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.