to revoke article 50 is the least gamble

British govt is at crisis point of having its hands tied by parliament against the exact thing it most wants to do. But will there turn out to be any point to it? For yet another EU extension is refusable, a danger that the Benn law does not deal with, + France's President Macron is already talking of refusing it. It was he who made the present extension shorter than the rest of the EU intended to make it. IT WOULD BE LESS OF A GAMBLE TO REVOKE ARTICLE 50, AND WE HAVE REACHED A POINT WHERE IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY DEMOCRATIC TOO.

We have never yet had a 3-way referendum, + our first will inevitably be beset by claims not to understand the process, encouraged by those who don't think it will go their way. It would have to be by the AV system itself defeated in a now-forgotten ref in 2011, the Tories won't agree to that, or else it could fail to produce a majority, fatal if its purpose is to resolve a deadlock !

To have a 2-way ref, you need to have a Leave option to offer in it, that the Leavers agree represents them, is not a robbery of their true position, + is fit for them to enact if it wins. There is none !

The Leavers were robbed by their own side, the ambiguity it pulled to hold itself together. For some Leavers only leaving with a deal was acceptable and they promised so in their campaign. For others only leaving with no deal was acceptable, now the Brexit Party's position: they avoided that in the campaign but have taken the Leave win as grounds to change the goalposts to that harder position. Both those camps within the Brexit movement hoped + gambled that winning a vote just for the principle called Leave should then let their camp prevail as the true form of Leave supported by reason.

That has not happened, the 2 camps are strong enough on their view of true Leave to fight each other + show that there is are actually majority feelings, national and parliamentary, against each camp. The majority consists of: the other Leave camp's purists + the Remainers. No dtheorists + debaters of referendums ever guessed such a Gordian knot. That a ref would be won for the principle of a step, offered in a papered-over alliance of 2 versions mutually unacceptable to enough of each other's supporters to make majorities against enacting either of them !

Hence it is perfectly democratic to revoke A50 until the Leavers sort that out or holdability of a 3-way ref gets sorted out. It's also less of a gamble to do this than go for either a ref or an extension request which Macron is already talking of refusing. Remainers, handed the chance of a legitimate default victory by the Leavers' divided positions, could still blow it + lose by similar division on the rightness + electoral daringness of revoking A50.

I want some more

Margo Macdonald and Patrick Harvie are wrong. It's like we are Oliver Twist and they are taking away our second helping, our second question.

Their motives against the second question are openly to increase the stakes for their preferred side, Yes, on the first question, which they think will make them more likely to win. That they think so is only a fallacy of true faith nationalism, it is an unproven act of faith and the polls make it look just as likely their tactics will backfire. The voters are already obviously growingly unsure towards Yes, so they may feel even more unsure if they know that the Yes side is holding them to ransom to vote Yes by depriving them of a second question. they may then vote No. They may be put off Yes by this picture of the forces behind it.

The recent experience of the AV referendum showed how easily a doubt about the character of the proposed change will make voters feel safer to run back into their caves to the devil they know and vote No. Holding voters to ransom to reject the option that you think they are worst off with did not work for Labour in its hard left controlled period in the 1980s, when twice the hard left believed voters would be forced to vote for hard left policies when the alternative was Thatcher, and on a British scale at least, they voted for Thatcher.

A second question is fairer to voters. It gives us a more complete say, a complete range of options. Suspect anyone who takes it away.

Crikey Cruddas ! He said it.

The referendum is all over now, innit? Who is ever going to vote No after hearing the leak of what Cruddas said, that they don't really want the Union at all. Cruddas of the expensive Prime Ministerial dinners, and who gave a £1 million to the No to alternative vote campaign last year, I mean that was soooooooooooo soddy - he is who the folks who voted No trusted. It's no problem to him if Scotland separates, and we can keep voting with PR too.

"we as a party have to be seen to be fighting to keep the Union together, even if we don’t agree with it, because, at the end of it all, if the Scots say ‘we’re out of here’ and they want to go independent, we can turn around and say it’s not what we wanted, it’s not what we campaigned for, you can’t have this, you can’t have that, and you can get on with it.”

Yet we still have to sustain a serious threat to vote No if the SNP's position is too neglecting of the diaspora or plays to any racist agendas. Though if they play to the same ones as the Tories do, e.g. by not joining Schengen, that can't tip your vote either way.

After Cruddas saying this, it would be clanging against the SNP down through history if by not being seen to cater for the diaspora they blow winning secession.

NB the Scotsman article linked to is wrong to repeat that scare that without us the Tories would have a permanent majority Presumably we are meant to think we would be to blame for doing that to the English poor if we secede. As shown here, without us Labour still wins a majority all its last 3 wins and all its wins where it had a majority of more than a few seats.

What if the campaign is delegitimised after the result ?

When voting on a break between countries, that is too permanent and serious to expect you can undo the result if it loses its legitimacy at a later time because one side's campaign gets shown to have majored on a lie.

"* That if, either during polling hours or after them, the winning side lets it be known, either voluntarily or by an admission under questioning, that one of the factual claims made in their campaign, against the other side's position, had been false, then the result should not stand as valid. "
is what I lobbied to my MSPs after the AV referendum. It is vital for the independence one. Should we choose either way on it, as a result of factual claims made by the winning side that later get proved to be lies? How clear will Scotland's status be then, and how happy will you be with it?

Then make sure this proposed rule gets adopted. yes it reopens the legitimacy of the AV result too. Here is today's news from the Press Complaints Commission, from the AV campaign:

www.pcc.org.uk/case/resolved.html?article=NzIyMQ%3D%3D the Daily Mail
www.pcc.org.uk/case/resolved.html?article=NzIyMg%3D%3D the Sun
had both reported that an organisation supporting the Yes campaign would profit from selling voting machines if they won. Yet the AV proposal never required voting machines. 8 weeks after the result it influenced, this report is now found to have been not true. i.e.
stephensliberaljournal.blogspot.com/2011/06/and-another-thingpcc-says-chancellor.html - and another thing...PCC says the Chancellor lied for #No2AV

I think Andy May who posted this here on another Lib Dem blog www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-unfair-and-unbalanced-the-scandal-of-print-media-referendum-coverage-24623.html, wants to spread the message and will be happy to have this quoted:
" Let’s just think about the context in which this fallacious claim was printed:

• The Chancellor of the Exchequer stands up and makes false claims designed to damage the credibility of the Yes campaign at a point in mid-April when the campaigns were running neck and neck in the polls.
• 2 newspapers with a combined daily circulation of 6 million reprint these controversial claims several days before the postal vote ballots drop and give no right of reply to the organisation involved.
• A central plank of the No2AV campaign was the £250 million claim which, as David Blunkett later admitted, was also made up. The Sun and Mail took the lie one stage further, making it appear that not only did AV cost the taxpayer large sums of money but that the Yes campaigners were being made rich out of it. All totally false.
• Polling day is May 5 yet the Press Complaints Commission takes nearly 2 months to rule against the papers despite the impact of their false claims potentially affecting the referendum vote of millions of people.
• Despite the original prominence of the stories on page 2 of the sun and the front page of the Mail, 2 short letters are the only required retraction.

This case and plenty of others like it in the referendum and the last general election highlight a huge imbalance in election media coverage between broadcast, which has strict balance guidelines and print which has no balance guidelines and near impunity when it comes to what they can print. Not only can print journalists take an angle on a story and decide whether or not the target individual or organisation has a right to reply, they can get away with repeating false or dubious claims safe in the knowledge the PCC will do little or nothing about it.

The PCC is toothless, stuffed full of self interested journalists and so weak it is unable to stop unscrupulous party hacks and biased journalists and editors misleading their readership on serious political issues.

What does this example actually demonstrate? That there was collusion between press and politicians to repeatedly mislead the public over a crucial constitutional issue to secure their own power base through illegitimate means. "

Both sides' plans for our next referendum will need to sound less corrupt than this.

SNP support AV, now we know

It has taken right to the last week for there to be a clear message from Salmond that the SNP, rather than just some voices within it, back Alternative Vote.

Everyone should watch Dan Snow's video on AV and campaign broadcast.

SNP folks who intend to spoil their papers in order to make a point about wanting an independence referendum, will make life harder for their own party and for getting the referendum they want, as well as making us less able to stand up to British governments so long as we are in the Union, however long that may be. There is obviously no point doing that. They need to vote Yes, as we all do.

Instead of making capital out of the British government's decision to hold the referendum clashing with our election, the SNP should have joined with the Greens and SSP, as well as the unionist parties concerned, in being keen to endorse a Yes vote to AV sooner. Like, in time for the postal voters.

flyer, a photo by megaknee on Flickr.

minging towards the AV referendum

Given the fact that we are in Britain and nobody can forsee when we might leave it, our access to accountability and half-decent treatment by decision makers is affected by the Alternative Vote referendum, open endedly into the future. The SNP has always, always except 1974, been disappointed with its results in British elections, and been a squeezed smaller party, so it has an obvious interest in AV.

So it is completely stupid that SNP flyers are ignoring the referendum. After urging you for their vote, they just mention, there is a third ballot paper which is on the British election system this has nothing to do with the Scottish election. Not a word about voting Yes, just this has nothing to do with the Scottish election. Just contemptuous.

That does not show caring about your interests, for all of the unknown future duration of the Union. There is no gain to the independence campaign made by doing this, nothing would be lost to it by supporting a Yes vote in this other referendum. They are just being emotional and minging because it is a British issue.

The censored referendum this blog was concerned with was the independence referendum: but it is worth mentioning that the AV referendum is also effectively censored, in the balance of its reach to households all over Britain. No provision has been made for the Yes campaign to get literature sent to every household, and that is not happening, it is being left to volunteer leafletters to reach where they can, while the No campaign has been amply funded by the Conservatives to do a national mailshot of a booklet to every household. This is not parity, and it will pose a challengeability to how the referendum has been conducted. It breaks the precedent of the EU referendum in 1975, when both the Yes and No campaigns were resourced to mailshot a booklet to every household.

As one of the volunteer leafletters, I have had to make a complaint to the NHS in Fife, [update: who have made a proper check and now confirmed these nurses were not NHS] against a nurse who was arriving at a house to do a home visit at the same time as I reached it in my leafletting, and who put on authoritarian airs trying to stop me leaving a leaflet, entirely on her own without the householder knowing let alone authorising it. The Yes campaign is up against illegal interference like that, to No campaign is not.

the other referendum

This blog is about responses to the consultation on the independence referendum, getting suppressed from the public record.

That referendum is the one that never happened, which the SNP are asking for a second go at making happen. At least today someone from the SNP attended the Yes campaign launch, in Glasgow, for the other referendum, Alternative Vote. it was only one ex-MP from them, John Mason, not much of a showing. The SNP as a whole seems to be no more united than Labour towards this issue and is giving the campaign a lot less effort. Seems they prefer to make an issue of the polling date clashing with the Scottish election, than over the outcome, though they are a party with a fairness interest in a Yes win too. They have always got squeezed in British elections.