Tuesday 28 January 2014

Yes for who?

On the same day as the news of their sudden narrowing of the polls gap, the Yes side may have blown any deserving to win. Unless they put something right, they have let it slip through their fingers just when your spirits were highest, tragically by a thoughtless piece of racist sloppiness from the ideas-conservative heart of the SNP.

The latest Yes paper, which came through my door today, states "all British citizens who were born here or live here on day one of independence will have a right to a Scottish passport." It said nothing at all about the diaspora born's position, it was written in a way that the public can read as meaning the diaspora born who can't move back here before independence day are not necessarily entitled at all. It presents the exile born as not counting if they are not already here, it does not present the diaspora as equal.

They may be kids who will only be adult after the date, or young adults stuck in the family economic dependence that is deliberate Tory policy,

I know the White Paper clarifies that the exile born for 2 generations can also register for a passport by right - btw a betrayal of Salmond's plan of only a few months previously, to make it 3 generations. But this point is about the public message, rather than the less known detailed facts. The presentation has suddenly sloppily slid back to the 1999 election, when the SNP made that crucial policy foul-up and was open to attack by Labour as dividing families. This may cause racist bullying, among the thick laddish type of adult, and among schoolkids some of whom are in the 16 franchise where already before this Yes was said to be trailing unexpectedly.

An interesting site linked to by Yes supporters on Facebook is "100 Artists and Creatives who support Scottish independence." The list includes diaspora born Lesley Riddoch. Were the folks in the campaign she supports remembering all their supporters when they wrote the paper?

Monday 13 January 2014

taking to the hills in Russia?

Green leader Patrick Harvie is gay, and outspoken on gay equal ops. Russia has swung to a chilling explicit state anti-gay hate policy, showing that modern diplomacy does not tie dodgy states never to breach those lines. So it seems logically natural, as well as right, for Harvie to talk of "Putin's brutal regime": against the Sunday Herald's creepy story of Britain wanting to draw anti-separatist diplomatic solidarity from Russia and imagine that actually winning voters!

But Harvie leads a CND party that has always wanted us to live stripped of defences against Russia. Does he no' find the brutal regime a worry that way? It's a very unusual acknowledgement of fact from a Green. They never call Russia a brutal regime, not even back in the Soviet era did they do that, it sat so ill with the CND policy. Why does he think the good pro-gay folks in Russia are not stopping Putin's policy by means of the type of civil resistance movement that CND believers have always claimed we could beat off an invasion by? Because it doesn't work, that's why. Because populations, full of political apathy and social nastiness to each other in normal times, can't suddenly stick together in comradeship to achieve a solid mass effect whose first pain is upon themselves, and can't halt all the functioning of social services and food supplies they need for themselves too, see. As the fuel blockaders found in 2000.

This thought's noticeability goes against his own Yes side, if it persists in being intellectual-left fashionably CND and ideologically revelling in defencelessness as a great cool option. All the smaller Yes parties, including his, are pushing it that way. But looking at Putin's regime, in order to vote Yes we need to see the intellectual-left CND posturing watered down enough that de facto we will still be under the West European Bomb, allied to it and seeing that its coverage won't in fact be capable of restriction to only a part of this island and not to the whole.