within 3 days of losing they rewrite the rules

Referendums are part of our constitution for any change in the governing system big enough to be a constitutional change. That has been well established since the 90s, since the present post-Thatcher wave of constitutional reform got going - but the precedent's establishing can be traced back to the first EU referendum in 1975. For which Tony Benn, though his side lost that vote, was credited with adding referendums to our constitution.

3 days after losing this referendum, Salmond and Sillars are talking of dropping the need to have one, and considering an election win for pro-indy parties in 2016 to establish secession on its own. No longer want to have to hold a referendum after the experience of losing this one.

It is neither legal to declare UDI, nor constitutional to do it only 20 months after losing a referendum. If they actually do this, the population of Scotland will be put in a civil war type dilemma between which state to hold is legit here and to affiliate to. Will we end up like Cyprus with populations fleeing to either side of a green wall or getting trapped in a rogue state against their will with loss of international rights?

To suddenly write of such prospects evokes disbelief in peaceful familiar Britain - so remember nobody imagined the Northern Ireland troubles before they slipped into them very quickly. We have lived through exceptional days of constitutional instability recently and now we have 20 months' notice to take a position on the rights and wrongs of ref losers announcing a unilateral constitutional change abolishing what they lost only 3 days after they lost it. This is getting mad. This is not a democratic movement this is getting ever more fanatical on the tide of mob emotion they stirred up. As the dream falls from their hands, they clutch out after it.

www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/salmond-we-don-t-need-referendum-for-independence-1-3548270
www.express.co.uk/news/uk/513637/Salmond-s-plan-for-indy-coup-as-he-claims-independence-possible-without-new-poll?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daily-express-uk-news+(Daily+Express+%3A%3A+UK+Feed)

Trust it to be Sillars, the most extreme and racist of the leading nat voices, the same one as made that threat against No-voting businessfolks before the poll. That they lost, by a bigger margin than the polls had said, indicating there was a shy No's effect or a drawing back from the brink like in Quebec, was a morally great statement for democracy against intimidation and peer pressure. Long to be commemorated.

Never again, "for at least a generation", will voting SNP feel like a normal party choice. From now on it will be a vote for the intimidatory movement who frightened the country out of putting "No" posters in their windows then who began hunting for ways round democracy within 3 days after they lost.

Britain has clear notice of the nats' ravings, anyway. 20 months to prevent an illegal civil rebellion and a drift into violent troubles.

"Alex Salmond lost. It is not for him to try to overthrow the will of the Scottish people in some sort of coup." - Johann Lamont

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.

nationalists continuing the Clearances

NATIONALISTS CONTINUING THE CLEARANCES !! Yes, you read that right.

Before campaign details and policy crystallised, the Yes position offered great possibilities of helping the diaspora and producing a more liberal regime over citizenship than the British one. That is all utterly extinguished now. In the time since the White Paper came out, the Yes campaign has turned very ugly and sinister. It seems to be pandering to the racist vote now popular in all British politics, and to an anti-outsider racist strand in the SNP's support. It is betraying and backstabbing the Scottish diaspora, in ways that actually form a continuance of the clearances, dividing families and taking Scots' country away from them.

Have already mentioned here how the latest circulated Yes paper described the terms of automatic Scottish citizenship as not including the children of exile, the Scots born in what we now call "rUK" (rest of Britain) if they can't move home before indy day to qualify for citizenship by the absurd arbitrariness of living here on that one day. Already mentioned that neither they nor any of the Yes supporting parties have answered enquiries about it, about interpretation of the provision for "may register for citizenship."

Now something has happened that clinches a turn to a sinister appeal to outsider hate on the Yes side. An SNP MP has actually denied that the folks at stake in this issue are Scottish. It was in this Sunday Post story yesterday.

ON WHAT ENTIRE BASIS, SQUARED WITH THIS, ARE THE SNP PLANNING TO HOLD A HOMECOMING FESTIVAL ????? This Angus Macneil, MP for the Outer Hebrides, may be remembered in history as the exploder of every decent opportunity this referendum could ever have been and its association instead with dividing families, with hate between siblings, with dividing Scot against Scot, with tearing a whole section of the nation out of it, absolutely the stuff of the clearances and racial persecution.

In the Yes campaign's absurd party of wishful thinking, saying just choose not to believe anything that gets in our way, they are all wrong and bluffing, just believe whatever Salmond wants to be true, they might answer this point by claiming that the pledge for the common travel area and an open English border means that foul play upon the Scottish diaspora does not matter. this is of course convenient wishful thinking and wrong. The EU common travel area might cease to include either country, either one, we know there are uncertain futures around that attaching to voting either way. rUK might put a closed border on, it has said so, it owes nothing to make Salmond's inconsistent promise, to belong to the British common travel area yet have an independent border policy, work. So exclusion from citizenship can translate into exclusion from living here.

So until he and the Yes campaign pledge automatic right citizenship for the children of exile without our new state having any power even in theory to say no to any of them as citizens, and they have been totally reluctant to do that as yet, many many Scottish families with cross border links now know that the practical and moral position has been totally swung to voting No. Done actually by nationalists' own attitudes to thwe world community of Scots.

What a way to run a railroad to London

Oh no they don't mean anything they say, they mean what I want them to say. Whatever I want it to be that they said, of course really they said it, just TRUUUST me and take it from me, you don't need to actually listen to their words saying the opposite.

You can't go through life communicating like that. It's unconvincing and silly. it's wishful thinking. I don't like what someone said so really they meant the opposite, really they meant what I wanted them to say - consider how that works out - no more toys means more toys, no consent to sex means consent to sex, we voted Yes but it means No. IT DOESN'T WORK. Would you buy a used car on that basis?

The referendum has become a shambles and tragedy. Alex Salmond, who called it, has determined on the following tragicomic place in history. He will go right up to poll asking you to vote for a statement of faith that his silly unionist idea that contradicts independence, currency union with the country you are leaving, you can ignore the No clearly given to by the entire political class of Britain and believe what the cheery salesman wants them to say. He's not going to railroad them.

This is the Yes campaign that is so caring about our ordinary lives it has not answered about the issue in the last post, the citizenship of Scottish exiles who can't return before indy day. On the Facebook Yes pages you can read yeards and yards of emotionalism about a great natiomnal moment to seize.

To continue the Clearances' logic by the moral obscenity of taking automatic citizenship away from some Scots, to make indy a way of shutting our door in some of our own people's faces, to want to tie us to the austerity programme through servitude to the Bank of England without a say over it, to call for an extra year of Tory government instead of the next British election on time during the indy process, to shut his eyes and make this ridiculous spivvy assertion that we can take his word that 3 parties don't really mean they won't do what he wants, and what he wants is unionist anyway.... WHAT WAY IS THIS TO RUN A YES CAMPAIGN?? A unionist, implausible, ludicrous, people betraying, spivvy way. AAAAAAAAAAH. If there was any national opportunity moment it's this SNP leadership who threw it away.

The sensible non-SNP wings of the Yes campaign who never wanted a currency union now need to split with Salmond and his train crash of nonsense.

trust a journalist?

Joyce Macmillan is no star of positivity in referendums. It was me whose letter against her chairing of the Edinburgh launch of the Yes-Yes campaign in 1997 was published headed "Worse than Westminster?" in Charter 88's journal Citizens, an edition from early 1998. Frustrating it is no longer online to link to, it was once, since Charter merged into Unlock Democracy. She slapped down speakers who made any point from their personal life experience in support of the campaign and proposing the campaign could use their point. She showed she just wanted it to be an elite class's safe controlled campaign pushing out anything so unpredictable as real life.

Already before this, at a day event by Oxfam in 1996 that she chaired, when I raised the constitutional case against rent and mortgages she chose not to make the 2 politicians beside her (Menzies Campbell and George Foulkes) respond to it on grounds that "I don't think anyone know what you're talking about" without making any opening for me to explain in full where it comes from so that she would know what I was talking about, and without expressing any concern that her newspaper colleagues had not made it known to her.

Within this year she was writing in her column that a No win is inevitable and getting cornered by electoral luck into holding the referendum at all was tragic for the SNP. But last night she was on Newsnight, with a totally changed position, saying the No campaign is too negative about the country's virtues and predicting that if it continues their support will evaporate, i.e. a Yes win. This from a position of declaring as Yes-inclined now herself.

This is selective. It should follow equally that Yes support will evaporate if that campaign continues not taking voters seriously:

• by having policies that require the agreement of some party outside our new state, Britain or the EU, that has already said it won't agree.
• and By spivvily not responding to enquiries for clear positions on items like the citizenship item raised here already.

If we are just faced with 2 spivvy campaigns both messing us around and not addressing details seriously, the winning side may be the side of not voting at all.

twin dilemma

A Better Together paper just came through my door, a lot of its content over several pages focused on British overlapping feelings of nationhood. It's good that after the White Paper they are seeing a chance to force the campaign's emotive level to start focusing more on that question. Among all the to and fro claims about economics there had seemed a risk of both sides slipping past us the due focus on this basic fairness question of making sure you get to belong to your own home. With the Yes side being slippery and spivvy on the issue, will it take the No side's pressure to make them address it more properly?

But will voters notice how selective the No side is being? They mention a lot about how many folks in the British countries are from each other's country. They select to mention nothing at all of the same about EU countries - when exactly the same arguments apply to them.

They feature a Scottish father who was born in exile with a family with a multiplicity of births, and they quote figures for how many folks in Scotland were born in the rest of Britain and vice versa. But this statistic is misleading, if you are a Scot who was born in the rest of Britain there is every good chance you disliked your exile and are pleased to be home, it does not make you necessarily want to keep the Union at all. Only if there is a weakness on the Yes side here, only if there are enough holes in their citizenship policy to cause there to be any exiles whose return to Scotland independence could make harder and any less of an automatic right, should this No argument have any effect. At present, after the shambles of the White Paper contradicting itself on citzenship and being full of gobbledygook about forbears and where they lived on independence day and its unclairty on where to deem thast they would have resided if they had not died, the Yes side is choosing unecessarily to be weak enough on this issue to constitute a betrayal of Scottish history, and deserves to have the No side attack on this. But our EU citizen residents don't deserve to be put in more danger, by it, of right wing British nationalism turning on them after Scotland fails to vote itself out of that process.

They feature a family with twins born on each side of the border because of the circumstances when the mother's labour began during as journey. It's an excellent case study against birthplace racism, the evil of all bigots who would deem these twins to belong to different countries if they don't personally identify so. It's morally right that it should turn anyone against loopholes in the citizenship policies, on both sides. But what is the No side's answer to the case, you could have just as easily, of twins born one in Britain one across the Channel? Do they agree with their own argument's implication that we should not vote to belong to a country that leaves the EU in an ugly mood of nationalist racism?

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.

While Peru becomes court change, what says the Scottish govt about it for a Scot abroad?

Gordon Wilson had been saying the Yes campaign is soulless, again. It's the result of it not wanting to say anything new and outside the carefully filtered range of ideas that the political class comfortably tolerates for itself. That is what they care more strongly about than actual statehood. No new content, no acknowledging that the court change exists, no inspiration to reopen the homeland to all the diaspora, means no inspired public. That will be their place in history, they created this moment and just offered same-old.

At this moment, silence on the court change means silence towards a Scot in trouble abroad, and towards all the parents worried for their own young adults travelling to the same places. Ibiza belongs to Spain, and like us, Spain belongs to the Council of Europe, whose member countries are where the court change began. The first to be made court change by the item of corrupted practice by the European Court of Human Rights, in making a factually impossible decision and calling it final, that created the court change in 1999.Full write-up explaining the court change has long been on this blog, here It abolishes final decisions, which makes all court decisions open endedly faultable on their reasoning, including for being corrupted. So the court change applies to the present case of Melissa Reid from Scotland and Michaella McCollum.

They have a pressing humanitarian need for it to become publicly known, so that it can be used to actually scrutinise all worries over the handling of their case and be used to challenge any bad standards in it. But are our Scottish government and Yes campaign going to do this? Or our British government and No campaign, either? Many folks before them have had a pressing humanitarian need too, but have not had the court change publicised for them: including shockingly many asylum deportees from Britain, and including the folks deported to the US a year ago labelled as terror suspects after a deficient process at the ECHR.

Reid and McCollum's case extends the court change to another country, Peru. It may be our media's fault that I had never before found a case that extended it to Peru, which has been a very late reached country, and that in fact there is a much earlier case that does it: but until we discover that, at least their case does it and the people of Peru now have claim that the court change applies in their country. When a legal case overlaps between a country that has the court change and another country, the court change causes the case's content to be open endedly faultable and not final. This forces each country involved in the case to deal with open endedness. So for those countries that were not yet court change until the case happened, open ended non-final case content, hence case outcome too, is created in their legal system. THEY BECOME COURT CHANGE TOO. It is a brilliant opportunity that this lets folks all over the world help each other to get a massive advance of democracy in their countries. It just needs to be widely enough realised.

Because Reid and Connolly's case overlaps between Spain, which is court change, and Peru, it makes Peru court change too.

Be part of silly

Gordon Bennett. Just blimey and gasps. When is SNP unionism ever going to stop?

The lagging polls show folks already need more imaginative inspiring motivating to vote Yes than they are getting. The campaign has already made itself sound silly with the whole palaver of we are going to keep a currency union with the country seceded from, on demand and even though they say they won't agree to it. The strongest reason the Yes folks have held onto, have not toed the British line on, have kept rightly telling us is where there could be a big difference to be gained from going our own way, has been on social conscience standards of welfare and escape from the British austerity agenda.

The reason why real folks in Scotland have to continue to suffer trashed disability benefits, unemployment sanctions lasting 3 years, the bedroom tax, and pension worries, for over a year to come, has always been so that we will be convinced to vote against continuing to suffer them. (Hasn't it?)

And now, when we are already in the middle of a mood of hollow scepticism that independence is really intended to mean it at all - Sturgeon turns round and accepts a naff proposal, FROM HER GOVERNMENT'S OWN ADVISORY GROUP EVEN, that we should stay in a union of welfare systems with Tory Britain for a so-called "transitional period" whose length is not even defined, that is open ended. A Guardian story places it at at least to 2019 !!! where it far exceeds the Cameron government's full term so still inflicts its whole austerity programme on us. Through it, we would still get the social wrongs that most practically of all we are being asked to vote against still getting.

Silly silly silly. Who conceivably has been increased in belief in the whole Yes offer by this? In the Scottish National Party having the confidence to separate our state from the British state, which is supposed to be the whole point innit? "Be part of better", they told us. The Silly No Party, who just want to throw every last strand of our statehood away!!

See, folks might conclude this is a handy way for the SNP to make sure they can keep us neocon, the same as every major party wants to do. Just the same as Labour about this. So what do the other Yes supporting parties have to say? Are they going to be part of silly?

the court change reaches Central Africa

Another update on the court change.

The Central African Republic accuses Chad of an intervention a role in causing a coup there. Because that is a cross border legal dispute that overlaps between Chad and the CAR, and because the court change is already claimable by the people of Chad, this is all it takes to establish that the court change now applies to the CAR too. This is how easily folks all over the world can help each other to get the court change.

Yes this does have something abstractly to do with Scotland: the question why don't we fear independence leading to a political culture where coups can happen? if that is what happened when new states were created in Africa without a bedded in deterrent balance of estates of power to fix democracy in place. It has to do with interdependence, with all Europe's multi-country institutions and our interests tied in to them, that have worked for all the countries to keep each other democratic. Made democracy stick in Germany, where it had only ever had one terribly economically flopped 13 year period of democracy before its present state was set up in 1949, and that was all East Germany had ever had before 1990. Made it stick in Greece which had a coup as recently as 1967, in Spain which had a coup attempt as recently as 1981, with no more such events since they have been in the EU. Slovakia went in an authoritarian direction after its independence in 1993 and was pulled back again when it was pulled into having interests in joining the EU in 2004.

On neither side of our referendum is the picture comfortable or safe. We are being asked to be all light heartedly feelgood over our future at a time of the most heightened starkness since the European institutions have been around that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We are being asked to vote Yes by a Scottish government capable of introducing a charge for criminal defence even when it confirms your innocence, we are being asked to vote No by a British government talking of withdrawal from the whole European Convention on Human Rights. It's the way the British level political culture has swung, into racism and manipulated anti-European feeling calculated to make society more authoritarian, that is by far the more dangerous and worth avoiding course at present. The more of a referendum issue can be made out of the contrast, and out of Scotland intending to stay anchored to structures of interdependence that make it difficult for countries to dump democracy, the more the Yes side can be grilled on the criminal defence costs policy's total contradiction of the best looking reason at present for voting Yes.

Explain why don't we have to get out to stay in?

Tony Blair today says independence is bad for the same reasons as leaving the EU is bad. Cutting ourselves off into a small bubble instead of being cushioned by belonging to a bigger whole in an era when economics works on the big scale. Okay, follow his own reasoning?

What happens in the event that Britain chooses not to listen to him and continues its anti-EU drift that has so swiftly accelerated to such a serious scale that nobody expected. We will see Britain heading for the separatist choice, and largely for racist reasons that will make it a very ugly scenario for many of our continental friends who live here and have important places in our lives. Already it includes right wing moves against the principle of human rights. Then exactly in order to choose against separation we would have to choose to separate from Britain. In order to follow Blair's advice on the EU and stay in that European bigger whole, we would have to leave the British bigger whole, so as not to be included in its leaving of the EU?

With the 2 decisions forced on us in the wrong order, the Scottish decisison happening before the British EU decisison and not informed by its result but forced to gamble on what it will be, won't it be a safer way of following Blair's own reasoning that we separate from Britain for fear of it separating from Europe, and we seize on the support of figures like Blair for the desirability of not shrinking the EU, to use in fighting our way back into it if we get the accession problems the unionists are having us threatened with? Blair obviously would not say it was bad that smaller countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, separated out from the former bigger unions of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, and have joined the bigger EU instead contributing to its expansion, before it was possible for them to bring the whole of the unions they left into the EU. Scotland will be in exactly the same moral position if we buck a very nastily anti-democratic swing to Euro-hate by Britain.

This surely is the only really strong argument the Yes side can use to climb out of the hole the SNP's secret economic nerves have put them in, also today! It means being strong on human rights to differentiate from, and to raise clear alarm against, the way England is turning. But that will only work if it overturns the SNP's own eagerness to attack human rights arm in arm with the Tories, if the Yes side disown and cease to be burdened by Macaskill making you pay for a court defence when charged with a crime. Otherwise, being part of big or small wholes ain't what it's about at all. Survival of free society and getting out of the hole that both sides at once have thrown our civil liberties into, will be the primary item to vote on.

Safe in whose hands?

We may be driven to independence no matter how badly the SNP treats us in the process and hushes up ordinary people's unrecognised needs from getting heard in the Yes campaign or in the published contributions to its consultations. As Sturgeon is now well saying, and she is onto something, we may need to escape from belonging to Britain and become a place of refuge for the fair minded English too, as English politics swings further to the right than has been possible in the human rights era.

Today the Mail On Sunday claims an anti-European campaign success as it reports an apparent Tory policy pledge by Theresa May to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

An illegal obstruction of justice will be committed, and widely witnessed, BY HUMAN RIGHTS' SUPPORTERS AND DEFENDERS !!! - mark that !!! - if they let a leaving of the convention happen without exposing and publicising the court change.

Thanks to the court change, there is open ended non-final court case content in both Scottish and English law. As that open ended case content will always be there, it is irreversible. So the court change itself is an irreversible progressive advance in liberty. Britain was one of the Convention member countries brought under the court change when European Court of Human Rights case 41597/98 brought the court change into existence, in 1999. So originally it was because we belong to the Convention that we got the court change. But BECAUSE THE COURT CHANGE IS IRREVERSIBLE, BECAUSE OPEN ENDED NON-FINAL CASE CONTENT STAYS IN OUR LEGAL SYSTEMS NOW IT IS THERE, WE WILL NOT LOSE THE COURT CHANGE IF WE LEAVE ECHR.

The court change will still exist and it may be our only barrier to the social repressions and danger to democracy that would follow leaving the Convention and would ride on any political current capable of leaving the Convention.

All progressives now contemplate the blood you can anticipate will be on your hands unless you now get off the fence and directly committally acknowledge on open record that the court change is there and needs to be used.

Spoiler

2018 they say today is when Cameron would hold a British EU referendum.

Is that 5 years of relief or of intolerable uncertainty for our European friends here?

It is a total spoiler for the Scottish referendum, where to make an informed vote we need to know the EU vote's result first. Having them the wrong way round makes the Scottish voter a gamble, voting either way. With voting Yes the gamble is how much trouble Spain can make for us in the EU, it is with voting No that the gamble is worse: which way will Britain then go? Perhaps expecting that a No vote is more popular at present, it will manipulate us, to blunder into ending up going with a British nasty tabloid racist vote to leave the EU, instead of having the chance not to make that choice.

die of debate

According to the Sunday Herald's last front page, reckless new workfare rules for disability/sickness benefits are going to cause a lot of health damage from pushing folks into unsuitable placements they can't cope with. This comes from the British end, under whose powers the welfare system still rests. The Yes campaign will say this is a good humanitarian reason to leave Britain. Become a state where both major parties are progressive, "no more Tory governments" as had been on the SSP's Yes voting posters in Edinburgh.

But look at the independence timetable. It is actually longer than the British government's term, Salmond the reluctant seceder will take until 2016!! to actually do it. Clinging to every crumb he can on Britain's table. All this suffering will still happen while we are still waiting.

Oh but me must have a good long debate. So if folks die under pushing around by the benefits system and Atos, under 3 1/2 years of us still subject to this new system, they die to give us something to debate, do they?

the nat clearances?

The long term Nat maverick Jim Sillars who finds the SNP totalitarian, and their former leader Anti-Gay Gordon, now want us to leave the EU. In the wake of Salmond's mess up of the Scottish EU membership issue and doubt, they have jumped on the same Euro-angry bandwagon as the British right wing and tabloids.

This when the sudden mushrooming to seriousness of a chance of Britain leaving the EU had become the strongest looking reason for voting for independence. Instead the contagion has spread to both sides. That is bandwagons among the political class for you.

How do they expect our European friends and guests, living here and playing a welcome and often major role in many of our lives, to feel safe? Anti-EU voices on both sides need to be challenged to clarify what they intend for the future of EU citizens living here. The obvious fear is of a new clearance, a mass expulsion from the country of people who are friends or workers with real lives intertwined with ours. Thanks to Sillars and Wilson the question now exists against both sides. Before, it was a question for the No side. Salmond too, who you have noticed never clashes with the tabloid racist vote, should have made clear that our friends can stay here if our EU membership is interrupted. Pandering to the British tabloid consensus against Schengen in a way that is absurd for a movement to separate from the country where that nasty consensus is strongly rooted, neither has he ever touched the option of joining Schengen even from outside the EU, like Norway and Iceland and Switzerland. That would secure our friends here. Would Spain veto that too? Even if it would, it is right to propose the option and put Spain under an isolated pressure on the issue.

Both sides, tell us our friends are safe. Otherwise, the referendum will be like poker! We are not informed enough on both futures if we don't know what the EU membership outcome will be with either of them. That is why we fairly need any voting on the EU to be done before on independence. But it won't be, neither side is offering to do it that way round. What a spiral. Sillars and Gordon have said vote on the EU after a win for independence. No, we need to already know what our own decision is on whether we would be in the EU before we can vote for our own state in the first place.

EU mucked up

Nobody needs telling that Salmond has not had a happy day in the newspapers. Or in his party. Blink and savour having a majority government while it lasts, it may be over any minute.

Just when the SNP's years of tabloid law and order nastiness towards the young seemed to be starting to thaw, as he pledged a bill to make the voting age 16 properly. How will all that young bashing, the tightening up on pubs and their under-18 licensing, look in hindsight if the same party that did it makes some breathtakingly ironically British history by turning out to drive votes at 16 into place across all Britain's elections? After the half generation of nasty reluctance and faffing there has been by the British major parties, continuing not to do it, all through the new era of reform opportunities since Thatcherism ended in 1997?

Just when Salmond seemed to start turning a bit nicer to the young again, now that he needs their votes, he had to go and spoil his whole enterprise by the sneakiness over our continued EU membership, where the SNP has now been tripped up. To try to be popular he persisted in saying he would go along with the existing British system's narky old racist line of not joining Schengen. If we had to rejoin the EU as a new member we might have to join Schengen: GOOD - I want to join Schengen. So does any rational and humane person who fears the losability of travel documents and finds covering the world in apartheid passport barriers an obstacle to common sense life. Though Schengen only exists because the EU does, you can even belong to Schengen without belonging to the EU, like Norway, which is worth knowing if our membership gets interrupted.

It was not worth telling fibs and blowing trust for the whole Yes campaign when it was falling behind in support already, to get out of joining Schengen and pander to Tory passport racism. That will be a mortifying mortal failing for the Yes campaign to be remembered with in history.

OCT 26: Newsnet Scotland here has posted a story that was in the Herald, of the European Commission Vice-President saying EU citizenship once given can't be taken away. Yes supporters on Facebook can criticise the BBC for not majoring on this story, but they are seizing on it too eagerly, it does not establish Scotland would be in the EU, only that we would not lose our citizenship for travelling to the EU.

Alex goes south

The Olympic Games are a conceptual absurdity. Their modern revival was supposed to be a promoter of peace, and that is what the symbol with the interlocking rings is supposed to show. Yet nothing is less peaceful to raw hurting human egos, than competition, victory, defeat. That is what competitive games do to people, and they showcase nations' posturing pride which goes back to possessive or territorial animals' aggressive displays to each other.

We hear Alex Salmond was there. Why the hell? It was a feast of unionist propaganda, Britain telling its self-promotional story. Like, look how wonderful we are for creating the NHS, to make the outside world find it harder to believe we are destroying it. No Highland Clearances in there.

Scotland is not even competing as an entity, only Britain is.Who has the man who says he wants to vote Britain away gone to its capital, in its greedy third hosting of the Olympics instead of a British bid going to a different city this time, to show his support for?

He went to Wimbledon too. Alex really really luvs going to England.

Banned demo

On Saturday a demo in Glasgow which I was on, in support of refugees who are housed there, was shut down in mid rally by the police and everyone sent home. We were not even told the reason why, but that it would involve a fascist counter-threat was fairly guessable. Speakers sent away who had not yet spoken included political ones.

The demo organisers are lodging a complaint over this. It has turned out that the police threatened use of the Public Order Act to ban a hundreds strong demo on grounds of public safety, force its participants by law to run away, because just 25 members of the SDL were counter demonstrating.

Nicola Sturgeon had sent a support message to the demo, and the Green leader Patrick Harvie was among the speakers present. So what do both say about whether independence will reduce the prospects of this type of thing happening?

The demo was about how new business contracts for housing refugees have resulted in sudden evictions of them onto the streets, including them coming home to find their locks changed. Speakers cited that under human rights throwing anyone onto the streets is illegal. They will all be interested in taking up my case that rent and mortgages no longer constitutionally exist, then? As explained here to the housing policy consultation Firm Foundations in 2008.

There was some sentiment expressed that independence will enable us to stop being part of British policy to have refugees treated like this. The corruption and absurdity was highlighted, of a policy that allows them to refuse a person refugee status when the country the same person has come from is acknowledged as too dangerous to return them to !!!

If independence is going to make that humanitarian difference, they should be getting on with it, not waiting another 2 years. eh? But it is time to clarify what protections against racist policies will be built into the new state? and built in whoever wins its first election, not assuming it will begin with an SNP government? There is a discrepancy. the SNP has appeased the racist vote by saying we will stay in the British Isles travel area and not join Schengen. How will we stay in the British Isles travel area without staying in the British humanitarian disaster of the present ayslum system? On what basis does Sturgeon promise we will not stay in it?

Show we have caring values by making you wait 4 years on the street

Yesterday I was on the demo at the Border Agency "reporting" office in Brand Street, Glasgow - is it Govan or Cessnock? a yukky office of global apartheid. Ypeople, a name for the YMCA incredibly, has been housing asylum seekers, under a contract now being switched away from them, and they are simply throwing them out, regardless of nowhere else to go, and with no state support even at the same time as they are not allowed by law to get jobs. So enforced homelessness.

As the speakers said we should not even say "asylum seekers", as the Tories made up that term to spare the hate newspapers from having to use proper factual terms like refugees. So that is the term we should use. Along with Green and Solidarity, but nobody from Labour it was mentioned, there were 2 SNP MSP speakers who are trying to raise it with their own government but this week were unlucky in getting a question into Salmond's PMQs. Yes I will call it PMQs, "first minister" also being a silly made up term. Across the speakers it was criticised that the SNP government takes a position against these evictions but it not taking any step to provide for their victims, to help out practically.

Given that the evictions are a result of policy at British level so forms part of the SNP's case against the British system's whole culture, mention was made of how the SNP has trumpeted a "new Scotland" that will be more welcoming and decent than that, and the inaction conflicts with this.

Something else conflicts with it. That they plan still to stay in Britain for another 4 years. If you are on the side of folks in immediate need, and if you include in your case for independence that Britain is leaving them abandoned in need, and the picture that Glasgow wants to be a decent community and win back these folks' means of viable subsistence, then it makes no sense to plan to keep them waiting, still under the British policy and potentially on the streets because of it, for as long as 4 years! For remember how oddly Salmond does not want independence until 2016, a year and a half even after a Yes vote happens. Sounds really keen on it he does?

Will we get a Yes campaign that majors on inclusion and prevention of race hate, the message that 2 of the SNP presented as popular yesterday? If it does succeed in getting a good response, will that speed up the referendum timing? If not, then what will the Scottish government do for the victims of Ypeople and all victims of British asylum policy during the wait of its own choosing? If the cuts were fought by a spending increase under the devolved tax power, this is one drop in the ocean item it could deal with.

Ever so reluctant

How the hell is it a "very reasonable timescale" that independence would not actually happen until 2016? and be gently phased in at the time of a Scottish election that has already been postponed for a year by Britain to fit a British coalition's timetable? The same coalition as Salmond is always slagging, and telling us not to choose to remain ruled by, yet he wants to put off breaking away from their rule until a year after their present term has expired anyway! So that they still get to do all their stuff to us.

Is it something psychological about independence seeming less real when you vote for it if it is not going to take effect next day? But what about those of its keen supporters who have waited all their lives and who die while Salmond's snail timetable keeps them waiting more? Waiting for a year and a half even after voting for it, if we do, in 2014?

No it is not the same pace as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, at all! An absurd claim. They decided in 1992 they wanted to split, and split by end of year. It was still only 3 years since the fall of communism, while Salmond's timetable will have taken 5 years from him winning a majority. The Ukraine split from Russia in 1991 with a vote within 4 months of the fall of communism making it possible.

What a cumbersome fantastically cautious bureaucrat Salmond is being. Noticeable that he is keeping hold of every inch of the 5 year term of office that the British coalition's manoeuvrings with election dates gave him, and seems to be putting that ahead of actually reaching the statehood he syas he wants, rather than risk the independence election's outcome at a date any earlier than completion of the term Britain has given him? Really believes in his cause, then?