from the moment of the election! new travel laws designed to persecute Roma

AND VOTERS WERE TAUGHT TO BELIEVE IT WAS LABOUR that had become affected by a racism associated with the Nazi period ??

- This is sourced from the Conservative manifesto - https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/12/gypsies-travellers-boris-roma-crackdown-conservative-tory/?fbclid=IwAR2wq2noQ0xJeDJc3zdI7eHivKOPPrjK39RiPQMOm0MukHtG1u678Zu5MK4

My evil head teacher, at our breach in 1985: "Any society requires enforceable rules, even in mundane matters such as traffic control, laws are necessary. If a school is to function then it too has to have rules. Opinions may vary as to the type of rules required, but none the less rules there must be !

One Gypsy mother, who wished to remain anonymous due to the possibility of violent retaliation: “I will become a criminal everywhere I go. I would be a criminal staying on a friend’s farmyard, even if I was invited to visit. At motorway services. In a layby. Popping into the supermarket,” she said. “There is no minimum time frame mentioned. From the minute I apply the handbrake, and before I stop the engine, I will be illegal.”

The proposed laws would allow police to seize the homes of Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller people by force and to destroy their property without compensation. The proposal also says Travellers can be banned from the local authority area for up to a year, cutting off access to support for homelessness, which often requires someone to have been a resident in the area for a length of time, leaving many in fear of having to live on the streets.

#election2019 #travellers #Roma #Conservatives #antisemitism #homelessness #law

search yourself Lesley Riddoch

Riddoch has written a National column seizing on the opinion poll of Brexit-raving Tory menbers, that found a majority polling as preferring to lose Scotland than drop Brexit. Symptomatic of what Brexit has done to the Tories, and some commenters have suggested it comes from the weight of Brexiters who have joined the Tories to influence the leadership election. But the nats are all falling over it with glee.

They and Riddoch are making a logical fallacy typical of them, in declaring this the end of unionism. They are assuming that all u ionists are Tories. A piece of mud they would sneakily love to stick, and which makes no sense alongside what they often say on low Tory support here. i.e. the majority of Unionists are not Tories, and their Unionism is completely logically unaffected by the Tories' collective crack-up.

Here are Riddoch's words asked back to her. As I asked them back to her in a National site comment.

SHE WROTE

>
• As Stuart Campbell [Wings over Bath] pointed out: “Tories in Scotland and Northern Ireland are clinging to a nation from which their own Conservative colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb ... at the first inconvenience.”
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst Union-supporting Scots ? ... So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that “fellow” arch Unionists would throw you and your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cutting ties with the European Union – how do you feel about the Union now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• What on earth are we waiting for? Even Scotland’s No voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

ASKED BACK TO HER

Lesley: you are a diaspora-born Scot who belongs to your nation by family. The White Paper does not give, and ever since it SNP and Yes have refused to give, unrefusable citizenship by the family connection route, parental descent. For 6 years you have faced the question, and you evaded it when asked by me at a meeting you did in Edinburgh Friends' Meeting House during the indyref:

• Why are you an eager leading voice of a movement that is racist against yourself ?
• Yessers who either are, or care about family/friends who are, parental descent Scots, are clinging to a nation from which their own Yes colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb, by dogma without even waiting for an inconvenience.
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst indy-supporting Scots? So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that "fellow" arch Nats would throw you and your subset of your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cruelly dividing families in breach of ECHR article 8 - how do you feel about indy now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• As of Perth's recent hustings, Green leader Maggie Chapman has come round on parental descent citizenship. What are you waiting for? Even Scotland's SNP voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

We are getting welfare devolved

In Tory conference week, the Scotsman has learned from UK civil service that yes we will get welfare powers devolved. To introduce new measures and to top up UK benefits, including disability.

It's from 2018, so there is the frustration of the foot dragging process of these things coming into effect, waiting through 3 years more of Tory measures (unless their tiny majority government falls before then). But the SNP have been insisting that we were not going to get this. Though such a detail as this was never in the vow, they have been using it to claim the vow is not being delivered. You can see it is being delivered. This is in the spirit of the Smith Commission.

The announcement's timing is to get around any economically diehard Tories wishing to be difficult about it. That shows their leaders wanting to get around them and secure the Union.

Not listening makes us blue.

How fair will it be for an election to be swung by the psychology of "don't understand"?

Today's Tory press are trying to muddle with the situation around a Labour government's relation to the SNP. Following Miliband's renunciation 2 days ago of any deal with other parties, now several front pages saying: oh look, we've caught them out, they will do a deal. This is based on some of the Shadow Cabinet explaining that a minority government would go from vote to vote talking to other parties to get as much as it can of its own business through. That is not a deal. That is what Miliband already explicitly explained that that is not a deal. It is exactly what happens when there is not a deal, it is the way any minority government has to function, the other parties can jostle with it on passing or not passing each item of its business. It's the way the SNP minority government of 2007-11 worked, getting business through with Tory support so often that to be logically consistent these papers should accuse it of having a deal with the Tories, exactly what is terrible for the SNP ever to be seen by its voters to have. But logically consistent is what these headlines have an interest in not being. To understand what it or is not a deal takes willingness to listen to explanations and understand the system. For the real human minds of many voters, knee jerk prejudice is easier and saves mental effort. Oh look, this headline has made it sound like this means a deal, so it probably does, so it does. Conclusion reached, end of story, mind closed to further listening.

.Because the story is written to fit prejudice that what the politician says is likely to be lies, the voter leaps to the simple conclusion that it is indeed lies in this case. To make any effort to understand the system would be an unwelcome mental effort. It could threaten 2 things for the voter, (i) a prejudice, (ii) their self-esteem of being right in leaping to the hasty conclusion. because these things are threatening, they must be shut out of mind, by insisting: no no no, I DON'T UNDERSTAND. Even if they would understand perfectly well if they chose to listen. So now, anyone trying to explain the technicality of why a minority government's work to pass each vote is not a deal, and why these shadow ministers have not confessed there will be a deal, will just get "I don't understand", and based on it an impatient refusal to listen. And that psychology in enough voters could change the election's outcome.

The voting reform referendum in 2011, already, appeared swung by a "don't understand" prejudice. The argument that the proposed new system took more effort to understand, succeeded in appealing to voters to reject it. That worked better as an argument than the case that it was a fairer system. So this is irrational psychological process is totally capable of swinging election outcomes.

The atmosphere towards Labour is now frighteningly like 1992. SHOULD AN ELECTION BE GIVEN TO THE TORIES BY A KNEE JERK PEER PRESSURE AND A PSYCHOLOGY OF REFUSAL TO LISTEN TO SIMPLE EXPLANATIONS?!! That is the present danger.

Common travel binned already: try visiting Ireland.

Britain has been breaking the British Isles common travel area with Ireland, affecting both parts of it, without admitting so in any prominent political outlet.

Since 2010, shows this paper from when they started it, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/257182/cta.pdf, they have done immigration checks on the crossings from Northern Ireland to the mainland. It is shocking to see it, as I did on the Belfast to Cairnryan crossing, with "immigration enforcement" on their uniforms, checking identity and asking exactly immigration type questions about where you were travelling to - on a domestic travel route that is wholly inside the UK. It is not caused by NI's history, any extra security because of that would be security rather than open explicit immigration checking. Dangerously it does not make NI feel treated like part of the union, does it? The idea behind it is supposed to be, that the Republic is more liberal on immigration, and the Irish peace requires there to be easy crossing into NI by road an appearance of open border between the 2 parts of Ireland, so Britain will let the Republic's policy govern who can reach NI but it will still put a trap in an unexpected place to catch folks trying to reach the British mainland. This is why it is only being done in one direction, coming from Ireland, not going to it.

A friend who has visited family in the Republic reported that he was asked for his passport when crossing into NI on public transport! This is exactly what is not supposed to happen under the common travel area, and all our media debate on the EU and during the referendum took as common knowledge that it does not happen, that we have a happy little passport-free travel area with the Irish Republic. Googling, you can find stories since 2011 of this happening. It's not being publicised in media and politics, it's only folks who travle to Ireland and experience it who are getting to know this is happening.

As a No voter who is migration liberal and has no love at all for Britain's present border culture, I'm writing against Britain's practices here and accusing that they weaken the union. But this revelation is more of a problem for nats than unionists, because during the referendum the Yessers relied heavily on claiming they could predict that rUK would keep the common travel area with us because it would be rational. They insisted cavalierly that we could dismiss as bluff all contrary talk. Some Yessers actually relied on this, to argue that my anger at Yes's citizenship plan betraying the Scottish diaspora was unnecessary, because the common travel area resolved it. Predicting common travel's certainty to remain in place would mean, all the Scots born in the rest of Britain to emigrant parents and still living there at the date of indy, who Yes intended to betray without unrefusable citizenship of their own country, would still always be free to move home as part of common travel. So it would not matter how deficient and full of loopholes Yes's rules for Scottish citizenship were. This is clearly disproved by what is happening to Ireland. If intrusive migration checks are now capable of being intruded sinisterly upon civil liberties even inside the UK, between its nations, and if we are illicitly and dishonestly breaking the travel area with the Irish Republic too, both of these shocks show how easy and casual it would have been for rUK to put them onto a new Scottish state's border.

It's obviously another reason not to vote Conservative if you care for the union.

which scare wins?

In this campaign, opponents of each of the 2 British major parties are bound to seek to portray the other as a threat to the Union. After all, the Union is popular, as we know: it was chosen in a referendum quite recently.

None of the right wing newspapers accusing Labour of risking the Union simply by being willing to cooperate with the SNP on economic issues in a hung parliament, have itemised exactly what risking effect this is supposed to have upon the Union? But when a Tory sympathetic paper, the Sunday Times, runs in a front page column that the Conservatives would give Scotland financial home rule, fiscal independence, separation from the security and mutual support of the shared British budget, that is the one to be scared of.

It makes the Conservatives a worse threat to the Union. Fiscal independence fits with Tory attitudes on self-reliance and anti-welfare, make Scotland pay for itself jolly good eh what? No, and not what we voted No for. They are the ones who have been disturbingly leaning to this idea ever since the Smith process, when you will remember it was Labour who stepped in to say no that's too far in separation. It's Labour who are holding the line against fiscal separation.