell just a Scottish version of the status quo as worth voting for, as the SNP has so clearly been trying to do, it has to float more radical possibilities for why independence would make a beneficial practical difference. There won't be agreement on what these should be, so different conflicting possibilities must be floated and will be issues in future Scottish elections. Entitlement for all the diaspora to return, is one such possibility that Harvie did not mention, but is the key radical difference determining whether independence really is even nationally just at all or not.

It was an entirely left wing occasion. What is strongly part of Harvie's radical agenda, and was in all the speakers' agenda, was the Yes side's wearyingly constant assumption that its new Scotland will be against the Bomb. No contrary voice to that was heard, though a contrary view to the SNP's on NATO was heard. With Isobel Lindsay speaking too, the rally was totally dominated by CND and it gave a dismal picture of the Yes campaign itself being controlled by them.

At the back of the garden, on the Princes Street railings, there was a disturbing banner about Padania, an alleged nation in north Italy that was only invented in 1992 by the Northern League there - which has a terribly anti-immigration reputation and of being the bad type of nationalism. Was there anything official about their presence? Actually maybe not, because there was a rally speaker from the Venetian nationalists, whose territorial claim directly contradicts Padania because would just be arrogantly included in it. It shows how you have to sort out the historical authenticity of nation claims before leaping to embrace all secessionist movements as your allies.

Secret session

In this quick new drama of the Information Commissioner taking the government to the Court of Session, over it legal advice on our future EU membership, both sides are at fault, for not disclosing that the court change exists.No matter which way the court decides, no matter which side's campaign it turns out to help, the winning side will miss a way to make Scotland better and the losing side will miss an opportunity to fight back against the damage to them.

As a result the issue will not be portrayed accurately to the public, who all have an interest in the court change becoming properly publicly known and functional as a result of this case. The court change is a massive advance in democracy that the media and political class have kept silent for 13 years, despite nobody ever having any argument to give against the clear reasons why it is real. Whatever is the position on Scotland's EU membership and whatever the court says about it, it includes that all its details are contestable under the court change.

What will you hear of this tomorrow, if you go and watch the Yes campaign's rally in Edinburgh?

Schengen first, EU afterwards

Now the big row on EU membership. How disgusting of the Lib Dem leader, Willie Rennie, to say in parliament at PMQs, oh dear if we need to renegotiate our EU membership upon independence we will have to join the Schengen area .

I WANT TO JOIN THE SCHENGEN AREA. So should any humanitarian. So should the Lib Dems.

They are supposed to be the party of the European ideal. That includes common united travel among all these countries, moving away from apartheid passbook barriers betwen them - NB think about it, border controls and passports are a global apartheid structure, keeping the whole world living in separate racial boxes.

All we look likely to get in this campaign, on all sides, is them all bowing to the tabloid race hate vote. Lib Dems doing it, SNP certainly doing it by saying no no we won't join Schengen we will stary in the British Isles common travel area. The British Isles common travel area means the nasty chilling unfriendly "UK Border" corridor at the airport, the walls lined with intmidating threats, including the humanly unreasonable atrocity of being threatenable with prosecution if you have lost your passport during your flight. Then what if a criminal assault you and steals it, that is your fault and makes you criminalisable? It is against the facts of human fallibility, hence against human rights, for travel to depend on carrying any losable document at all. The medical conditions of dyspraxia and attention deficit affecting dexterity and fine motor skill, help to force this issue under discrimination.

The SNP has at least been good enough to say before that it wants us to have a more welcoming culture than the morally foul British immigration regime, that is the single item with most potential to attract my vote to Yes if the SNP stops blowing it by censoring its consultation responses from publication. So why the hell contradict it by pledging not to join Schengen? Probably because the threat that England would then slap border controls on us is unpopular. of course while it lasted it would be bad for that to happen, a new barrier, but it would be less bad than the good done by reducing the territorial size of the nasty racist UK Border regime and giving us the whole Schengen area without a barrier. We should be willing to squeeze England in that way for having the tabloid racism in its political culture, and to take some affordable trips to the continent instead of to England.

Though it was the EU that created the Schengen area and it is betteer to help to hold it in place by belonging to the EU, you can even belong to the Schengen area without being in the EU. Norway, which I visited recently, does that and certaibnly feels just like its EU neighbours as a result. For this reason, to be keener on Schengen would get the SNP off the hook of the difficulties over whether our EU membership would be continuous. We could stand eager to sign up to the Schengen area even for the duration of an interruption to EU membership. That will make the interruption less serious, hardly noticeable at the level of real people's travel.

bombed out

Big row in the SNP over the U-turn on Nato membership. The CND folks saying us belonging to Nato will let England drag its feet over removing the Bomb from the Clyde.

Nato has shifted away from being the defensive alliance it was originally, to one that starts colonial wars, but luckily the EU has an interest in replacing Nato's original defensive alliance role as part of closer union. So, nicely, the CND side of the SNP will not get what they want anyway. In practice Scotland will still be under an EU nuclear umbrella, as well as under the English one because England is hardly going to stop seeing an attack on the other part of the same island as an attack on its won security too, is it?

What both sides are getting wrong, again, is that the SNP is just one party, its policy at one time is not the determiner of what a whole new Scottish state's defence alignment will be as part of the independence deal. Indeed, no defence policy can be offered as part of the independence deal, because the deal is not supposed to be a 1-party state. Our new state's defence alignment would be just as open to shifting by different governments and as the world around us changes, as Britain's is.

It is misleading to run a Yes campaign at odds with this obvious fact, treating our future defence policy as part of campaign. The campaign should look beyond just the new state's first government. It is not even assumable that the first government will be SNP. By climbing down from keeping that assumption sneaked into the campaign, the SNP can spare itself this defence policy row because it should not be at all as crucial to the Yes campaign as both sides say it is.

Alex goes south

The Olympic Games are a conceptual absurdity. Their modern revival was supposed to be a promoter of peace, and that is what the symbol with the interlocking rings is supposed to show. Yet nothing is less peaceful to raw hurting human egos, than competition, victory, defeat. That is what competitive games do to people, and they showcase nations' posturing pride which goes back to possessive or territorial animals' aggressive displays to each other.

We hear Alex Salmond was there. Why the hell? It was a feast of unionist propaganda, Britain telling its self-promotional story. Like, look how wonderful we are for creating the NHS, to make the outside world find it harder to believe we are destroying it. No Highland Clearances in there.

Scotland is not even competing as an entity, only Britain is.Who has the man who says he wants to vote Britain away gone to its capital, in its greedy third hosting of the Olympics instead of a British bid going to a different city this time, to show his support for?

He went to Wimbledon too. Alex really really luvs going to England.

I want some more

Margo Macdonald and Patrick Harvie are wrong. It's like we are Oliver Twist and they are taking away our second helping, our second question.

Their motives against the second question are openly to increase the stakes for their preferred side, Yes, on the first question, which they think will make them more likely to win. That they think so is only a fallacy of true faith nationalism, it is an unproven act of faith and the polls make it look just as likely their tactics will backfire. The voters are already obviously growingly unsure towards Yes, so they may feel even more unsure if they know that the Yes side is holding them to ransom to vote Yes by depriving them of a second question. they may then vote No. They may be put off Yes by this picture of the forces behind it.

The recent experience of the AV referendum showed how easily a doubt about the character of the proposed change will make voters feel safer to run back into their caves to the devil they know and vote No. Holding voters to ransom to reject the option that you think they are worst off with did not work for Labour in its hard left controlled period in the 1980s, when twice the hard left believed voters would be forced to vote for hard left policies when the alternative was Thatcher, and on a British scale at least, they voted for Thatcher.

A second question is fairer to voters. It gives us a more complete say, a complete range of options. Suspect anyone who takes it away.

will innocent lives be sacrificed to torture to censor the referendum?

The campaign for Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, 2 British citizens held at Long Lartin prison in Englandwho are under threat of extradition to America under the treaty of 2003 where America does not have to give the British courts any evidence, is in a particularly urgent crunch phase coming up to a European Court of Human Rights ruling on a referral to the court's "Grand Chamber", on Jul 10.

In that campaign's meeting and film-showing in Glasgow yesterday, at the centre for Contemporary Arts in Sauchiehall street, we were told something that unsurprisingly has never been prominent in the media: that the European Court has had meetings with folks from the American courts, experience swap and education, that type of meeting - but when it was coming up to taking the decision it originally took in April to allow the extraditions, and in visible disregard of piles of evidence to find against American Supermax solitary confinement being torture. When the decision was taken there was also a decision coming up in Europe on reform of the court itself and there is a perception that the decision was made to please the British government in exchange for the court's role and jurisdiction not getting reduced. We may remember the Tories and tabloids had gone through a long period of ranting against the court for being too liberal. Which probably got many liberals lured into becoming fans of the court, only now to see it throw away the lives and futures of these folks who not even a prima facie criminal case has ever been made against.

This humanitarian emergency is the most perfect instance you could ever need of how the court change could prevent the court getting away with politically bent humanitarian wrongs, and why we need the court change for that purpose. For what are any of the campaigns for these political prisoners doing, unless they are FAULTING what the court has done to date? and what the American system will do. too? The court change creates a power of fault finding against all court rulings, it abolishes their finality.

Yet campaign flyers have still been printed talking about July 10 as a final decision. Public exposure of the proven fact that it is not a final decisison, because of the court change, is a humanitarian emergency. What is Scotland Against Criminalising Communities' stance on this? The whole emergency campaign from them only makes any sense if they have got a stand on this.

The situation's crunch humanitarian weight now weighs heavily upon the SNP government too. Not because they have any formal power, this is a British government issue and you would write to your MP about it not MSP. But because the Scottish government knows all about the court change, see the record so here, and by deciding to accept and welcome that the court change is real and make it big time public, before July 10, they can stop the European Court or anyone else from claiming that a decision to deport is final.

The humanitarian record of whether the SNP does it will weigh over the ethics and standards of their referendum campaign. The question asked here before, will they campaign acknowledging the court change or going along with the British political class in hushing it up? Knowing now that unless they choose the right course before July 10, it may mean EXPEDIENTLY SACRIFICING REAL PEOPLE TO TORTURE CONDITIONS avertably? Would you find their new Scotland healthy as a state, if a key legal fact about its courts was publicly unknown at the time of its creation and knowingly avertably by its creators innocent folks were sitting in perpetually lit white cells in supermax jails being psychologically destroyed? with communication only through screens and not face to face?

Diaspora back to the 90s

More Tory suffering here that Salmond will make us wade through. Salmond??? Indeed so, because he does not intend independence to actually happen with the present British government's term up to 2015, so how absurd to base his campaign on our suffering of its actions?

This is back to the 1990s, when Major said that for morality and "family values" and "back to basics", all that front of bogusness to win old bigots' votes, it was somehow morally better for young adults to live with their parents and to remain financially dependent on having to. So the benefit system should deliberately inflict that, make them do that. The new proposal from Cameron in this link, cutting off housing benefit from young adults, is exactly the same agenda brought back again. Make them live with their parents - but that means, make them live in the same country as their parents live in.

DIASPORA OPPRESSION ALERT here, how are the SNP going to respond to this? Are they going to say a word for, a word acknowldging the existence of, young adults of the Scottish diaspora stuck living in exile not in Scotland? Like I was in the early 1990s. A Yes campaign now exists. It can speak up for the diaspora, it can sell us independence as a means to stop this ethnic violation of our diaspora, this entrapment of them cut off from their own country's life, a means to bring them home" and be damn quick about it in case any of them die in exile after never having the chance to live in their own country in their lives. If the SNP won't do this, what say the other Yes parties, whose relations with the SNP are already fraying over control of the campaign, about this?

Next day's news brings us some more clarity, that Cameron can't do all this now because of the coalition and it is going to be Tory policy next time. Okay, then it is still dangerous to the diaspora if we have to wait until 2016, which could be well into his next government if he gets in, before independence. So still what says Salmond to that? The same as he says, which is nothing, to all the folks continuing to suffer the already existing Tory measures up to 2014?

voting Labour no more?

Nicola Sturgeon in PMQs today, said independence will mean no more getting taken into illegal wars by Labour Governments.

No it won't. Unless it's a one party state, independence will have no means to mean anything of the kind. We might elect a Labour Government, that is very likely on Scotland's voting history, and it may make the same choices as Blair's did. It's this fallacy again, that is happening on both sides, of assuming independence will mean SNP policies. Why should it?

Even if it was an SNP Government, look at the SNP's manic fetishing over regiments and military traditions because of the patriot vote around them? They were close to the media tycoons, how can we know they would not be close to the pushes for Western interventionist wars?

Johann Lamont's comparison of all the SNP's recent watering down of independence with Life of Brian and its famous scene What Have the Romans Done For Us, was so accurate and apt. Spot on.

Banned demo

On Saturday a demo in Glasgow which I was on, in support of refugees who are housed there, was shut down in mid rally by the police and everyone sent home. We were not even told the reason why, but that it would involve a fascist counter-threat was fairly guessable. Speakers sent away who had not yet spoken included political ones.

The demo organisers are lodging a complaint over this. It has turned out that the police threatened use of the Public Order Act to ban a hundreds strong demo on grounds of public safety, force its participants by law to run away, because just 25 members of the SDL were counter demonstrating.

Nicola Sturgeon had sent a support message to the demo, and the Green leader Patrick Harvie was among the speakers present. So what do both say about whether independence will reduce the prospects of this type of thing happening?

The demo was about how new business contracts for housing refugees have resulted in sudden evictions of them onto the streets, including them coming home to find their locks changed. Speakers cited that under human rights throwing anyone onto the streets is illegal. They will all be interested in taking up my case that rent and mortgages no longer constitutionally exist, then? As explained here to the housing policy consultation Firm Foundations in 2008.

There was some sentiment expressed that independence will enable us to stop being part of British policy to have refugees treated like this. The corruption and absurdity was highlighted, of a policy that allows them to refuse a person refugee status when the country the same person has come from is acknowledged as too dangerous to return them to !!!

If independence is going to make that humanitarian difference, they should be getting on with it, not waiting another 2 years. eh? But it is time to clarify what protections against racist policies will be built into the new state? and built in whoever wins its first election, not assuming it will begin with an SNP government? There is a discrepancy. the SNP has appeased the racist vote by saying we will stay in the British Isles travel area and not join Schengen. How will we stay in the British Isles travel area without staying in the British humanitarian disaster of the present ayslum system? On what basis does Sturgeon promise we will not stay in it?

Spot on question

Well done Johann Lamont, getting Salmond with the right question at PMQs yesterday.

Yes I will call it PMQs, the contrivance of "first minister" was never used for colonial Prime Ministers or the Canadian provinces or for Northern Ireland's in 1921-72, and a Prime Minster is a first minister.

Salmond needs to be more factual, in his position, than to make up speculations and claim they will happen because they sound sensible to him. Otherwise voters will start to feel he is selling them a dud. Saying that after independence, outside and separated from the UK, we could make the UK give us a seat in the bank of England's structure for issuing the UK's currency. Totally silly. Exactly as Lamont said, he was just crossing his fingers and hoping for the best: and trying to bounce it, too. Most voters, without needing to follow politics, know you can't take for granted without asking, a foreign country will provide you with a facility on demand just because you say it would be sensible. No wonder the Bank of England has said no.

Campaign questions intimately related to the question of honesty over the SNP filtering the public availability of consultation responses. Does Salmond listen to any items voters raise on the position around independence? Will voters get any position out of him on other issues than just those he has chosen for a fudged feelgood campaign for a statehood not fully explained in many of his aspects? So does he actually care where ordinary folks' state of life will be?

Who is signing up?

20% of us are called "the persuadables". Because we have not said firmly yes or no, it is open to the SNP to convert us if they say the right things.

Consider what your own self regard as a thinking voter means. It must not take just a hip sounding campaign to win you over, where what is said remains within the crappy bounds of what campaigns always say. To win you over must take committal definite answers to every issue you want to raise. It must take a participative enough form of campaign to show you you have the means to actually extract those answers. It must be the opposite of a controlled filtered respectable message. It must be the opposite of what the SNP did when they said they would not put all the responses to their first consultation onto public record. They showed then a closed up filtering of their message. To watch and point out its continuation was the point of starting this blog.

• Until that filtering has stopped,
• until they do take a definite absolute position in favour of an immigration right to the Scottish diaspora descended from any number of generations returning here from anywhere in the world,
• until they do take a definite absolute position on the specific story of police lying to newly returned diaspora that their newly bought home is in a rough area,

I shall not be attracted from the ranks of the persuadables to sign Salmond's gimmicky people's declaration "saying Yes to an independent Scotland".

Among the signatories you can see today in the Sunday Herald is John McAllion, SSP and formerly Labour when he chaired the petitions committee in the 1999 parliament. As chair of the petitions committee he openly broke parliament's rules at the time by excluding a petition from the agenda and the record, for calling for a restriction on the committee's powers. "I have discussed this with the committee chairman, who is not inclined to include the petition on the agenda for a committee meeting." This was an act of corrupting the rules and dishonest record within parliament's first few months of existence. By the ever so neat rule that such breaches have to be challenged through an MSP and no MSP would pursue it, this dishonest act of class power was allowed to happen within parliament's first few months of existence. Unless Salmond answers this, how well does that bode for the new state whose creation McAllion now signs for? Also there is Margo Macdonald, who has a public writing platform herself as a newspaper columnist yet who was one of the MSPs who declined to act against McAllion on grounds that she agreed with the committee's view against petitioning for things to be published. Against public platform for any facts and info that are outside the already existing class filtered approved view of reality.

Then in 2004 on an SSP platform for their now forgotten declaration of Calton Hill", McAllion called the world's longest running one party state, Castro's Cuba, "a worker's democracy". You notice how it was a hard lefty, an apologist for communism, who committed an act of class power for MSPs to control and filter what content is heard in politics and what issues popularly recognised to exist?

Glasgow free by '14?

So, Glasgow has not fallen. Labour has a majority there again. Salmond can't take his momentum for granted. Winning Glasgow is the latest of his many unmet boasts ever since "Free by 93".

It simply means he needs to let folks be heard. To give voice to the issues around independence that folks have raised, like I raised in my response to the 2010 consultation which he did not put on public record.

It means putting items like that on public record and not manipulating the record in pursuit of complacent voter feelgood. It means the SNP showing any care towards the returning diaspora, taking a position on stories of the state wrecking zionist returns to Scotland such as having the police lie to you on your eighth day here that your newly bought house is in a rough area, when it provenly is not.

Wanting to expose injustices upon ordinary Scots from the status quo is the way to win independence. Wanting to leave ordinary Scots' issues uncommented on, and try to progress just on a feelgood momentum ignoring folks' troubles, is the way not even to win Glasgow. Got it?

You are all suspects now

johnpilger.com/articles/you-are-all-suspects-now-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it : You are all suspects now. A really important article by John Pilger on the cooperation between the Western powers to get rid of the presumption of innocence to an alarming extent, on grounds of security. How this is still going on as intensely as ever since 2001 despite the War on Terror petering out of the media.

Ask the SNP whether their new Scotland will still be part of this process. Watch out for whether they give any commitments otherwise, let along to reverse specific dangerous losses of civil liberty that have happened already.

Show we have caring values by making you wait 4 years on the street

Yesterday I was on the demo at the Border Agency "reporting" office in Brand Street, Glasgow - is it Govan or Cessnock? a yukky office of global apartheid. Ypeople, a name for the YMCA incredibly, has been housing asylum seekers, under a contract now being switched away from them, and they are simply throwing them out, regardless of nowhere else to go, and with no state support even at the same time as they are not allowed by law to get jobs. So enforced homelessness.

As the speakers said we should not even say "asylum seekers", as the Tories made up that term to spare the hate newspapers from having to use proper factual terms like refugees. So that is the term we should use. Along with Green and Solidarity, but nobody from Labour it was mentioned, there were 2 SNP MSP speakers who are trying to raise it with their own government but this week were unlucky in getting a question into Salmond's PMQs. Yes I will call it PMQs, "first minister" also being a silly made up term. Across the speakers it was criticised that the SNP government takes a position against these evictions but it not taking any step to provide for their victims, to help out practically.

Given that the evictions are a result of policy at British level so forms part of the SNP's case against the British system's whole culture, mention was made of how the SNP has trumpeted a "new Scotland" that will be more welcoming and decent than that, and the inaction conflicts with this.

Something else conflicts with it. That they plan still to stay in Britain for another 4 years. If you are on the side of folks in immediate need, and if you include in your case for independence that Britain is leaving them abandoned in need, and the picture that Glasgow wants to be a decent community and win back these folks' means of viable subsistence, then it makes no sense to plan to keep them waiting, still under the British policy and potentially on the streets because of it, for as long as 4 years! For remember how oddly Salmond does not want independence until 2016, a year and a half even after a Yes vote happens. Sounds really keen on it he does?

Will we get a Yes campaign that majors on inclusion and prevention of race hate, the message that 2 of the SNP presented as popular yesterday? If it does succeed in getting a good response, will that speed up the referendum timing? If not, then what will the Scottish government do for the victims of Ypeople and all victims of British asylum policy during the wait of its own choosing? If the cuts were fought by a spending increase under the devolved tax power, this is one drop in the ocean item it could deal with.

Crikey Cruddas ! He said it.

The referendum is all over now, innit? Who is ever going to vote No after hearing the leak of what Cruddas said, that they don't really want the Union at all. Cruddas of the expensive Prime Ministerial dinners, and who gave a £1 million to the No to alternative vote campaign last year, I mean that was soooooooooooo soddy - he is who the folks who voted No trusted. It's no problem to him if Scotland separates, and we can keep voting with PR too.

"we as a party have to be seen to be fighting to keep the Union together, even if we don’t agree with it, because, at the end of it all, if the Scots say ‘we’re out of here’ and they want to go independent, we can turn around and say it’s not what we wanted, it’s not what we campaigned for, you can’t have this, you can’t have that, and you can get on with it.”

Yet we still have to sustain a serious threat to vote No if the SNP's position is too neglecting of the diaspora or plays to any racist agendas. Though if they play to the same ones as the Tories do, e.g. by not joining Schengen, that can't tip your vote either way.

After Cruddas saying this, it would be clanging against the SNP down through history if by not being seen to cater for the diaspora they blow winning secession.

NB the Scotsman article linked to is wrong to repeat that scare that without us the Tories would have a permanent majority Presumably we are meant to think we would be to blame for doing that to the English poor if we secede. As shown here, without us Labour still wins a majority all its last 3 wins and all its wins where it had a majority of more than a few seats.

May get Schengen

Teresa May-Not, she should be called. Hatchet Home Secretary who wants to say no to families, they may not be allowed to share a rational healthy future living in the same country. There is a Tory family value for you. Immigration oppression again, at British level. Vote for us because we will keep families apart, not take dependant relatives into the same country as the valued new member of our community here doing valued work.

She says vote for Britain for national barriers and national paranoia and tribal bullying. In direct contrast to this appeal to the evil vote, she says vote against a separate Scotland because it would be in Schengen and more open to immigration.

That is exactly a reason to vote for a separate Scotland. Because the Europe-wide immigration union is compassionate progress, makes life more sensible. Everyone simply goes where they need to go. Immigration is a flattery to us and makes our lives better, and when it comes under a continent scale agreement is balanced by emigration too, returning the flattery to other countries. Thinking folks like immigration.

So does this clinch a Yes vote as right? It should, because the SNP should take this line. Do it with the Scottish diaspora in mind too. Any SNP literally deserving its own name would do this. The real SNP conspiciously has not. On the same day as welcoming creation of an internet domain called .scot , the SNP has denied May's silly scare stories. Implying that being in Schengen is a scare story. Defending on the Tories' terms. But being in Schengen is a cosmopolitan justice. It keeps us out of a British racist agenda, keeping out of which is what our diaspora need, whether in Schengen or the Commonwealth. If we by joining Schengen made it geographically sensible to draw the Irish Republic in too, England could be morally deservedly isolated in continuing to go the tabloid way.

Instead the SNP is doing what it always slags all the British parties for doing, following a Tory led consensus, saying we will stay in the British Isles Common Travel Area. That, like may other of their actions posted on here, makes them more doubtful in bothering with our diaspora at all.

Unlock candidates

Time to expose a most startling piece of censoring from a different source.
Unlock Democracy!

It calls itself "The UK's leading campaign for democracy, rights and freedoms". Successor organisation to Charter 88.

It has just circulated to its subscribers papers for an internal election for its council.

" No candidate may pro-actively campaign for election online, or allow anyone else to campaign on their behalf." - What the hell is wrong with campaigning online? No explanation given.

Candidates may inform their existing friends and social contacts that they are standing and may answer direct questions about their candidacy, if asked. This rule applies to the informal use of social media (Facebook, Twitter etc). However, there is inevitably a thin line between informing and campaigning via social media and there are circumstances in which a candidate may not be able to control how their communications on social media are subsequently relayed by others.

For these reasons, the Returning Office advises candidates to take great care in communicating via social media their decision to stand. The Returning Officer may disqualify any candidate who they deem to have made a public statement to promote their candidacy".

WHAT THE HELL REASON OR PURPOSE IS THERE, IN OUR "LEADING CAMPAIGN FOR DEMOCRACY" PUTTING UNDEMOCRATIC GAGS ON ITS OWN PROCESS? Would you trust any public election that gave one official the personal discretionary power to "deem" anything factual whose effect is throwing candidates out of elections? That is the same as It is a power of bias over the whole election, to control and select who can stand in it. The same trick as often practised by dodgy unfree states when they put on a controlled show of elections, that we know not to recognise as fair as a result.

Here that person will be a judge of folks' performance at an impossible task of walking on eggshells, at a requirment to get right something so excruciatingly narrowly defined that even in writing the instructions they admit it will be very easy to get wrong, yet still impose the rule and on pain of exclusion from the election. This is totally not reasonable at all. A process with impossible to avoid pitfalls is not a fair or open process at all.

Time to lose trust in Unlock Democracy. What is being protected by an election that no participant can be sure of getting right? and WHAT IS WRONG WITH SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNING? WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?

Ever so reluctant

How the hell is it a "very reasonable timescale" that independence would not actually happen until 2016? and be gently phased in at the time of a Scottish election that has already been postponed for a year by Britain to fit a British coalition's timetable? The same coalition as Salmond is always slagging, and telling us not to choose to remain ruled by, yet he wants to put off breaking away from their rule until a year after their present term has expired anyway! So that they still get to do all their stuff to us.

Is it something psychological about independence seeming less real when you vote for it if it is not going to take effect next day? But what about those of its keen supporters who have waited all their lives and who die while Salmond's snail timetable keeps them waiting more? Waiting for a year and a half even after voting for it, if we do, in 2014?

No it is not the same pace as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, at all! An absurd claim. They decided in 1992 they wanted to split, and split by end of year. It was still only 3 years since the fall of communism, while Salmond's timetable will have taken 5 years from him winning a majority. The Ukraine split from Russia in 1991 with a vote within 4 months of the fall of communism making it possible.

What a cumbersome fantastically cautious bureaucrat Salmond is being. Noticeable that he is keeping hold of every inch of the 5 year term of office that the British coalition's manoeuvrings with election dates gave him, and seems to be putting that ahead of actually reaching the statehood he syas he wants, rather than risk the independence election's outcome at a date any earlier than completion of the term Britain has given him? Really believes in his cause, then?

bank manager

Salmond's latest wheeze today: we are going to be independent but demand a seat at the central bank of the state we have split from.

Huh? Constitutionally emeshed in the workings of Britain, in deciding on a British economic policy and interest rates. Rates that can't be called anything else than UNITED. Scotland having a seat in deciding the rates for England. While calling itself a separate sovereign country, a foreign state, yet taking part in deciding the rates for England and the remaining UK. Get this - THAT IS A UNION !!

That is not independence. That is Britain still functioning as one entity. Just with Scotland's place in it made less of an obvious entitlement so less to be relied on. That is a con. It's silly.

out of sight out of mind ?

Facebook page "Buses For People", admittedly a left wing group, campaigning against bus route shrinkage in Fife, claims this about the SNP paradise that is going to inspire us to vote Yes:

The SNP Scottish Government slashed a full fifth from the Bus Service Operators Grant, forcing most operators to nudge up fares or scale back services - or withdraw.

Isolated villages across Scotland home to the unemployed, young or old, or disabled are increasingly unable to access essential services as transport links are withdrawn from local people.

Bus operators have been told that their grant is to be cut by 20% from April 2012. The Confederation of Passenger Transport has warned that it could have “a far-reaching impact on many bus passengers” and lead to increased fares and cuts to local services.

no park in Aberdeen

Not content with supporting Trump and using parliamentary powers to through the golf develeopment against the affected community's will, only for his monster erecently to turn on him, - now Salmond also supports the destruction of Union Terrace Gardens, the only city centre park in Aberdeen, by a stupid pointless business development. Aberdeen has several malls already. Many folks there want to keep the garden space in their city, that is part of the city experience there, that makes such a big difference to any city's niceness to be in, a green lung.

Salmond's Scotland is going to be covered in scars and a less gentle environment for everyone. This constant siding with the fleeting whims of big business is not care about the country.

But we ain't falling for a mystery tour to nowhere

Let's at least join with Salmond in saying nobody is going to swallow from Cameron a meaningless lure with no content, vote No then gamble on what I might do by surprise. We remember what happened when Home said exactly this in 1979: his word broken by Thatcher and 20 years of nothing. It's not devo max he's promising, that is all he has told us about it. It's some undisclosed mystery less than that. Proper salesmen show us the product before we pay, and proper customers don't buy spivvy noncommittal mysteries whose details they are not told.

If Sillars is right the National Conversation never mattered

To folks who are not yet decided concerning independence, who still want to see which side and which outcome will treat the Scottish diaspora best in making it easier for them to come home, the more options the better. If independence loses, devo max might still be a way to free Scotland's hand concerning this issue. Probably devo max is not attractive to diehards of independence or of union, but for the rest of us it is an attractive option to have on the table.

So Jim Sillars's rubbishing of it as just a fix for the SNP leadership does not seem the best way to deliver us a vote on what would be a good reform to win if independence does not win.

But he is probably right that winning devo max after losing independence would be a very comfortable option for the SNP leadership.

Such comfort would be a reason for them not really to care what happens in the consultation or what happened in the National Conversation, and to censor some folks' submissions from the record.

They should be remembered as not seriously wanting to win the cause they have pursued for 80 years at all, not really campaigning to try to get it, unless they make the record honest and stop omitting any submissions from it. Certainly unless they do that they will not show they care about getting Yes votes or justifying them.

Which is the vandal ?

Trump again. This is the Mr Big who dug up sand dunes with lots of rare biology in them, vandalised a piece of Scottish environment, and now he says he is our environment's champion, against the sight of wind farms, and has written a rant his old protector and buddy Salmond is destroying our coastline.

It's embarrassing for Salmond though. Not because anything Trump says is right, but because he did do physical damage to Scotland - by forcing through Trump's development ruining the sand dunes in the first place against even Aberdeenshire council's will. This is the thanks Salmond gets for serving money power while presenting as running the government that shows we can care for ourselves.

Just another reason why Salmond and every plan he dangles before us should not be trusted until he becomes open about putting on the record every constitutional issue raised by the people every time he supposedly consults them, which is needed for that consulting to be honest.

Neither Trump nor economic separation may happen

2 consultations. We have already had one in 2010, as the ending of the National Conversation, and this blog exists because of Salmond choosing to keep unpublicised some submissions to that consultation, including mine. Does anyone still remember the National Conversation?

Another consultation fills more time while the SNP continue to consent voluntarily to keep us in the Union for 2 years as their best shot of obtaining the national mood they want, and it generates some legitimacy for Salmond's particular plan for the vote in the form it has reached now, with the Devo Max question included. But will this consultation be any more opne than the last one? Will there still be any selective and unexplained non-publicisings of any of the responses to it?

Even while Salmond launches it showily in Edinburgh Castle's Great Hall on Burns Night, the Tripping Up Trump campaign has celebrated the same Burns night with this news of the project, destroying a piece of Scottish coastal environment, that Salmond took powers over Aberdeenshire council to allow to go ahead:

Dear Friend,

Trump's future is blowing in the wind.

Trump's already told us the world's gone bust, so plans for his housing development, hotel and crazy golf courses have been shelved.

And now Trump's back to being described as a millionaire, not a billionaire. Maybe he'll sue the Guardian for writing that, like he did to another writer.

So as a potential escape route, Trump's escalated his fight with a wind farm* that might spoil his view.

If the wind farm goes ahead, Trump will pull out altogether. And this time it's reported that Trump's favourite First Minister - Alex Salmond - is refusing to intervene. We shall see.

Unlike Trump's plan, the wind farm promises skilled and well paid jobs, in an industry where the Scottish Government is committed to be a world leader, estimated to be worth up to £100 billion by 2020.

Let's help get this wind farm approved.

ACTION

Please take a minute to send an email to - iain.todd@aberdeenrenewables.com - with your comments in support of the wind farm.
You could even copy Alex Salmond's Special Advisor - geoff.aberdein@scottish.gsi.gov.uk
You can also send your message of support to the development partner, here.
And if you're on Twitter, you can tweet Alex Salmond, here.

Meanwhile, the film - You've Been Trumped - continues its travels, most recently appearing on The Rosie Show, part of the Oprah Winfrey network. Please watch this clip.

A lot of natural sand dunes have already been dug up and ruined pointlessly, as anyone who has seen the film saw, and this will be the permanent scar of Salmond's judgment on Scottish soil.

Same day, Salmond says we will still be in a currency union with England and admits the Bank of England would decide our monetary policy. Yet he calls that independence. it's not separation, anyway. It must get a few heads scratching.

Wallace and foul-it

Jim Wallace says today 2 thoughts rather at odds.

He says, the referendum needs to be decisive, hence fair enough that the losing side can't cry foul. Said he remembers 1979 when the 40% rule was a foul and left the position unsettled. Good, he is right.

Then he says, for clarity we will have the same electorate as for the last Scottish election. Which means, not giving votes at 16. Excluding a population group who have more future life ahead of them to vote on than any of the present voters have. A group whose franchise is supported supposedly by his own party the Lib Dems as well as by the government calling the vote.

That will be a foul and will guarantee that foul is cried whatever the result! We know it's cynical bowing to the Tories. It is also a contradiction, and self defeating for him with his own admission on future record that any foul on fair play means an indecisive unsettled outcome.

3 way vote is a must now

Nice to see letter against birthplace racism in the Scotland on Sunday today.

Yes Henry McLeish let's have devo max on the ballot. He is right about that, he is being a decent reformer on the unionist side. On both sides the reasons for not having it are to manipulate the situation by using lack of choice to force the people's hands.

It is said devo max will save Salmond's face. It won't save his face at all if he chooses to go against caring about a fairness issue and that is seen to result in independence losing and devo max winning. So devo max can be a lever on the SNP concerning its responsiveness to issues concerning life here at its ordinary level. * Concerning Salmond supporting Trump. * Concerning zionist return to Scotland from the diaspora, the ethnic injustice of any economic obstacles to it, and having no immigration barriers to it. * Concerning the British state mistreating diaspora returners and trying to sabotage their returns, as in my story from 1995 of the police lying to me against my newly bought house's area on the eighth day of my return.

If the independence offer does not look like helping just outcomes to these items of ethnic justice for the nation, then devo max will be a good choice. Or, to have to offer a devo max settlement levers the unionist side into having to show progress on these items of ethnic justice if we vote against independence, otherwise make a case for voting for it.

It is natural that the widest spread of choice for the voters increases the chance for both sides of their favourite option losing unless they respond to this type of issue. As well as actually letting each option get voted on which is undemocatic not to give us. Mandate legitimacy now requires the 3 options to be in the vote.

tied to one time to win now

So the jostling for position between the 2 governments has forced Salmond now to pin down a date, autumn 2014 with the Commonwealth Games as a springboard, exactly as guessed by the conspiracy theorists. Who are not always wrong, you see.

It may be right, as the more sympathetic radio voices say, that by it he has stolen a headline for a day. So what? One done, he can't steal the headline on any more days with it. Now he is more boxed in than before. He has to make support go his way at one particular time, no longer any time in a 2 1/2 year range. With the polls presently showing a wobble away from Yes, he must spend the next 2 1/2 years trapped worrying about that gamble. It can't be fun. Some prize for his election landslide.

During their nerve wracking wait, the SNP critically should not want to alienate any population group. The way they have pushed around and picked on the young for the last few years, and socially oppressed them by making their access to pubs harder, is noticeable to the youngest voters ongoingly every day of their lives.

That is a potential nemesis for the SNP now. Deservedly so for the SNP, but not for the smaller pro-independence parties to have the SNP blow it for them.

It sits there conflicting with the new position on the young's side that the SNP is now in over the franchise. As a party that supports votes at 16, it is at least doing good now by holding out for that franchise for a vote that will affect even more of that age groups' future lives than for the older voters. But their recent years of youth bashing over pubs and in tabloid law and order rhetoric has a potential to work against them and undermine them over the youth franchise.

Unionist move's oppression of the young

The office of Scottish secretary was supposed to be abolished when devolution came in? All voices were quite certain it would be. So what happened? Ooh it feels quite useful to have a focal point in the Cabinet for putting up barriers to what the devolved government can do, as an layer of insurance for the union. That was the Labour government who first made that choice, so it's only thanks to them that Cameron has a Scottish secretary at all.

So today the said Michael Moore has been offering terms for a referendum, if held on a faster timescale than Salmond wants, to have a binding result. Is this necessary? Generally no referendum's result is binding unless the British parliament has passed a law saying it is, because default sovereignty is with parliament. But where national self-determination is involved, so is international law. At United Nations level going back to the decolonisation era and the UN's early principles against conquering countries, in votes on independence the country concerned has a sovereign decision: self determination. That stands over any British law on competent status to call the vote.

The present unionist position is going against that international law. But any problems with courts striking down the referendum, as today's papers are full of imaginings of, will also be the SNP's fault if the SNP continues to ignore the court change described twice in this blog. The court change, the development since 1999 that court decisions are always open-endedly faultable on their reasoning and are no longer ever final, is exactly what the SNP needs to stand up to any unionist court antics to declare void a Yes result to a vote called by the SNP.

A vote imposed from British level should also be held void, illegitimate, if its franchise excludes any population groups who would have a vote anywhere in the world. The Tories are following their demographic as the home of narky old bigots against youth, they are against votes at 16 and their proposed terms for an authorised referendum by 2013 specifically exclude votes at 16. Though Moore himself is a Lib Dem and going along with this. Folks with the vote's result ahead of them for a lifespan will live with the memory of contemptuous rejection from taking part in it, when they have the vote in the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Austria, Nicaragua, and Brazil. To have self determination be a sovereign principle of international law, for votes on it that can happen anywhere in the world, means having all votes on it held on no lesser a franchise than exists anywhere. A No vote on an 18 voting age will absolutely not legitimise the union, nor a Yes vote legitimise its end. It will not be a conclusive outcome, it will not be visibly sovereign.

amendment backed by its own victim

Though it made some money from the stunt of the Year of Homecoming, the SNP has always lacked interest in the diaspora and their opportunities to return here, both economic and by British immigration rules for those who have been away for several generations in the Commonwealth, as a social justice cause. Now, there has come from the unionist side a racist move, whether intentionally or by very sloppy blunder, that hands the SNP an opportunity to score some good for itself by taking the moral ground on the diaspora's side. But it will lever them to show some committal interest in the diaspora's problems, so will they do it or will they show uncaringness by dodging the issue?

Baroness Taylor of Bolton, who is an expat Scot by choice, and is Labour, has moved a Lords amendment to the Scotland bill, to give a referendum vote to everyone who lives in the UK and was born in Scotland. the UK, by the way, will not include the Isle of Man and Channel islands, so how are folks there racistly different? The proposal's purpose is being billed as to give the diaspora their say. But the diaspora is not just the folks who chanced to be born at home, nor are they even the majority. For a lot of the diaspora it was their parents or earlier ancestors who did the moving away, not always willingly, so they were born in exile. On a world scale at least 80% of all Scots were born in exile, for our diaspora numbers 20 million, the home population is 5 million.

Taylor's proposal involves a viciously arbitrary type of racism characteristic of school bullies and football crowd bigots: birthplace racism. The practice of believing that birthplace has any shred whatever to do with country belonging and identity. Birthplace is the location of one arbitrary event at one moment beyond the person's memory. Many folks have no further connection with their birthplace in their lives, e.g. the Silent Twins were Barbadian, and they were born in Aden because their father was in the RAF there at the time, they left there at age 8 months and never returned to Asia at all. They are obviously not Yemeni nor have Yemeni or Arab lives in any way, their birthplace is no guide to who they are. Nor to who famous Scots who were born in exile were: Tilda Swinton, Alexander McCall Smith, Eric Liddell, John Prebble, Lord Kelvin, Alec Home, the Queen Mother, and Labour's Edinburgh leader Andrew Burns.

Anyone who says being Scottish is determined by birthplace defines the vast majority of the Scottish people out of existence, which means, commits genocide. The Jews and the Palestinians are dispersed peoples too. A birthplace based franchise does this genocide, and discrminates even between siblings in the same family who were born on each side of the border. Another side of the same racist anomaly is that folks who were born in Scotland but do not identify as Scots and have left, folks for whom Scotland was their place of exile and another country is home, would have votes.

So why is the proposal actually being backed by someone who falls on its unjust side? Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, also Labour, tells us on his own website that he was born in Oswestry, a particularly tricky place for birthplace racists as it is officially England but to historical reason Wales. It is Wales's Berwick. Disputed lands wreck birthplace racism, once the bigots start on the complex border history of Eastern Europe they are mired in a web. Yet Foulkes is quoted "Ann [Lady Taylor] wants to open this up for debate. She was born in Motherwell and has a strong connection to Scotland. She still supports Motherwell. She is as interested in Scotland as some people are who are still living here. She wants the Scottish diaspora in the UK to be included." Yes George, the diaspora exactly like like you were, who racistly won't be included, with violent bullies getting ego gratification from seeing so.