second perception

A very perceptive letter in the Metro, on the UKIP election win, deserves passing on:

UKIP has less chance of gaining strength anywhere by Scotland staying with the UK. Any smaller country with a depleted electorate has more risk of extremists taking power. The Scottish vote would countermand the overall result. If ever there was a reason to vote No in the referendum this has to be it.

CONFIRMED, OUR NATS ARE BETRAYING OUR DIASPORA.

RECEIVED THIS MORNING FROM NICKOLA PAUL, POLICY OFFICER FOR MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP:

Dear Mr Frank,

Thank you for your response of 9 May.

As you reiterate, citizenship by descent would also be available to those with a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship. This will require the individual to supply evidence to substantiate their relation. Legislation would be made to establish detailed rules for Scottish citizenship in time for independence including both the evidence required and any discretionary elements. Therefore further details of the procedural requirements and administration of the relevant rules in relation to Scottish citizenship applications will be available when the legislation is drafted.

Kind regards,
Nickola Paul

OBVIOUSLY THIS MEANS VOTE NO. That could only change if the position got overturned as a result of being exposed, and it has taken this long since the White Paper even to extract it so clearly.

It took 2 mailings to them, linked to an enquiry to the electoral commission about registering rules, to get this, on a question I have pursued ever since the White Paper came out and never yet extracted this clear admission of what evasive answers had always indicated. They are refusing to make any commitment before the vote, that the Scottish offspring who were born in rUK to parents who moved there, and who are still there after independence day, can be sure of their citizenship. Hence, if common travel areas break down, sure of being allowed their natural right to live in their own country, as they are now under the union, which is not romanticism it is a humanitarian life practicality about dividing families.

A Labour broadcast in the 1999 election warned of this and was very effective. To choose not to learn from that, the nats must have some very sick forces they want to keep happy. has not learned from and happening again. This confirms our nats are xenophobically betraying the diaspora and prospectively dividing many families. This is an anti-outsider community hate politics worse than UKIP, it would be a new Clearances. Its timing is an ideal unionist answer to, and totally trumps, any scares about UKIP that the SNP still try on despite the election result's humiliation of their claim that we were immune to UKIP and splendidly different to England.

Why are journalists Lesley Riddoch and Iain Macwhirter still both Yes supporters, when they were both born in England so it is the Scots exactly like themselves whose racist betrayal they are now confirmed to be supporting?

Only a week ago, at Tom Devine's lecture at Glasgow university, I got in my question about betrayal of the diaspora and put it into the awareness of a big thinking audience many of whose own families stand to be divided by hate. Yet in the informal time after it, an inane smarmily smiling Yes supporter who works for Academics for Yes was introduced to me by one of those academics, who I know - and out of the blue he started banging on at me about the voting franchise, an issue I had never mentioned, and all about how "very progressive" the Yes side is to base that on residence. This was a severe example of a brainwashed fixed mind not listening. There was some time ago a diaspora-related controversy around the franchise, so just on hearing the word diaspora he had jumped top assuming that my question, which he had clearly not listened to, was about that, the question he was familiar with, instead of the very different question it actually was !!! What a dismal prospect of human stupidity at a time of humanitarian crisis against hate and division, in Scotland's life as much as in Europe's.

Eck says Yes to English rule

Metro front page, on all the buses and trains this morning. Salmond says the Bank of England will run our monetary policy when we are a separate state and we will just have an observer on its monetary policy committee. Not even a member any more, just an observer.

THIS IS STUPIDLY NOT INDEPENDENCE.

Nice people must hope that Yes's determination not to say that the position around citizenship by descent will be open and not divide families, has had something to do with the second thoughts of the voters in the surge in Yes support a month ago, in the change to a surge in No support now. If we are not even going to be economically independent, but hand over our economy to the monetary policy committee of a different country whose government we can no longer vote for, then dividing families and ill-treating our diaspora with Jim Sillars' xenophobic shut doors becomes the only item achieved by the Yes offer at all.

our polity is just as neocon

Made known by Inclusion Scotland and No supporters around the web.

SNP voted down a bid by Labour to introduce a Scottish Living Wage duty - which would make it mandatory for firms who wanted to win work from the public sector to pay their staff this rate. Totally scotches the claim that voting Yes offers a more caring political culture against neocon economic attitudes and poverty.

registered dilemma

With the formal campaign period's approach, I have been enquiring to the Electoral Commission about how any folks who share my voting position can register as campaigners. You can register to cover the possibility of big spend without having to already be committed to planning a big spend, and the benefit of enquiring about registering is towards getting answers in the campaign.

The system is that you have to register whether you are campaigning for Yes or No, so how is it possible to register for campaigning one single view that might mean either Yes or No depending on the govt's answer to a policy detail it won't answer?! i.e. the view that we have a humanitarian duty to vote for the side that will give the most open position towards the returning diaspora, the maximum citizenship entitlements for them subject to a priority of not taking automatic citizenship away from anyone who has it now. This will mean voting No if registrations for citizenship by descent, as described in the White Paper and qualifying with its terms, will be refusable, Yes if they won't be refusable.

I put to the commission, that they need to tell me whether this campaigning position should be registered a Yes or No, and in order to be able to tell me they have to make the govt tell them. They have tried to refer the question back to the govt and say, oh I understand your position but it's really for campaigners to choose which side they support. So I have asked back (and copied in a paper that might be hoped to take a neutral interest): right then, if the govt won't answer, "will it be illegal if we do not register that it is for Yes or for No, because it is for a single view whose logic means voting either Yes or No according to the government's answer to a policy detail it has not answered?"

This question is now for the electoral reform and democracy standards scene too: can participation be gagged by one side's withholding of information about its own policy?

Meanwhile, I have made a bit of progress by making this enquiry - At this time of asking govt what the position is, it's with the commission's backing as needing and expecting an answer so that anyone who agrees with me and wants to register as a campaigner can know whether to register as Yes or as No. So that, if govt still won't answer after the commission referred me to them for an answer, they are seen to commit a referendum irregularity. Already govt's first answer just said, full details are in the White Paper and descent citizenship will be "available", and "further details of the procedural requirements and administration will be available when the legislation is drafted." That of course is not an answer to voters now, and I have mailed back that they have only answered the question when they say what one word means. "Does "available" mean refusable or not refusable ?"

Meanwhile, the Sunday Herald, a week after backing Yes, has not chosen to answer the following, I had written in:

As part of backing Yes, you owe to the public, and you must want, to pin down as news any facts doubted by voters that will make the Yes case socially fair. Thus: any time you can report government or legally sourced, that registrations for Scottish citizenship by descent meeting the White Paper's terms will not be refusable and will all be entitled to acceptance, you will instantly convert from No to Yes any voters like me whose concern is to uphold the diaspora and their families.

On Apr 13 the Sunday Herald printed a letter that claimed to answer my concern about citizenship just by quoting the White paper, which without the clarification as above on refusability, does not answer it. They have shown they realise that by never printing any request for clarification. But why is their own Iain Macwhirter such a keen Yes supporter that he keeps crediting the White Paper and SNP with being pro-immigration, without this question clarified, when he was born in exile himself, he is exactly the type of diaspora child who my concern is about. he risks his position closing to others like him the door he found his way home through himself.

They have reported as a splash that Kenyon Wright now backs Yes, yet it takes other sources to point up the remarkable irony that he now lives in England and can't actually vote. How well informed is he, in his chosen exile, about citizenship policies in the way of future freedom to make the same type of cross-border move as he has chosen to make>?!