Vote and seek

On the Scotsman's news page about the White Paper, a unionist commenter has already gone straight for the jugular, and correctly. Quoting: 11. Will an independent Scotland have control over monetary policy?

Day-to-day monetary policy would be decided independently of government by the Bank of England as it is now, taking account of economic conditions across the Sterling Area. The Scottish Government would seek formal input into the governance and remit of the Bank of England.

Effectively: we're bought and sold for English gold, such a parcel of rogues in a nation. An independent state will "seek" formal "input" into the central bank of another state, indeed of the state it has just seceded from. Sadly so ludicrous, and so unionist, it will be remembered all down Scottish history to come as suggesting Alex wants to lose.

the culture over the water

How was Dundee a candidate to be chosen for UK City of Culture for a date, 2017, when it might not still be in the UK? How was that going to work? How would it have affected our vote, too, to have that anomaly dangling in the ether? No wonder Hull got it.

MEP Alyn Smith's idea that it should now go for EU Capital of Culture will be far more constructive and do practical good. It will be a spot on way to highlight how the EU has to assume continuity of membership for its parts. A way to dispose of the claim that statehood might exclude us from the EU, so that the question of us leaving the EU will rest wholly on No vote and the proposed British referendum.

demanding

See again? We are not gonna get a currency union. The UK has told us that again.

Quite apart from how silly it is to want one, how it's unionist and not real self-government. The Czech Republic and Slovakia tried to have one following their separation in 1993, and it lasted 33 days.

A Scot trapped in exile by a hideous citizenship injustice.

The following page citsee.eu/citsee-story/scottish-citizenship-now-time-start-discussing-it is a link to said professor Jo Shaw's academic questions and thoughts on citizenship, as mentioned last post. But what matters far more than that inconclusive article, is to be found in the comments posted below it.

A commenter named "WithoutHeritage" has posted -

THAT DESPITE BEING FROM GLASGOW THEY ARE EXCLUDED FROM BRITISH CITIZENSHIP AND HENCE FROM LIVING IN SCOTLAND, BY REASON OF A CHANGE TO CITIZENSHIP RULES THE YEAR BEFORE THEY WERE BORN.

"I can not explain to you how saddening this is. I have struggled with this issue all my life. I loved the land deeply and felt it is where I came to be." "I tried every legal way possible to claim citizenship. I tried using my parents old passports and entry dates( they are not citizens). "

This is an ethnic atrocity. IT IS HORRIBLE.

WHAT ARE BOTH SIDES OFFERING TO DO ABOUT IT? This person, stuck living in the US, supports independence in expectation that it's the Yes side who will take any interest in this. The question is there for both sides.

leaving the gatekeeper.

An "Edinburgh Research Council", first time I've heard of them, and a professor Jo Shaw, have produced some research on the issues around citizenship for a new Scottish state. They want to make a ripple by suggesting it would effectively be the UK instead of Scotland that got to decide who would be a Scottish citizen.

So isn't that an obvious danger from the policy of remaining in the British Isles Common Travel Area? A position the Yes side has too recklessly bound to because Alex fears the unpopularity of having a border control?

But the wider position with the rest of the world makes this counterintuitive. It's right not to want a border control, a barrier between people, a part of the nastiness of global apartheid. Certainly we should say we won't put a border control on by our choice. But how do we minimise border controls and maximise our access links with our diaspora, unless our actions are independentof being dictated by the UK? and by the chilling mounting racism of 2 of its leading parties, and real threat of it leaving the EU? In order not to have border controls dictated to us by them, and barriers put on our diaspora - and by it, exactly as the prof says, treated as not independent! - we need to be willing to pursue a separate line from the UK's even when we know it will result in them slapping a border control onto us.

If we can't get a common travel area with anyone because our own needs, with our own diaspora to retrieve from the oppression of exile, are more open door and liberal than any other country will agree to, then that is what we should do. Better to be an ingathered and enriched pro-migrant people than to be casually able to pop next door. But if we can get compatibility with this openness from the European travel area Schengen, then we will obviously be better off in Schengen than in the British Isles Common Travel Area. Even if England and Ireland slapped border controls onto us, that's 2 countries doing that, in exchange for the gain of having no barriers with 26 countries.

one of the heard

Alex, if you want this to be the independence generation, you need to make us the HEARD GENERATION. None of whose responses to the consultation stage of your bill get excluded from the record. It's simple. Otherwise, you are telling us you want to go down in history for throwing away the independence generation by not listening to them.

Blair Jenkins leader of the Yes campaign says "If you are sick and fed up of the corrosive and cynical world of Westminster, then next year we can be rid of that." But not of its currency. Rid of the entire way British politics works while still using a currency issued as part of British politics and controlled by it. Everyone can see this is contradictory and a mess up.

When you meet Yes supporters informally, they find Alex's currency union sellout an embarrassment and millstone to them. All the other Yes supporting parties besides the SNP would go for issuing our own Groats. They don't want our spending and budgeting to lie held to ransom by another state that we will have no vote in or influence over. Because they know that is actually less independence not more!! and will find us betrayed and still under the cuts regime they told us we were voting to get rid of.

the land of hope is poverty

It has been said that unionism, voting No, leads in the polls among the young and this is supposed to be an irony given how the referendum is making a first by lowering the voting age.

How many aged under 25, now threatened by Cameron with cutting off of support when in need, are still going to see the union as a country "sticking together"? From the voice who tells them "the land of hope is Tory"? The land of hope is not sticking together with its mass scapegoated young, is it? He tells them - "think of all we've achieved together" and deaths in a war of occupation that we should not be fighting are actually his own example!!!