Sabre man or deliverer?

A Yes supporter with expat-born kids who will need to register for citizenship by descent, has told me this on Facebook:

• I don't 'trust' that the White Paper means what I think it means, what I'm saying is that I am confident that I can successfully argue that it means what I think it means. In court if necessary. It duplicates, and slightly extends, current arrangements with regard to British citizenship for Scottish-descended overseas residents. Specifically, it's not 'automatic' now either, they already have to apply. And some specific exclusion clauses have been left out, which is why my kids, who are not currently eligible, will be, post-indy.

He said this in defence of the interpretation that the registered-for citizenship will be an entitlement and if all the criteria are met for providing evidence the Scottish govt won't have a selective power to refuse the applications. Any ideas where we voters can get some info on how right he is about court, to show us it's not just bluster and he could stop in court a govt operating the White Paper citizenship policy from turning down his kids?

the voters who matter behind the fermenting polls

There was nothing in yesterday's (Apr 20) Sunday Herald to the above. Scottish govt and Yes campaign both seen to make no response to the enquiry put to them, and copied to the Sunday Herald: asking them to clarify to that paper's readers, whether the letter printed last week claiming the White Paper's existing content as an answer to my concern about citizenship, was accurate. They knew they were going to be seen as misleading the voters unless they clarified that the letter does not do that. They chose not to clarify. So they have let the suggestion stand of misleading the voters. Now it stands as an indication that Yes rhetoric on this subject is misleading the voters as to their actual policy.

The Scotland on Sunday's headline was that voters born elsewhere, which includes Scots born in exile as well as foreign guests, are now decisive in which way the close polls will tip. This heightens the importance to the Yes folks and SNP OF GIVING A STRAIGHT ANSWER.

The Sunday Post's headline also welcome, its poll finding that there is a crisis of trust in the whole campaign, with BOTH SIDES largely mistrusted, and so trying its new initiative "Independence On Trial" to focus on what concerns from the people have been missed in the campaign. It obviously should include this one on citizenship. This will come under "Would Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the UK and the world be better or worse?" and "Would Scotland be a fairer place to live?"

May 4:The above was the background to which the Sunday Herald has now declared as supporting Yes.

Will you write in and confirm to the readers?

Yesterday in the Sunday Herald, a letter from John Jamieson of South Queensferry claimed to refute the claim that the White Paper will not give automatic entitlements to citizenship by descent. To do this, he just quoted what the White Paper says about registering for citizenship. the Yes campaign itself has never said it means an entitlement, and at their public meeting in Gorgie Edinburgh on mar 12 Alex Neil said it does not.

So there is a question of campaign propriety, over whether they will mislead voters, over whether the Yes campaign will take ownership of this letter that has been written on their behalf and will confirm that what it implies is accurate.

I have mailed back to Yes, and copied it to the Sunday Herald, and to Lesley Riddoch's Nordic Horizons as she is an exile born Scot whose support for Yes is absurd unless this issue is fixed the right way:

" The above refers to a letter in today's Sunday Herald. It has pledged for you, publicly, a line on White Paper citizenship policy that you have never been willing to say to any voter's enquiry by me, and that Alex Neil told us the contrary to at your Tynecastle High School public meeting.

Is Mr Jamieson right? Did he write from you? Or will you recordedly let voters be misled in your name? Will you write in and confirm to the readers: will there be any power at all for the state to select to refuse any application for citizenship by descent, which meets precisely defined terms of supplying evidence of having a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship? "

it was bluff and bluster by the Scottish govt too

Especially in arguments on the web, folks on the Yes side always claim to be the underdog with the media unionist and loaded against them.

The coverage this morning of the so-called exposee about currency union, coming from an unnamed minister who we as yet only have the journalist's word for exists, is a quite contrary example. It has been covered in a totally Yes biased way. Any media unionism, even by the BBC, has been totally swamped by the priority of getting the government. Why don't they want to get the Scottish government too? Is it taking so long for the penny to drop about what Sturgeon's rush to welcome the unnamed minister's comments, which were in fact an offer of a deal involving a significant climbdown for her side too, has indicated?

I have made the following bias complaint to the BBC:

Coverage of the Guardian's expose on an unnamed British minister's comments on a currency union. It was treated as only emabrrassing the No side and the British parties, and being an admission that the refusals of a currency union have been just a bluff. Yet if, as is not yet proven, this minister actually exists, his/her quoted comments are actually just an offer of a deal, a currency union in exchange for nuclear bases. That is not a one-sided granting of a currency union so it was misleading to treat it as if it was.

For parity of coverage between both campaigns, the following should have been noticed and analysed. As named minister Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the comments, that implies a Scottish government openness to making the proposed deal, and that indicates their position of refusing to keep Trident and the Clyde nuclear bases has also just been "bluff and bluster". So logically the story is equally as much an embarrassment for them and the Yes side as for the other side.

18 = out of country, separation from family, suddenly sent alone to where you have no life basis.

PETITION:www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/the-rt-hon-theresa-may-mp-home-secretary-fightforyashika-stop-this-sixth-form-student-being-deported-alone-she-deserves-a-future#share

Due to be deported from Britain, arbitrarily, and alone without her family, just for turning 18. That is how civilised we aren't.

Yashika arrived in the UK along with her mother and brother in 2012 to escape abuse and danger. In that time, Yashika has proved herself a model student of Oasis Academy Hadley and valuable member of the Enfield community. Simply because she is now over 18 she is to be torn apart from her family in the UK and deported to Mauritius without even having the chance to finish an educational course.

Yashika Bageerathi is being held at Yarl’s Wood detention centre. She has been told she will be imminently deported alone to a country where she has neither friends nor family.

This is against Article 8 of the Human Rights Act (respect for private and family life). That she has technically become an adult does not mean there is anything fair or just about tearing her away from her mother and siblings.

When Britain is in this condition it is a particularly high level of betrayal for Scottish nationalism to be in the condition described in the previous post.

grim purist racism becoming clearer step by step.

Very unpleasant racially excluding themes are now emerging consistently, if you look out for them, in the Yes campaign and case. It is a particularly tragic turn in the history of a dispersed people historically subjected to worldwide clearances. despite the plan to have a Homecoming Festival this summer, present day nationalism is showing selfish forms only caring about the home population and betraying the diaspora. If it stays this way, everyone with family links to the rest of Britain, or with friends who have family links to the rest of Britain, will have strong humanitarian need to vote No.

I have mentioned before getting ignored by every part of the Yes campaign enquired to to establish that our new state will not have a power to say no to any of the applications to "register" for citizenship by descent, as the White Paper describes. To this you can now include Labour For Independence. The position is no longer left to assuming the worst from silence and from Yes newspaper number 2. On Mar 11 there was a Yes public meeting in Gorgie, Edinburgh. there, to my question on this, Alex Neil confirmed the worst, the answer not wanted. That yes the new state would hold onto a choice how to respond to the citizenship by descent applications. He offered as an excuse for this that it screens out undesirables like serious criminals. He made the usual noises about the Yes side wanting to encourage new population, but that can not take away that when pinned down in front of a public audience as to their position he has gave a position that would take away the automatic unobstructable access to their own country, that exists now under the Union, for Scots who were born in exile because their parents/grandparents moved away, and who already have the pain of not having been able to rush back to live here on independence day and qualify for automatic citizenship that way. To vote for that is to commit a new clearances, to divide families and effect a division of hate between Scots potentially closing our country to some of our own offspring. That is not national renewal or liberation, that is national betrayal and severely serious purist racism.

In that meeting there was no comeback to the answers given, so that the speakers could get away with evasions. So there was no comeback to ask him: how do we know you won't discriminate against the unemployed and the poor. Any time politicians are not tied down against doing that, you know as surely as clockwork it is what they will do. These are the same folks as inflicted Trump on Aberdeenshire against the locals' will and who are abolishing corroboration and tampering with free criminal defence, always remember that.

A letter in the Sunday Times, responding to the birthplace racism in the legal challenge for expats to have the vote, pinpointed exactly what is involved in these attitudes. Written from England by Andrew Lockhart, it said "There are many people born in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or abroad who, for ancestral reasons, have emotional ties with Scotland and deem themselves Scots. That does not mean they would wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state..." and "Alex Salmond should not assume that even those born in Scotland and who live elsewhere would wish to accept what he so condescendingly offers." It now seems to be the No supporters who are conscious of these ties. Alternatively they might well wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state if one is created, and stronger practical factors than just ancestry and emotion are at stake, family ties and background, when your status is made different even than your siblings' and the rest of your family are all in the homeland whose government, claiming to be progressive, asks to be allowed to exclude its own.

You might say that no excluding will happen because we will all still be in a common travel area. Even if that was true it would only hold for those of the offspring born in exile who live in the rest of Britain or the EU. But as we rationally know, there are considerably big chances that common travel areas will break down, through either country ending up outside the EU or through England fulfilling its threat to put a border onto us. If those situations happen, citizenship does translate into being allowed to live here at all.

Then yesterday I attended a lecture in Glasgow by a Yes campaign leading name, supposed to be a lefty one into popular participation. In the informal time after the lecture I asked him what ordinary people should do to make the Yes campaign take a position guaranteeing the children of exile their safe belonging here and citizenship. What I got back was a volley of disgustingly hard man conservative attitudes about folks who live here and pay their taxes here, something about a standard process for citizenship taking 3 years! that is not even in the White Paper, and no promises or straight answer at all for anyone not already living here to live here if free movement breaks down. He actively said he would speak up and say this is wrong, if citizenship was being opened up any further to diaspora who do not already live here. By this he showed a very dark racism, only further confirming the seriousness of these concerns against voting Yes on present terms. He seriously imagined himself in the lecture a progressive calling for our news state to do lots of left wing things, and disturbingly undemocratically he called for it to be governed by a left wing consensual partnership between the major parties instead of a proper party contest, that was sinister too. yet he has no feeling or consciousness for the diaspora at all, all his imagined empowerment of the nation applies only to the folks who already live here, that is all he sees the nation as. Narrow minded, sweepingly excluding and with mental walls up against the rest of the world and everyone in it including exiled Scots, this nastiness follows naturally on from, continues, the recent hating action of Angus Macneil MP who denied that the childen of exile are Scots if they have not yet lived here. This is very ugly, very bigoted, very divisive and a threat to families, a far worse line on citizenship than Britain's, this is not liberation or progression at all, this is an inward turned grim racist horror prospect. Step by step this dystopian appeal to narky inward focussed outsider fearing bigots is becoming too stark not to see.

Listen to your expat families. They are real people.

nails and moustaches go with kilts.

A petition is circulating, on the Change site, https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/david-dinsmore-take-the-bare-boobs-out-of-the-sun-nomorepage3?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=51216&alert_id=YYbkkucFse_FJINYhHrdP to get rid of Page 3 as degrading to women. Quite right but always right not to overlook any gender inequlity. So I signed it as follows:

As part of eradicating all gender specific costume. This goes with having gender equality about breasts' actual decency, banning skirts as indecent if society is not going to find them decent for men - but kilts would stay, their double layering gives an extra decency protection - and banning as a gender hate crime all ribaldry towards painted nails for men and moustaches for women. Hoping the petitioners agree, ask them.