Sunday 29 April 2012

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.

Sunday 22 April 2012

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.

Sunday 1 April 2012

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.