Monday 28 November 2016

drifters

Who is listening to who, and what is progressing where? Nowt. That's who, and what and where. Nowt. All us drifting inconclusively. No one is winning. But will we win our continuance in the single market? That is the only item that sensible folks are united on wanting.

Friday 16 September 2016

Missed opportunity or a meant miss?

This national survey is an absurdity. It is so incapable of obtaining any content of value, that surely that can't be accidental? Surely it's just a ritual the SNP is doing to make itself look, to the sheep, like it's doing something? while running scared of receiving any actual feedback from the issue driven No voters, so not providing any space in the survey for giving them issues.

They must know you can't answer the survey questions on ranking issues' importance to you, in any way that reflects accurately what your voter view on the issue actually is. e.g. immigration. If you are a nice caring pro-immigration Europhile, firstly you won't like to say that immigration matters to you, because that is usually taken to mean you are a racist anti. Suppose you clear that hurdle, and because Yes was pro European open borders they read your answer to mean that you are too. Then they celebrate and count it as a good Yes issue to use to appeal to your vote - and they are deluded, for in fact the issue swung your vote to No. You will vote No again if they again propose, as the White Paper did, an injustice over giving citizenship by parental descent. You may also have voted No because Sturgeon threatened to take residence away from EU citizens, as a negotiating weapon, in exactly the way she now condemns May for doing.

If you are a citizen of another EU country and had no vote in the Euroref, how do you handle the question of which way you voted in it? They must know that poser would arise. If you are Polish, Danish, Irish etc, how do you answer the question whether you feel more Scottish or British?!

Sturgeon's absolute claim that we must stay in the actual EU and somehow defy both the Euroref's British result and Spain's veto on EU membership for us, is running out of momentum. Alex Neil, SNP minister, is now telling his own side to swallow that they are going to get less. That is a crisis of dream for the nats' wish driven sheep, who also are seeing that Brexit is not causing a tipping of public opinion in favour of indy. To retrieve anything, such as our place in the single market, we need to engage with doing that.

Neil says that a hard border with England is a disastrously unpopular vote loser, such that with it they can't win another indyref. But the unpopularity comes from folks expecting to actually be subject to this border and experience it as a barrier, as it would be if it was between 2 states. But not, if it was within a united Britain, such that British citizens and residents have this status on both sides, so can cross the line freely. They would not experience it as a hard border, and nor would anyone making a permitted visit to the whole UK. It would only be a hard border for the EU citizens exercising free movement to Scotland when they no longer can to England, and others who are allowed into only Scotland under a home rule power over immigration. That is how we could keep a united Britain with its importantly united citizenship and yet keep Scotland (and NI with us) in the single market while Englandandwales leaves it. Indeed, we could join the Schengen area too under this arrangement.

Sunday 7 August 2016

flirted with Trump

August 4 at 7:30pm ·
Dear Members and Alumni,

In every presidential election since 1888, the members and Executive Board of the Harvard Republican Club have gathered to discuss, debate, and eventually endorse the standard-bearer of our party. But for the first time in 128 years, we, the oldest College Republicans chapter in the nation, will not be endorsing the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump holds views that are antithetical to our values not only as Republicans, but as Americans. The rhetoric he espouses –from racist slander to misogynistic taunts– is not consistent with our conservative principles, and his repeated mocking of the disabled and belittling of the sacrifices made by prisoners of war, Gold Star families, and Purple Heart recipients is not only bad politics, but absurdly cruel.

If enacted, Donald Trump’s platform would endanger our security both at home and abroad. Domestically, his protectionist trade policies and draconian immigration restrictions would enlarge our federal deficit, raise prices for consumers, and throw our economy back into recession. Trump’s global outlook, steeped in isolationism, is considerably out-of-step with the traditional Republican stance as well. The flippancy with which he is willing to abdicate the United States’ responsibility to lead is alarming. Calling for the US’ withdrawal from NATO and actively endorsing nuclear proliferation, Donald Trump’s foreign policy would wreak havoc on the established world order which has held aggressive foreign powers in check since World War 2.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Donald Trump simply does not possess the temperament and character necessary to lead the United States through an increasingly perilous world. The last week should have made obvious to all what has been obvious to most for more than a year. In response to any slight –perceived or real– Donald Trump lashes out viciously and irresponsibly. In Trump’s eyes, disagreement with his actions or his policies warrants incessant name calling and derision: stupid, lying, fat, ugly, weak, failing, idiot –and that’s just his “fellow” Republicans.

He isn’t eschewing political correctness. He is eschewing basic human decency.

Donald Trump, despite spending more than a year on the campaign trail, has either refused or been unable to educate himself on issues that matter most to Americans like us. He speaks only in platitudes, about greatness, success, and winning. Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge on critical matters, meandering from position to position over the course of the election. When confronted about these frequent reversals, Trump lies in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.

Millions of people across the country are feeling despondent. Their hours have been cut, wages slashed, jobs even shipped overseas. But Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan to fix that. He has a plan to exploit that.

Donald Trump is a threat to the survival of the Republic. His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy. He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House. He is looking to to pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, American against American. We will not stand for this vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children.

President Reagan called on us to maintain this, our shining city on a hill. He called on us to maintain freedom abroad by keeping a strong presence in the world. He called on us to maintain liberty at home by upholding the democratic process and respecting our opponents. He called on us to maintain decency in our hearts by loving our neighbor.

He would be ashamed of Donald Trump. We are too.

This fall, we will instead focus our efforts on reclaiming the Republican Party from those who have done it considerable harm, campaigning for candidates who will uphold the conservative principles that have defined the Republican Party for generations. We will work to ensure both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands, continuing to protect against executive overreach regardless of who wins the election this November.

We call on our party’s elected leaders to renounce their support of Donald Trump, and urge our fellow College Republicans to join us in condemning and withholding their endorsement from this dangerous man. The conservative movement in America should not and will not go quietly into the night.

A longtime student of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

De Tocqueville believed in the United States. Americans are a decent people. We work hard, protect our own, and look out for one another in times of need, regardless of the color of our skin, the God we worship, or our party registration. Donald Trump may not believe in that America, but we do. And that America will never cease to be great.

put out by The Harvard Republican Club

Of course, to progressive society in Scotland it would be really nice if the conservative movement in America would go quietly into the night. But think about the depth of crisis when even they talk of Trump "flirting with fascism".

WHO flirted with Trump? ALEX SALMOND DID. He physically vandalised Aberdeenshire and destroyed a piece of its nature to do thatm and undemocratically overrode Aberdeenshire council on pkanning decision to force it through. What happened to folks' homes and local environments, what piece of Scotland was destroyed more irreplaceably than Palmyra, when the left talking SNP flirted at ordinary Scots' cost, with the tycoon whose own party accuse him of flirting with fascism?

Sunday 10 July 2016

"how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries"

From Paul Kavanagh's "Wee Ginger Dug" page in the National:

" It's quite likely tbat an independent Scotland will extend citizenship to every British citizen resident in Scotland when independence is achieved, and to everyone born in Scotland or who has a Scottish parent. That is, more or less, how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries."

This is not yet the atrocious racism problem in the last indyref solved. "Quite likely" of course is not certainty. But welcome, and record and keep, that a columnist in the National, the nats' own paper, has put in print that he finds parental descent citizenship natural and an axiomatic likelihood. Has he forgotten the White Paper or is he a welcome vanguard of the nats deciding to change it? Are they going to comply next time with the ECHR human right to family life? This writer has chosen encourage a spark of hope for it.

Wednesday 29 June 2016

One hand and the other?

So now this same Alyn Smith will be remembered for his impassioned beg to the European parlt.

It was a good speech, and cautiously all our Remain voters can endorse it. But his case to the EU sits side by side with petition 1448/2014, and it's down to the nats whether they will bring the both into conflict.

To back up Smith's plea, they simply need to make the right choice not again to offer us evil racism against the Scottish diaspora, in their citizenship rules for independence. If they do, it will be a hypocritical contradiction of the anti-racist and inclusive argunent for keeping ties with the EU and will blow that apart. The EU stands cited under ECHR article 8 on family life, to disown a Scottish state as a pariah racist state engaged in ethnic persecution, if it makes citizenship by parental descent refusable.

Tuesday 7 June 2016

Say it with me

"Say it with me: immigration has been great for Scotland and the UK, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise."
- So wrote MEP Alyn Smith in the National. He has been an SNP figure with an impressively liberal and positive sounding angle on borders and openness, going back as far as the 2003 election when I got a decent reply from him on "an open and welcoming Scotland", as their candidate for Edinburgh West, and voted for him.

How then can he possibly explain, excuse, or square his own words with, the indy White Paper's hate atrocity against our diaspora and the citizenship by descent of our emigrants' offspring???

When eager Yessers at South Queensferry's indyref local debate argued in classic racist words that there was not enough space not to limit immigration numbers ACTUALLY OF DIASPORA-BORN SCOTS TO LIVE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, were they saying "immigration has been great for Scotland and the UK ?"

Ah, but there was, visible in hindsight, a catch in what he wrote to me even back then. "Our definition of Scots is anyone who lives in Scotland". That left it open for the SNP to keep in its unity racist nats who did not want to include in our nation's definition its children of exile not yet living here. What was left open was exactly the hate crime that ended up proposed in Yes citizenship policy in the indyref.

You will have to fix this before you can make any bid for the open borders vote, and any campaign based on pro-immigration morality, in an indyref2.

Wednesday 4 May 2016

HURRAY. LOST MAJORITY.

Even if you are Labour, the headline is hurray and celebrate. The majority SNP government is over. They have failed to be a barnstorming juggernaut sweeping an admiring country. They are being faulted by voters now. Down 6 seats. They have lost their majority.

-they have picked up the mindless tribal vote in Glasgow and Clydeside that used to belong to Labour. But elsewhere they have made losses, notably in their own former northeast heartland. They expected a majority and really wanted to actually up seats even more and look unstoppable. Nice bloody nose instead.

Thursday 7 April 2016

We will woo you with rudely blatant brush-offs

Sunday Herald: Sturgeon, ‘We will woo No voters to support the ‘beautiful dream’ of independence’
Me to Sturgeon's public message system: "We will woo Yes campaigners to the beautiful human rights duty, that the diaspora born offspring of Scotland's emigrants and travellers shall have unrefusable citizenship of their own country."
Reply: "Thank you for your letter of 15 March 2016. I have been asked to reply as our team is responsible for responding to enquiries to the Scottish Government about immigration. It may be helpful to know that immigration and citizenship are matters reserved to the UK Government and Scottish Government has no devolved powers on these matters.

I hope this information is helpful.
Yours sincerely Laura MacCallum."

They know perfectly well that a declaration to Yes campaigners is about conditions under independencem, and they answer with deliberate obtuseness about not having the powers now, saying nothing about independence at all. This is a STARK AND ARROGANT FAIL in Sturgeon's promised dialogue with No voters, right from its start. A contempt of the public in its blatantness of not answering. On the key item to whether a Scottish state will be human rights compliant to its own nation's families or a pariah racist state internationally.

This is a totally failed start for Sturgeon's wooing initiative.

Sunday 6 March 2016

CIVIC NATIONALISM CITED IN RACISM

Every gradually building concern of the alert questioning voter, during the ref, against the term "civic nationalism", that it was serving as a device for racism against the diaspora, is proved accurate and terrifyingly vital.

From exactly the same Guardian story on Irish Republic citizenship as in the previous post. See the comment under it posted by "Ricayboy" at 6 Mar 2016 00:10. It explicitly cites civic nationalism in support of the emotionally savage bully hate crime of birthplace racism - the bigotry of saying that folks' country is dictated by birthplace. It contends that birthplace racism follows from civic nationalism and is the modern PC position. He says nationhood by family and descent "goes against the 'civic nationalism' that we are all supposed to believe in and has more in common with the ethnic nationalism that has supposed to have been consigned to the past."

THERE IT IS IN THE OPEN. EVERY NAT MUST DISOWN IT OR ELSE STANDS PROVED TO BE BACKING RACE HATE AND CLEARANCES.

In the hate writing of a racist who wants the Irish diaspora not to have citizenship of their country, who actually regards them as not Irish when he is writing about a state they created, "Surely nationality in the modern world has to do with where you are born and grew up, not to do with blood and ancestry?" THIS IN A MODERN WORLD WHERE FOLKS OFTEN DON'T GROW UP WHERE THEY WERE BORN! They may have no further connection with their birthplace in their lives, e.g. th Silent Twins, Barbadian, born in Yemen and left it at 8 months old. According to him, the modern hip racially fair PC of civic nationalism makes fair and logical that siblings, growing up in fhe same place, whose parents moved between their births, should be forced to belong to different countries. Birth should force a country on you in an era that says it's wrong for birth to force a gender on you! Have you thought of how a diaspora born child of exile growing up in the wrong country parallels transgender griwing up in the wrong body?

According to his PC civic nationalism, the exiled Palestinians are not Palestinians and the Jews globally are not Jews, both people were successfully abolished when they were cleared out of the land - that line of hate would start a Middle East war!

That is what birthplace racism says, so according to this guy that is what civic nationalism says. Nats?

Thursday 3 March 2016

the party's over

You know well that the neocon economic era did not start with Thatcher, but with her predecessor Callaghan in 1976. His government swung to bankers' cuts and bankers' rule. In the face of bankers' games with the pound it failed to sustain financial independence even for Britain. Tony Crosland said of underwriting council budgets "The party's over." In the present, how much harder was it supposed to be to sustain financial independence for Scotland, and without it even having its own currency at all? The oil price plummeting.

Now for the SNP the party's over. The end of the council tax freeze won't bite jn time for the election, because it's put off for a year, so you are supposed to think it's never coming. But as you have seen across the front pages today, all except the National of course, the SNP budget has set a bomb of hammering rises beyond inflation, 3%, next year, to hit you like a released spring.

This instead of using Scotland's national tax power redistributively as Labour is standing for, and in a narrower single issue way the Lib Dems are too. SNP position is an embarrassment in contrast to them. So that SNP policy is austerity, and Labour's policy is redistribute and spend on need.

Scotland's much-claimed progressive voters have had a crappy history of taking several elections to make culture shifts when the progressive ground moves away from where their voting habits are. They stayed with Labour throughout the New Labour period then moved away from Labour on grounds of the memory of New Labour but aftet it was actually over. That was absurd. It's time to catch up. There is nothing progressive in voting SNP this time.

Saturday 20 February 2016

time to vote In

Although Cameron's EU deal brings in some inevitable nasty Tory economic barriers, which a future Labour led government can easily enough drop, yet there is also a surprising strand of good in Cameron's deal.

He has drawn some red lines that protect member countries' democratic sovereignty and stop the growth of centralised commission power to tell them to do things. This has actually made the EU more democratic in a way that folks have been saying ever since the 80s is needed. It has shown that members can reform the institution in more democratic ways and put their foot down to halt undemocratic drifts. It's a milestone of democratisation in the EU's development.

Time to vote In, or Stay, or Remain, on Jun 23, whatever they will call it. They will have to avoid calling it Yes when there are still stubborn blue Yes window posters around referring to leaving another union.

AND MEANWHILE?OH MY GUUÀAAAAARDD !!!

George Galloway!!!
He was a massive asset for the indy No campaign. He was the most prominent name among radical leaders to support the British union, he showed decisively to many that you could be unionist and left wing. So, now, WHY THE HELL ISN'T HE UNIONIST FOR THIS UNION TOO? He is anti-EU and has already been photoed alongside Farage !!! campaigning for out !!! After in the indyref he wouldn't be seen alongside the Tories.

How totally Gordon Bennett is that? What a jerk particularly because leaving the EU keeps the British union unstable and there is continuing argument for independence on that trigger. Present polls don't make the nat leaders keen to call a second indyref, but the constitutional argument and threat of it is always there, an EU Out vote could still help to lead to it eventually.

How will Galloway then argue against it, when at the Out rally which the Daily Telegraph site showed a clip of, he calls lifetime important "the demand that Britain shall be an independent sovereign and democratic country", exactly the pointless nationalist sentiment he condemned for Scotland saying that creating national barriers is bad! Work Galloway out !!! eh? What he said is nonsense because Britain is already perpetually sovereign, Cameron's deal has clearly established that, with the EU treaties now formally exempting us from the aim of "ever closer union."

Sunday 24 January 2016

in a little box with nasty barricades

For the anti-outsider racism against Scotland's diaspora which made it morally necessary to vote No, the worst of the leading nats was Jim Sillars. He it was who actually proposed that the Scots born in diaspora as the offspring of our emigrants - whose emigration itself was supposed to be a nat issue - should be filtered for desirable skills the same as migrants with no roots here, before they can live in their own country. He took this line of xenophobic hate speech towards a section of his own nation, in his campaign dialogue with George Galloway and to the Yes meeting on 7 May 2014 at Liberton school, Edinburgh. SSP leader Colin Fox was sitting beside him and continued to do a campaigning tour with him calling him a friend.

I saw it because it was my question on citizenship by descent that he was answering. He told the same meeting that he was a Eurosceptic who would rather Scotland be like Norway and join EFTA, he retains from 70s nationalism its anti-EU strain, the idea of sacrosanct national sovereignty not getting pooled and united with anyone. Anti-Europeanism is now another racist anti-immigration position, because it means, and at British level much of it is motivated by, ending the union of free movement and travel. Going back to having nasty barricades up to the rest of the world outside your little box of global apartheid.

It fits him perfectly that he has now announced he's campaigning for an Out vote in the referendum, and splitting with the SNP mainstream by it, as he has ranted against the party control created by Salmond. The nats are better off without him, but will they realise it and break with his sick level of anti-diaspora bigotry?

Sillars will have no claim to moan or to claim any crisis if Scotland votes In and Britain votes Out. It is a matter of record that he wants the opposite.

Saturday 9 January 2016

term time

Green leader Patrick Harvie to wrote a column in yesterday's National, accepting as routine and uncontroversial across all oarties the bill to put off the 2020 Scottish election to 2021. He writes that he anticipates our electoral term becoming 5 years from now on to fit with the British and European terms and avoid clashes.

What's so wrong with clashes then? What is wrong with simply having an election at some other date than May when you want to avoid a clash? What, only since 1997, is suddenly so magic about May for elections?

Why the hell do the Greens, on the whole the most reformist party, want to go along with a consensus to make elections less frequent? How does that help reform anything?

Why would they, or indeed a nationalist government, want to change for worse Scotland's election cycle to acommodate Britain's, when there is no need to? Especially when there is much discontent by British-level political journalists that the term is too long. This 5 year term, this reduction in elections now presented as permanent, originated entirely from the party interests only for the 2010 parliament in making a right wing coalition deal of despised memory!

It rather looks like the Greens have succumbed to temptation to accept the gravy train giving them a free ride of holding their seats for the extra year, between having to see how they as small party perform in elections.