Wednesday 25 January 2012

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.

Saturday 21 January 2012

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.

Sunday 15 January 2012

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.

Wednesday 11 January 2012

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.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

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.

Sunday 8 January 2012

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.