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
