Welsh border post ?

At school in the eighties I drew a cartoon of a Welsh border post. Today its Prime Minister, Mark Drakeford, Labour not nat, announced travel bans into Wales from other parts of Britain by reason of the Covid emergency's second wave. For the first time since the Middle Ages, + in any modern sense the first time ever, border controls into Wales!

Okay, consider these details:

• Saltney is a Garden Village in Wales running into English city Chester. The border runs from a crossroads along a Boundary Lane, a housing street that is a different country each side. On the English side are several culdesacs with a railway behind them.
• East Maelor is a finger of Wales that juts into England, just because of a historic court district, + cuts across the Oswestry to Whitchurch road.A495 in Shropshire.
• Llanymynech is a village half in each country, its High Street is the border.
• Pentreheyling and Brompton are a pair of villages in England in a loop of the border that crosses every road into them. By farmland + country paths they are joined to the rest of England, but by road you have to go through Wales.
• Knighton is a town in Wales with a rail station in England, because railway + town are on each side of the River Teme which is the border.

Police those! It seems we are now watching the experiment of trying to operate a real hard border on a line of this nature!

Its nature derives from it being Henry VIII's line, from when he settled the feudal-style local court districts after he annexed + abolished Wales in 1536. Wales's last period of independence was 1393-1410 the Owain Glyndwr rebellion. So it's a line that was never designed to be a frontier. Nats imagining a hard border separation have a big problem from this, when it is combined with how geopolitics after WW2 has adopted an ethic of taking borders as they are and never redrawing them, to try to prevent nationalist pushes for border changes from being a cause of wars. It sits awkwardly with the later post-colonial principle that all entities recognised as nations or countries have self-determination, that Wales has.

#Wales #coovid19 #borders #Saltney #Chester #EastMaelor #Shropshire #Llanymynech #Pentreheyling #Knighton

opinion polls conducted like this are garbage

What does this experience of an Ipsos Mori politics phone poll say for the credence of all their politics polls? Polls whose demographic is only the folks whò will passively take pushing around by the caller including arrogant ignorement of being short of time, are obviously not a true demographic of society. This caller ended the call and called me hostile just because I said “okay OKAY” to stop him giving a long winded repetitive spiel about the poll instead of keeping to the questions, ignoring that I had said at start I was relatively short of time.

Ipsos Mori’s Scottish politics poll called me at 17:50 on Oct 7, and by fluke, caught me in shortly before going out for the evening, and shortly before becoming older than the 16 to 54 age range they were polling. I have complained to Ipsos Mori that I was treated completely illogically + penalised for its caller’s own miscommunication, which does not make an honest poll, it makes a corrupt wrong poll.

First he seemed to say that the call was recorded, though later he said he could not listen to any recording. If there is a recording, I waive any confidentiality needed to allow investigators to listen to it, to hear how he conducted it.

As written to Ipsos Mori – When he asked me the most important issue in Scottish politics, he was stuck to categorise my answer, put it under “other” then said, how would I express it? Yet I had already given an answer, so what was he asking for now? You want me to think of a precis of my answer? No, he was asking me for the same answer again, for no reason ever explained, + when I tried to refer him back to the answer already given, that was when he said he had no recording. So I gave the answer again, then seemingly as a thanks for it he went straight off into a very long-winded spiel about the poll’s purpose. But this is after, at start I had said I did not have much time, soon to go out, + he had promised the call would only take 10 minutes! But now he was going round in circles, insistently reciting at least 3 different angles of spiel on the same thing, instead of continuing the questions.

So perfectly logically, to try to stop him + express time urgency, at a pause for response moment I said “okay OKAY!” Instantly he accused me of being hostile to him, + suggested that he should end the call. I said I was simply trying to prevent wasted time, + he ignored this, + in more long-winded recital he stuck to the charge of hostility, while “I’ve been perfectly courteous to you”, + asserted that he was ending the call.

To instantly start calling you hostile as soon as you have any collision at all, is a notorious unfair device used in modern corporate bullying, in business + by officials. It is a discrimination against standing up for yourself, an approach that only takes submission as amicable. No opinion poll conducted with that practice is fit. To suffer a termination of call so intemperately + not-listeningly of course creates hostility from that experience: in that way it is self-fulilling. It is also corporate bullying to declare yourself courteous when you have plainly not been. It is discourteous, very rude, to ignore the person’s statement of being relatively short of time, + despite it, insistently keep speaking to them in long-winded recitals of repetitive spiels about the poll instead of get on with the questions. Then it is discourteous to take as hostility a resulting “okay OKAY!” prod to return to the questions, and discourteous not to listen or budge to getting told that the called person wanted to save time. it is unfair polling as well as discourteous, to actually end a call for these things.

Polls confined to folks who passively accept unnecessary long-windedness even when they have limited time, + ignorement of them saying so, are not of a real demographic. All your polls stand invalid unless you say how handling calls like that is prevented + not allowed to happen.

wilting Lily

Blogger "Lily of St Leonard's" is a strong Brexiter, and philosophically determined Tory, though she is adaptable as a voter and now backing Galloway's Alliance For Unity. Even for folks like me not sharing those views, she used to be a good read for following how Scots of her views were reading political events. Same reason as why it's sometimes good to read the National. But the lily is wilting! Her reading of the position, where she used to be confidently predictive of Brexit actually strengthening the Union, is shifting. Gradually, not too visibly until you check back.

Best about her used to be that she wrote well in support of Alex Salmond getting a fair trial, and against the MeToo-related witch hunt of men. She was willing to act across sides to do that. But now she is writing about Salmond's case making a party point from SNP inaction against him at the time in question and lack of Scottish media chasing of it: in a way that rather clearly assumes him guilty, and arguing it from exactly the MeToo-corrupted standards of conviction in the US that she used to condemn. It's a disappointing change. It may show an increased sense of all-out back-to-the-wall fight against the SNP.

An even more startling shift is from
www.effiedeans.com/2019/09/the-remainer-rearguard.html
to
www.effiedeans.com/2020/08/knowing-terms-of-divorce.html.

That's from
"It never crossed my mind in 2014 that if Yes won the Scottish independence referendum that Scotland wouldn’t get to Leave the UK. I thought the SNP’s claims about the Scottish independence were exaggerated at best dishonest at worst. But we all had had the chance to contest the political claims of the Yes campaign. If they had won, I would have accepted the result. It never would have crossed my mind not to do so. I did not expect to be given a second chance if my side had lost."
to
"Just as Nicola Sturgeon argued for a confirmatory referendum on Brexit, so too the British Government could require a third referendum on independence after the terms of the divorce were known. The same ten questions and more could be asked an answered during the transition period in which Scotland would remain an integral part of the United Kingdom. Only when all issues had been resolved would there be a referendum on the terms of the divorce. Scotland could accept them meaning independence would happen or decline them meaning independence would have been rejected."
!

indy is not giving Montenegro's folks fair local running of land

Montenegro. Small country in the Balkans, that after a century in bigger unions since WW1, became independent in 2006. Sometimes argued as a precedent for Scotland.

So has indy given its ordinary folks a fair life empowered over what happens to them, keeping it locally suitable? Not judging by this story of a rural community's seasonal grazing pasture nicked for international military use. www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/saving-a-critical-pastureland-in-montenegro/

Decided from the top "with no publicly available environmental, health, or economic impact evaluations, and without any substantial negotiations with the affected pastoral communities, or any apparent respect for their legal rights."

Because power corrupts the same in a union or in a separation.

the jury is in

The SNP govt wanted, during the present state of emergency, to abolish juries. No attempt to do that has happened in Englandandwales, where jury trials are simply postponed for the duration. Mercifully, within a day they were stopped by all the Unionist parties: and okay, as the Unionists are not in a majority, also by the opposition of law professionals from their own ranks.

Human rights here have just passed through a breathtaking moment of emergency, and who from? From the reputed progressives who have told us for years they want to give us a nice more progressive state of our own, and campaigned against Brexit's likely rollback of ECHR-associated human rights safeguards. The independence movement's entire claim that Scottish governments and state would be innately more progressive and fairer, now stands smashed by this. This will always be there as a fact of history in the debate.

Notice it follows within days the MeToo extreme feminists' oopenly disliking that a woman-majority jury found Alex Salmond innocent. This has rightly split the nats into a bad fight on Facebook and in the National, where both the loyalists who saw politicality in the whole trial, and the scrupulous over the vital human right to presumption of innocence, have seen through the evil raving believe-what-we-want injustice of the radical feminists and their witch-hunt of men.

The Crossgate Centre on Mar 24 displayed on Facebook a reply to that character of radical feminists, that they well deserved, and deserve everyone to contemplate:

《 This tweet from Rhiannon Spear, the SNP National Women's Convener, in response to the Alex Salmond verdict yesterday is absolutely appalling, and has drawn a well-deserved backlash from SNP members and the wider Yes movement on Twitter. Her contempt for the principle of presumption of innocence, juducial due process, and not least the jury, 9 of whom, the majority, were women - makes her unfit for office.

Never mind respecting entitlement to presumption of innocence, clowns like you can't even respect a verdict from a female-majority jury if it goes in the accused's favour. You epitomise the entryism piggy-backing on & destroying an SNP where it is because of indy supporters. The tweet itself, Mar 23, and its reactions, are here.

It was natural for society to wind down gradually

I have been interested to observe this. Every frequently meeting group known to me has been psychologically reluctant to stop. It was always been irresistible to go on and achieve their next meet so long as folks generally seem well. There is that mismatch, then, between a thinking group's natural instincts and the advice. Folks have stayed active until last weekend before the move to major shutdown from Mar 16, feeling they owed to each other to try not to drop activities, and there was always a next meet that would still be good to get done if folks were still well. Precautions like separately wrapped food started, and Anglican churches stopping their handshakes and shared communion wine from a shared cup; but knowing there were not yet many cases, folks all seemed to need the week of build-up of threat awareness, before the govt announcements of Mar 16, to get mentally ready to stop their social activities.

That felt right. It's particularly reasonable for support activities for vulnerable groups. It points against the kneejerk armchair opinion there was on Facebook for a sudden instant "lockdown" on the shockingly authoritarian model seen in some countries like Italy. As a report by Robert Peston raised, heavy handed lockdowns put the elderly at risk of unseen neglect inside their homes, which counters the argument that the authoritarian lockdown makes them safer from the virus. I agreed with the government keeping the country active as long as we were still mostly healthy, and being driven by events re when we had to tip over into shutdown. Because it all matched folks' irresistible common sense day-to-day behaviour in my experience, mine included. That has been the real practicality of folks' social and political lives, during the descent into this health emergency.

a dangerous passport trap, they must not be over 9 1/2 years old even if over 6 months left

TRAP ! KEEP NOTE OF THIS. #globalapartheid #passport6months

From a story in the Independent titled "BRITISH TRAVELLERS FACE BEING TURNED AWAY AT AIRPORTS OVER NEW PASSPORT EXPIRY RULES AFTER BREXIT." A funny title when we are after Brexit now, as if they have not yet got used to that. Or is it intentional to jolt Brexiters with a reminder that we are not yet into full Brexit conditions until they hit at the transition period's expiry, next new year?

It's important and devastatingly unjust what they are reporting. You can get caught out + pigheadedly oppressively denied travel, with all the serious lost money that means!! as well as humiliation, if you use a British passport that you think is okay because over 6 months left, but that is over 9 1/2 years old. Until 2018 Britain used to give back paid-for time on passports and issue them for longer periods than the exact 10 years. But in conflict with that well-intentioned move, arbitrarily oppressively + pointlessly, many countries don't recognise validity beyond 10 years + their 6 month rule cut you off at 9 1/2 years no matter the actual expiry date.

From next new year, our transition period's expiry, this will include the EU. The EU is wrong to choose to have these rules, even if most of the world has. Passports are unjustly losable documents anyway. There is fault on both sides in this, + honestly admitting so makes a more rational case to Brexiters than a line of always placing all the fault on Britain's side. It is wrong when Rejoiners are unwilling to say that, + want to place all the fault only on Britain's side in every story like this. Honesty with the balance of fault is needed in any hoping to shift attitudes when Brexit's impractical results hit.

response open letter to Lisa Nandy, to Mark Frankland's

Response by Maurice Frank to Mark Frankland. He is a Yes supporter, English and liking Scotland's political life better - though his argument from no visible homelessness in his home Dumfries does not ring true at all to the Central Belt cities. On Jan 18 Frankland wrote and blogged an open letter to Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy, in an angered response to her Andrew Neil interview. It s going viral akonv nats on social media. This response is to Lisa Nandy too, + is confirmed emailed on 20 Jan 2020 -

In urgent factual correction of MARK FRANKLAND's open letter to you on SCOTLAND, here is a too underreported fact about our situation. There is in fact a shocking family-wrecking racist prejudice that the Yes movement and SNP have, to date, still never removed from their policy. It is just as bad as anti-Semitism or Windrush. It has been there ever since their White Paper in 2013, it also surfaced as far back as our 1999 election, when a Labour broadcast warned: "If you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a Scottish citizen? No! They will have to apply."

It is a prejudice against nationhood through family ties, against being Scottish and entitled to citizenship by the practical connections that routinely go with having a parent who is. Copied from Quebec, they proposed in the referendum that automatic citizenship should only be by birth or residence at the instant of statehood.

Now, calling any category of citizenship automatic can be problematic, as a person with several possible citizenships may not want the one that some official wants to deem automatic: so I have no problem with asking claimants to descent citizenship to take an active step of choice for it. But obviously what must be automatic is that they get it. That is, it must be unrefusable.

Faced with inability to get any Yes source to say this, during the campaign, I lodged EU petition 1448/2014. This was not the naive humble type of petition making a request, it was a citation of ECHR article 8 on family life: so it remains a legal resource for anyone to cite and use. It cites, that article 8 obliges the EU to disown shun and sanction as an international pariah racist state, and not build any relationship with, a Scottish state where citizenship by parental descent is refusable.

Since then there are 3 limited successes to record fairly:

• In the National of 9 Jul 2016, Paul Kavanagh's column included parental descent in a list of European norms of citizenship.
• only verbally on a stall, a self-declared international law expert in the Yes Marchmont and Morningside group in Edinburgh concurred that ECHR will require us to honour this citizenship entitlement.
• at Perth's hustings last May 16, which was recorded, the Greens' Maggie Chapman gave the right answer on this.

There are good "Yessers" who persist in an unsecured faith that this will not be a problem. Some are my friends. But there are frequently encountered Yessers with the prejudice, to show it is a serious problem. Many of them hold that their theory "civic nationalism" defines a country as its presently in situ population, and makes it virtuous to reject anything to do with "blood and soil" - and they will class family ties as implying blood and race. They faithfully think it is a progressive line against genetic views of race, to reject our emigrants' offspring from being Scottish, hypocritically at the same time as claiming emigration as a Yes issue! As well as simply being xenophobic excluding and hateful, this line breaks apart families. Nationhood by parentage has always come from the life practicality of folks’ ties to their families, to the places where their families’ lives are rooted, and to family’s mutual support and sharing of resources. All nothing to do with genetics and long predating all knowledge of its existence.

They won't budge when you explain that. They cling to a seeming fear that to admit any practical humane argument for families will be a blunder into a naughty endorsement of blood-related thoughts. So they put themselves in an absurd mirror-image position, of calling inclusion racist and calling vile family-breaking exclusion anti-racist and progressive. During the campaign I had a bonechilling conversation of this nature with a Radical Independence stall, arguing that line in all theoretical earnestness, opposing and calling racist any parental descent citizenship at all, constantly asking "how far back do you go?" to everything I said for nuclear families whose practical position is obviously not the same as the distant past's generations. MP Angus Macneil denied to the Sunday Post 23 Feb 2014 that anyone who has never lived here is Scottish.

The position of an emigrant's child, born in diaspora and growing up in the wrong country, has a parallel with the transgender position in the wrong gender: it too can be an emotional dysphoria with a practical basis. Not to uphold it is a social inconsistency. Their identities collide with the horrible school bully attitude I propose to name "birthplace racism", even dividing siblings: the bigotry of regarding country as dictated by birthplace. Then should the racists could get to see their victim rejected by the country they identify with?? Birthplace has visibly not correlated with country ever since the ancient Jews' Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, many folks are born in places they have no further connection with, Labour's morally outstanding recent election policy of right of return for the Chagossians recognised descent nationhood, it features on both sides in the Israel/Palestine problem. But given that common sense life practicality makes citizenship by birth also a natural right, notice a cruel exclusion by the Yessers here too. Against an older SNP pledge, they wanted to make citizenship by birth only apply to preexisting British citizens, thus continuing to cruelly exclude folks born to visiting parents who the British rules have excluded since Thatcher's changes in 1983. I met such a person online and failed to get Yes to solve his position either!

Just as Tory ministers with immigrant backgrounds have been happy to do anti-immigrant things, existence of some diaspora-born Scots in the independence movement's lead names does not disprove this descent citizenship scandal. The onus can only be on Angus Robertson, Lesley Riddoch, Mike Russell, Iain Macwhirter to explain why they support a movement containing prejudice against themselves. Meanwhile, by human rights there is never in the world a duty, there was not in 2014 either, to allow independence votes for any nation unless it is known that its citizenship rules will always comply with all family and personal practicalities without any cruel gaps.

Maurice Frank