Neighbourgood

Neighbourgood" is a little circle of food stalls in a sports field in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, behind the Edinburgh Academicals football club. Discovered it on the site of Mexican food folks

Write about your blogs elsewhere to keep them searchable !

Write both the names and URLs of your blogs and websites, in posts on Medium or Substack, and anywhere else you find it works, in order to make them appear as search results in Google or Bing. Circulate the tip to do this. Do it because your sites themselves now may not appear in google search results, not even if their exact names or unique phrases in them are searched.

Suspiciously unaccountable quirks of “indexing” of sites, by their bots that constantly review the web for present or new sites, are happening. You can confirm so as simply, ironically, as by googling on the question of how to make it list your site. At present no search results call the problem politically motivated. Instead they explain it as that sites may have code settings that discourage searchability, yet you are not aware of this, for a long established site that always used to appear in searches, and you would need a mindnumbing education in site coding and jargon like “root directory” to find the problem, or that Google’s bots may decide a new or altered site page needs verifying of ownership. Pointless new problems that searching used to work better without, clearly.

If folks can’t find your site even by searching on key phrases or its name, that completely stops you telling the folks in Youtube comments that your site exists, or of any info your site makes public. This because, as is already well known, Youtube’s automated moderation blocks practically any post with a url in it, and even with a disguised url, it recognises “com” or “wordpress” within longer strings of characters. Quora will allow a url once but it too classes as spam and autoblocks several postings of the same url. So you need to make site names and key phrases findability by writing them in places like here.

All asking or searching tells you that Google or Bing will only receive any requests for site listing if in the process you verify your site ownership, yet why do you need to own a site to want to make it findable? and this is now by a complicated method called “DNS verification”. It involves adding a line of code they give you, to a particular place in your site’s settings. Even after you do this, they can still take undetermined months to catch up with the searchability ! You have only put your site into a queue for that ! Now, if the problem has happened to a Wordpress site, there is a money trap here. Wordpress only gives you access to the DNS settings as part of a paid subscription for your site. Though Wordpress sites are available free, if you choose a free site you can’t do this “DNS verification” thing on it, so can’t stop the big search engines ignoring the site for unaccountable reasons.

This trap is particularly striking when Wordpress has just, on Jul 14, announced to its users Bao Nguyen’s new campaigning short film Code For the People, https://codeforthepeople.com. It is a call to use “open source” public sharing of programs and code, for anyone’s use qnd ownership of their own work, to defend the open internet from growing more business controlled, and it is largely an advert for Wordpress as a leader of this cause. It gives the name “platform decay” to the notorious business phenomenon, where something on the web, a service or a writing place or a community, is initially provided free, but after it has picked up a lot of users and their online lives have grown dependent on it, it reduces or ends the free element and makes the thing paid for. It is a good point in the film, one of the ways that business breaks down the open internet. It adds up to a pull back to the old pressure on the public to trust and only believe the elite-led media-selected view of reality, shutting out everything outside the core consensuses in politics and science and religion, that used to be such an oppression of thought in the era before the web.

flag that anarchists have faith in judges

The anarchist paper Edinburgh Black Flag is shitty in attitude, and has not even got a base address that it's published from or any regular place of finding it any more frequently than annually. For it was at the Meadows Festival, annual, that I picked up one.

Its attack on Justice For Innocent Men Scotland, where it sides with dangerous dogma that defending men from injustice is anti-women, contradicts absurdly the usual healthy scepticism of the justice system in radical writings. This is the type of literature you expect to see call out court short cuts or politicised contrivance of charges. Indeed this is self-named anarchist literature which means against laws. Yet instead, without any analysis, it calls it "fearmongering" to call out easy miscarriages of justice in sexual cases, or to say there is a witch hunt, and it depends the sections 274/275 powers for judges to deny applications to present defence evidence that socially embarrasses the accuser. Completely looking glass.

At JIMS's demo at parliament 2 days before, rape/abuse survivors had banners that they are not defended by jailing the innocent !! There is no logic at all in claiming, in one line unsupported by any analysis, that a justice campaign is bound to turn into misogyny. Look at the Salmond case followed by the present SNP scandals. This is another case among so many where radicals have worshipped dogma to a point that betrays the common sense of ordinary folks' situation !

wi' Wallace untold

In seeking to post this around facebook, it was astonishing to discover the Scottish Lib Dems now have no public page, and the UK ones still after a day had no mention of Jim Wallace's passing. even as a former Deputy PM, in the first Scottish government, he shared in an ordinary grassroots experience of street campaigning in the Brexit ref 10 years ago.

His passing removes a witness to how ordinary Remain campaigners got messed around by our own side in the Brexit ref. In the polling day flyering at Edinburgh Haymarket station. I was in it, we were completely left to do it when we were in numbers, in the morning peak. Then, when numbers reduced and a couple of us stuck at it after our colleagues had finished, we got targetted by the station manager then the police, who claimed completely different activity boundaries than our own organisers had told us.

After which our organisers when told about it would not challenge the police's action, and nor would the Lib Dem from their nearby office who was flyering beside me and who favoured respectability even when pushed around instead of arguing jurisdictions to defend the election activity info our organisers had brought us there by telling us. Then Jim Wallace was there in the evening peak and was allowed unbothered to do it in a place where the morning police had not allowed us to do it.

Our (ex)organisers never answered any communication from me ever again after our polling day activity was over, and despite all the controversy around whether the ref was held fairly, I could never get anyone to take up + make use of this story about Jim Wallace.

bank snooping, abolishing juries, suing governments under trade treaties, the drift

A twin terrible moment for civil liberties, sending civil liberties voices' alarm setting sky high. The present move to massively reduce use of juries in Englandandwales, and now passed the present Britishwide introduction of snooping powers over welfare recipients' bank accounts. Both these at once. Both need the COURT CHANGE used by all parties resisting them.

On juries, this is both to cite the court change against the change happening, and if it still happens, to use the court change in actual cases. In Scotland, where the extent of right to juries is weaker, still 2 recent attempts to partly abolish them were successfully stopped, including by lawyers' opposition. The SNP government tried to suspend juries entirely at Covid's outset. Then straight after a jury defeated its attempt to frame Alex Salmond, it stood on a policy to abolish juries in sex cases where even the present English proposal keeps them, and where even without doing that, the Supreme Court case recently proved Scottish law to have practised unjustly in the witch-hunting of men.

So the political elite, including from the left, has been dangerously after juries for a long time already. All organisations who stand for civil liberties, who voice any resistance to this change, are evidenced only to mean what they say if they acknowledge the court change, cite it against the juryless process's demerits, and are not ignoring it. The court change is a serendipitous resource in this which they can't afford to leave aside.

The move against juries is part of shift from proper democracy to business controlled government, corporatism. A Guardian item on which by George Monbiot, Dec 1, has been welcomed by Helena Norberg-Hodge of the Local Futures mailing list. To which today she wrote in response, it -

《 details the ISDS clauses, written into free trade treaties, which give foreign corporations – and only foreign corporations – the right to sue governments, sometimes for many times their annual GDP. This is what I mean when I say, as I did in a recent video currently doing the rounds on social media, that this is a completely illegal global system.

Trade treaties have been the dark secret of the global economy for decades. Both the Left and Right have been handing over their wealth and power to global monopolies, making a complete mockery of democracy and giving rise to Corporate Rule. This lies not only behind the complete failure in the climate arena, but is also a primary reason why more and more people are forced to run faster and faster just to put food on the table and a roof over their head. As a consequence of these increasing pressures on people, we are witnessing a frightening political swing toward fascism.

And the good news is that this is not so much about "good guys" and "bad guys" as it is about blindness. It’s my experience that the majority of our political leaders have not had a clue about this, nor have most social and environmental activists at the grassroots – not even the majority of people inside these giant monopolistic corporations! 》

She asks for circulation of it - 《 That this corporate empire threatens all of us gives us reason to unite like nothing else.

Please help us spread the word. Share Monbiot’s article along with our video, Trade Gone Mad.

Big hugs,
Helena Norberg-Hodge  》

But with the court change too. This campaign too will unaffordably miss a resource if it neglects the court change. George Monbiot has not exposed the court change, and nor have campaigns against corporatism for a generation already. Uniting includes automatically taking up all resources contributed by anyone. It will visibly only be meant if it acknowledges and uses the court change.

#FreeTradeAgreement #freetradetreaties #tradetreaties #CorporateGovernance #CorporateGovernment #corporategov #oligarchpolitics #oligarchy #LocalFutures #helenanorberghodge

Youtube censors Edinburgh tram options !

Under a video by CityMoose channel on the tram expansion, that supports the Roseburn path option, including without local knowledge the total path option at Telford Road, Youtube is utterly banning the following comment. Not even the first sentence on its own, or using 1s and 0s, any comment referring to station siting in any way will not post -

《 You are wrong about Telford Road. Station's site on the path route will be in a park and behind some flats, hence lonely, won't feel safe after dark. I heard that raised in the public drop-in. Its distance from the hospital too, across a housing estate, is not good for infirm or ageing patients who can't walk well. It will be a white elephant.

The road is wide, has a hospital gate straight onto it, has not got homes straight onto it. North side of the road, in Drylaw park's corner, there is a strip of ground behind a substation, gentle gradient, where you can bring the line up from path to road, so no need to build an intrusive ramp. 》

What world geopolitics or radicalism is there in words about a bloody tram line ? Made this point in favour of the Telford Road option in my trams consultation submission. Also

• instead of writing about cross-city services from Balgreen, could reopen as tram the old Corstorphine rail branch, there have often been views on local social media for that, folks who remember it say it has always been slower getting into town by bus without it. Most of the branch route still exists as a park path. Last 1/3 mile does not, so it would take an on-road bit to reach Corstorphine village. That is short enough, and not in town, that it would not slow up the buses like they are saying the Orchard Brae route will do.
• Cockburn Association, that cares about old buildings, has blogged warning of structural doubts in building the southward line over South Bridge. Modern big train-weight trams will stress the structure far more than the bus-sized ones in the historic tram era, and is a load the bridge was not built for. Same concern as for Dean Bridge, but while the Orchard Brae route is one of 3 options, South Bridge is a less known issue because the south line's route straight down the A7 is just getting taken for granted. Clearly there is a responsibility not to take it so.

If the line was diverted down Holyrood Road and near parliament, it would be a bit longer and have more corners, but it offsetting so, it would have an off-road section and avoid trying implausibly to run through the overcrowdedness of South Bridge and Nicolson St. Street widths would allow it to turn from North Bridge eastward into High St, with the northbound track off-road there to avoid the notorious tailbacks into that crossroads. Blackfriars St, Cowgate, Holyrood Road, then it could go off-road on the waste ground that is Holyrood Park's edge behind Dumbiedykes, and rise from the ground at gentle gradient by a ramp to beat the sharp rise in ground level it will eventually meet. Though the same rise prevents the line going up Pleasance because of steep gradient, that is on-road surrounded by streets with no space to beat it by a ramp, while in Holyrood there is that space. The least bumpy course over that hill, just behind the end of Dumbiedykes Road, already has an old wall along it, that obviously was easiest to build there, so the line would go through that, use its ramp to take the hill at gentler gradient than steep Braidwood Gate path up to behind Crags sport centre, Bowmont Place where it will not affect home entrances, St Leonard's St, then for local opinion to choose which street to cross back onto Clerk St via.

public be moved to keep bureaucracy off the graves you care for

change.org/p/oppose-removal-of-grave-ironworks #westlothiancouncil #disgustingbureaucrats #bureaucrats #oppression

This type of arrogance where it hurts can move the public to react against bureaucrats as they need to.

A 16 year old boy dead from some road accident, which itself is evil enough and attests the world to be so, his family set up on his grave some honouring structures that are made of iron. 26 years later, out of the blue, arbitrarily without consultation, West Lothian council arbitrarily declares new rules to ban and remove them.

learned of from Nextdoor, 17 Jul 2025

SNP’s Trident policy plays into Putin’s hands

A Herald article Jun 25,by Neil Mackay: SNP’s Trident policy plays into Putin’s hands

It complements my post here on 23 Jan 2022: Remember it was Ukraine who gave up the Bomb. This is a politics writer who has been trendily CND ever since the Cold War 80s days when it was so hegemonically the left fashion around its period in control of Labour. So when the Soviet Union existed, he was CND in face of it. But no more in face of Putin now after Ukraine.

A conversion like Einstein's in 1934. Saying that Putin's Russia now poses the same choices.

As left wing Unionists pointed out during the ref, indy won't remove the Bomb from Britain. It would just move it, and it would still have the whole island's safety as its meaning and red line, because letting an invader take Scotland just opens the door to England too. But instead, in a British election, as is on now, the concern is against the SNP exercising leverage upon British nuclear choices.

ex-PM and his party using the court change

A few days late with this, as I have had to carefully nudge my signs back in to Google, which it kept blocking on a main browser until updated, and even then, it had to be in a mobile site setting not desktop, and in a new window not retaining any code memories of the blocked sign-ins. Too much naff we get from Google's security. Hence, why had I ever signed out? knowing it has inconvenient results. Because, I had to reset all my identity indicators to do a survey from new again, that was programmed to pick up where you had got to and not allow you to start it from new again in the same browser! but one of the survey's option choices had been unclear and only after choosing, turned out to be a wrongly limiting choice, so that I needed to start it from new again.

Thus is an era snapshot of the fight to do your own simple things instead of confirm to what arrogant programs want you to do.

Okay. The real post. -

The Alba Party is loudly announcing and publishing an opinion by an international law lawyer, against the British Supreme Court decision that Scotland has no power to hold an independence vote unilaterally. It accuses the court of "significant errors" in the decision.

This is the new party set up in 2021 by former Prime Minister (okay officially they have the silly title "First Minister" to make them sound less like a national govt) Alex Salmond, after his falling out with the older SNP who he used to lead, but which conspired to get him jailed on word alone for accusations under the witch-hunting of men. The luck that an ethically conscientious jury did not go along with that, leads to the Alba Party's existence.

This opinion on the Supreme Court is a faulting of a court decision. Alike whether you agree with its content, or disagree with it and counter-fault it, it is an important democratic move to arrive at inability to accept as final what you perceive you can demontrate error in. Hence, is a use of the COURT CHANGE!

Nobody has ever offered any refutation of the reasons why the court change is real, but its ignorement by all the political elite includes by all the nat parties. There is the irony in now needing and exercising something whose existence they have ignored for a generation.

grave for community councils

Community councils - they are defined by law as to represent communities, yet they consist of self-appointed volunteers. Any time they choose to ignore or not engage with an item that protects some local businesses, they misrepresent the community, and liably harming those local businesses by it. Also breaching their constituted function by it.
Such is now the position in South Queensferry, whose community council is choosing not to record or address, in its picture of the local economy, an ethical protection of local funeral businesses. It has been created by an apology obtained for a very nasty anti-social action towards all bereaved people, in a community event at a venue used for funerals. This passed to a funeral director and further minuted in an affected church's AGM. Hence the community council system is proved deficient towards wellbeing of businesses in communities, and owing to businesses to repair this.
A councillor on the real council wrote "there are council officers within the governance department who are responsible for the oversight of community councils". But that office itself, "Under the Standing Orders, it is up to the Chairperson of the Community Council to determine what additional items of business will be included in the agenda of the Community meeting," one person's fief to do that completely unaccountably yet get taken as speaking for a community. This when "3.7: Community councils should be able to demonstrate how they are fulfilling their responsibilities as representative bodies by provision of an annual report and other forms of engagement such as newsletters, surveys, websites and use of social media."
The bureaucratic inaction line contradicts this, and interorets the Standing Orders such as makes them contradictory. Meanwhile, businesses are left without the benefit community committed upholding of an ethical protection for them.

lying about rape definitively provenly exists

The Eleanor Williams case in Cumbria is the most definitive proof that you or Nicola Sturgeon could ever need, that lying about rape exists. Hence that radical feminist dogma that it does not exist has always been a crime against human rights, conspiring to defeat justice. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/03/eleanor-williams-lied-grooming-gang-guilty-perverting-justice Convicted of the most publicly prominent, and on a group scale, with a made up story about a grooming gang, of serial crimes of false rape accusation, where there were clear alibis and evidences against the accusation.

Whence is Rape Crisis's answer?

Conviction on words against other words, whether it is 1 or even 2 persons' words, is never safe, never objective evidence. To allow it is always a most basic violation of human rights, the oldest human right of all.

Usually Tory blogger Effie Deans, completely right about this, warned on Nov 14 of Sturgeon brewing a plan to abolish juries in rape cases, on grounds that they find innocent at a rate not fitting the witch-hunters' dogma. Including, any thinking observer instantly points out, in Alex Salmond's case, where Sturgeon herself had appeared to anticipate conviction and it was going to suit her in party.

Remember too that Sturgeon was stopped, including by defence lawyers' opposition, from an attempt to suspend jury trials more generally at start of the Covid state of emergency in 2020. 20-20 vision on this will alert to and make the same law objections to every move against juries or for convictability on word, and will ever cite Eleanor Williams's case.

yes George, show us what the democratic means is

Because as we are now, devolved, eveyone living in Englandandwales is at liberty to escape this shocking pre-fascist virtual banning of protests and demonstrations there, by moving to Scotland. Compare that to how a Scottish state under racist "civic nationalism" would want to reject even some Scots from making that move. To make citizenship by descent tefusable is to hand over our economic emigrants' families, on a plate, to what George Monbiot has described in the Guardian.

Paragraph from a Guardian article by George Monbiot, 19 Oct 2022, on public apathy towards environmental protest:

《 Writing for the Mail on Sunday, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed: “There is widespread agreement that we need to protect our environment, but democracies reach decisions in a civilised manner.” Oh yes? So what are the democratic means of contesting the government’s decision to award more than 100 new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea? Who gave the energy secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a democratic mandate to break the government’s legal commitments under the Climate Change Act by instructing his officials to extract “every cubic inch of gas”? 》

But George Monbiot himself ignored the court change, after he spoke at a Globalise Resistance conference in Glasgow 2001.

The court change benefits fightability of everything he urgently cares about. Since he has experienced arrest on an environmental protest, intentionally indeed, George Monbiot arrested for defying Extinction Rebellion protest ban - 2019,  he surely has every personal motive to care against the largely media-ignored violation of the human right to presumption of innocence, by the US and Canadian border systems giving innocent arrested people a worse status for entry. The court change helps fightability of that too.

So WHEN MONBIOT URGES YOU TO LISTEN, ON THE ECO EMERGENCY, MAKE IT CONDITIONAL. ONLY LISTEN ON CONDITION THAT HE EXPRESSES SOME LISTENING TO THE COURT CHANGE.

Wee Alba Book citizens

There is now the Wee Alba Book, newly published by the Alba Party, given out at demos. p55

《 " The plans for how to manage Scottish citizenship were set out at the last referendum and still apply. Anyone born in Scotland or born to Scottish parents or grandparents will have an automatic right to citizenship, as will people resident at the time of independence." 》

Claiming this was the position in the last ref is of course spin lies. Salmond himself would not say this position to me as a caller on his last ref phone-in. The White Paper and Yes policy last time, which the SNP has still never budged from, was a racist shocker appealing to the same type of nasty anti-outsider voters as Brexit. It made citizenship by descent refusable, it made citizenships by birth or residence conditional on preexisting British citizenship

Faced with this, during the indyref I lodged EU petition 1448/2014 which is a human rights law resource always there for anyone's use. ECHR human rights are part of EU law. So I cited that article 8, family life, wil oblige the EU to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state and make no dealings with us, unless citizenship by parental descent is unrefusable.

But that history only matters to defending that I + we were right to vote No because of it. Even if Salmond was not saying the right position then, his party is now.

This new book corrects the citizenship policy + states the perfect line on it. But it states it just for the Alba Party - does the Yes movement agree with it? Do the other indy parties agree with it?

Remember it was Ukraine who gave up the Bomb

CND's drooling fantasy that Scottish separation would force British nuclear disarmament has always been recognised as nonsense by every CND-supporting unionist, like George Galloway. Defence of the whole island will always by definition be England's or rump Britain's defence interest: so in practice we would still be under the British nuclear umbrella. So the problem that the nat cult includes a delirious cult faith against nuclear weapons is not a real objection for voters who are not of the peer pressured left's faithful mob and who value keeping nuclear weapons.

That means, by our location we are luckier and not placed the same as Ukraine. But if the CND argument caught in and advanced and changed European defence the way it wants, that would change. So arguing with them about Ukraine is important.

CND aint worked for Ukraine, has it ?!! Had the bomb when it became indy. Bowed to fashionability to give it up in 1994. Now look where it's at. Now we interestedly await to see the invasion defeated by NVDA civil resistance, hope the CND faithful are holding your breaths for it, confidently. The NVDA civil resistance I was always infuriated to hear described with dedicatedly faithful confidence by an 80s schoolmate.

This is the big one for them, this is the Russian-threatened country that unilaterally disarmed ! The European-Ukrainian Nuclear Mistake -Obviously so.

Article 8 really is used

A link to a Europhile site on citizenship legalities with a global citizenship ideal. globalcit.eu/tying-up-historical-loose-ends-the-nationality-and-borders-bill-uk/ This link discusses changes and impacts from Britain's present Nationality and Borders Bill,

whose main purpose is to be nastier and less fair to refugees, but it actually also tidies up some fairness anomalies around the old British Overseas or Dependent Territory citizenships dating from the Imperial era. These anomalies included some racist anomalies around parents' marriages affecting getting those citizenships by descent, and through which parent.

The page mentions a case won using article 8, the European Convention on Human Rights article on family life. The same article as I have cited ever since the White Paper, in the long conflict with the indy movement and SNP for Scottish citizenship by parental descent to be unrefusable. I cited article 8 in my EU petition 1448/2014 during the indyref, to recordedly cite to the EU that article 8 obliges it to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state and have no dealings with us, until our citizenship by parental descent is unrefusable.

How totally vindicated I am now, in an action and a campaign basis that mindless cybernats have often rubbished. Article 8 already is used in court cases over citizenship and to overturn discriminatory citizenship rules. It was the right article to cite and it already used for this purpose. It is well founded.

Rockall imperialism

No momentum or much news is happening now, indywise. It's all flagging. The Herald was right to report, to the Believe in Scotland site's rage, that Yes's recent day of action was a flop, as 1000 of them taking part from 120 local groups is less than 10 in each place. Huddled groups chatting to the folks already well disposed towards them.

Meanwhile the polls are comfortably unionist again. The nat poll surge in the earlier Covid period, when the blame for wobbles around shutdowns and reopenings hit the British govt first, is long over. It already was before the election, as Scottish govt showed it had no cleverer ways to cope and was drawn to follow mostly the same as what British did, with mostly the same swings in and out of shutdowns caused by the same forces.

The National is full of pieces fighting within the Yes movement, over its loss of all momentum feeling and its split on gradualism. The writers and their fragmented grassroots know the picture is desultory.

So to show keeping up effort with their arguments, this Believe in Scotland, the latest brand name for their side, has flyered homes. 2 flyers arrived at my home today, on pensions and on a set of economic stats about us.

Those included: "32% of the UK's landmass and 62% of the offshore maritime area", illustrated by a map. 62% ? That we have the actual majority of maritime area ? What ?

The map has, sticking out of our coastal waters, a long horn of supposed maritime area protruding out to the northwest, just into the open sea. What justifies that ? What is supposed to make it our maritime area ? Simply ROCKALL ! Ain't that ridiculous ? A little rock you can't even land on gives us a great sticky-out extra maritime area to tip the stat, to let us claim the biggest ? A misleading creative stat that is just a ptake, and a nat piece of map-grabbing imperialism: innit !

Will the same people power be done against deportation of Scots?

《 It is increasingly apparent that the UK government is incapable of delivering an immigration system that reflects Scotland's values of compassion and dignity, the Justice Secretary has said.

Humza Yousaf ... 》 So reported the National, on the Glasgow People Power victory that stopped the immigration raid and 2 cruel deportations. All fair credit to the National, it has 3 times published letters from me on the citizenship concern, (11-7-16, 3-12-16, 6-11-20) it is open to it.

There is no compassion and dignity in having, under the name "civic nationalism", a theory of nasty insular disapproval of close diaspora and nationhood by family ties. Not including parental descent in the automatic conferrers of citizenship. Scotland may have values of compassion and dignity, but its indy movement has not towards a whole population group of its own nation.

To them, the Yes movement has made another hostile environment! Throughout the years of pursuing it I have found a shocking quite widespread adherence to theory that there is a moral virtue of rejecting "blood + soil" or "ethnic nationalism" by rejecting descent Scots and diaspora, and saying a nation is only its resident population. So that cruel bigoted exclusion breaking up families in breach of ECHR article 8, is getting defined as anti-racist, and nice inclusion defined as racist! Logically inverting that the whole point of being against racism is to protect inclusion.

All immigration control is global apartheid and will be remembered so in images of evil vans and raids, and in this inspirational people action. So - will the same people action be forthcoming to stop deportations of Scots, from their own country, under the indy citizenship rules that ever since the White Paper, the Yes movenent abd SNP have never budged from planning to have? Do they want to stop that hostile environment too? Will enough media ask the good folks of Glasgow that, to generate an answer?

Union mandate !

3 Unionist parties 1 364 656
2 Nat parties 1 326 194

That is not a ref2 mandate, that is a Union mandate! Unionism won the popular vote. Our voting system of Additional Member may be PR but it's still not 1-2-3- preferential. Split votes on the same side can't be undone by the voters' second preferences. Hence, the side that is more split across parties can win the popular vote yet lose the election in seats.

Sturgeon of course knows those numbers. As popular vote, direct number of votes, determines a ref, we know quite safely tnat she does not want one now. Neither side can afford to risk one, as it does not take professorship for John Curtice to tell us. Sturgeon can't hold the SNP together without a nominal show of confrontation for one, but has just kicked safely imto next year any parliamentary action on it. Most of her followers understand that first she will try to whip up more support by grievancemongering, and see if they can climb out of thus 50-50 divide of the voters.

The Alba Party's failure suggests that nat voters are mostly on their movement's cautious side, not the emotionally raving militants' side. They are not bursting to force a ref2 when they know its result would be a complete gamble. This election was the first time that has been actually tested, between 2 nat parties with different views on speed of action.

Notable that Tommy Sheridan, who since 2017 has made speeches at indy rallies demandihg that ref2 be called unilaterally, joined the Alba Party.

Curious that both the Alba Party, and its Unionist counterpart George Galloway's All For Unity Party, both led apparently from the left, both chose to blow it with progresssive voters in the same socially reactionary way! Both supported the anti-transgender reaction against the self-identification law. Alba did it in a trans-excluding feminist way, you could find it on Youtube, women demanding a biological reality definition of women. All For Unity did it by arguing a family values line like the 1990s Major government, you could find it on its own site and Facebook, including a nasty sinister oppressive line for parents to have power to decide what to allow their kids to know. There was leafers' hubris in doing that. For Salmond, a recent survivor of the unjust witch'hunting of men, it ws surprising and seems illogical to side with the angrier more excluding type of feminism! Exactly the type that sides with the witch-hunting more fervently.

Labour comes out of the election best. Quite unlike the concerns of an unsure position that afflicted it in the Corbyn period, Labour stood on a definite manifesto line against a ref in this term of govt, and held its candidates to that line, with strong pre-election purging of candidates who haf aberrated from it.

way to go abolishing juries, for observing ECHR and qualifying for EU

The last possible way for the SNP govt to convimce anyone they want Scotland to be a progressive EU member complying with human rights, ECHR being part of EU law, is to abolish juries. Let alone, to do it exactly when it looks like done in reaction to not liking what a jury did, not getting it to do the dirty against Salmond.

"PLANS FOR RAPE SUSPECTS IN SCOTLAND TO FACE TRIAL WITHOUT JURY" - Times headline, Mar 18. (Times links are paywalled but the headline suffices,) Plans to put half the population under politically abusable arbitrary authority including in deciding serious crime guilt on one word against another. That is exactly the type of arbitrary authority culture that Salmond said in the recent scandal hearings, makes Scotland's polity not ready for independence.

In reaction to him saying that: instead of moving to fix it they are escalating, militantly making it much worse. Abolishing the safeguard that cleared Salmond's name, and straight after it did. Openly going for the arbitrary judicial authority that could have been used to jail him at plotters' convenience and for a discriminatory reign of terror against men with guilt in accusation, and decided on by one person who will be part of the state's political elite.

Too many keen to buy indy as the new standard lefties' dream, have chosen to forget how the SNP govt attempted, at the pandemic's start a year ago, to abolish jury trials for its duration. Now it clearly hopes for the PC gender prejudice around this area of crime to override the concern that reasoning voters should have: for jury trials and presumption of innocence, and for how it is never safe to take just conflicting words, one or several against another, as evidence of guilt. Evidence is measurable verifiable facts. Competing words never are that.

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guilt by quack theory

SOMEONE POSTING ON THE STURGEON/SALMOND SCANDAL HEARINGS - I have a background in understanding and teaching non-verbal communication having studied it at length, and delivered workshops and training to a multitude of groups including trainee psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, police officers and social workers.

ME - As a civil liberty concern towards this idea of "teaching non-verbal communication" from involuntary mannerisms not intended to be communication at all. - Post-traumatic stress and autism are both things that can make innocent folks show the same nerves or blanked emotion, as hasty or high-handed police/psychiatrists/teachers like to interpret as showing guilt.

Does what you are teaching incorporate that fact and avoidance of that danger? It can only be moral if it does.

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