time to vote In

Although Cameron's EU deal brings in some inevitable nasty Tory economic barriers, which a future Labour led government can easily enough drop, yet there is also a surprising strand of good in Cameron's deal.

He has drawn some red lines that protect member countries' democratic sovereignty and stop the growth of centralised commission power to tell them to do things. This has actually made the EU more democratic in a way that folks have been saying ever since the 80s is needed. It has shown that members can reform the institution in more democratic ways and put their foot down to halt undemocratic drifts. It's a milestone of democratisation in the EU's development.

Time to vote In, or Stay, or Remain, on Jun 23, whatever they will call it. They will have to avoid calling it Yes when there are still stubborn blue Yes window posters around referring to leaving another union.

AND MEANWHILE?OH MY GUUÀAAAAARDD !!!

George Galloway!!! He was a massive asset for the indy No campaign. He was the most prominent name among radical leaders to support the British union, he showed decisively to many that you could be unionist and left wing. So, now, WHY THE HELL ISN'T HE UNIONIST FOR THIS UNION TOO? He is anti-EU and has already been photoed alongside Farage !!! campaigning for out !!! After in the indyref he wouldn't be seen alongside the Tories.

How totally Gordon Bennett is that? What a jerk particularly because leaving the EU keeps the British union unstable and there is continuing argument for independence on that trigger. Present polls don't make the nat leaders keen to call a second indyref, but the constitutional argument and threat of it is always there, an EU Out vote could still help to lead to it eventually.

How will Galloway then argue against it, when at the Out rally which the Daily Telegraph site showed a clip of, he calls lifetime important "the demand that Britain shall be an independent sovereign and democratic country", exactly the pointless nationalist sentiment he condemned for Scotland saying that creating national barriers is bad! Work Galloway out !!! eh? What he said is nonsense because Britain is already perpetually sovereign, Cameron's deal has clearly established that, with the EU treaties now formally exempting us from the aim of "ever closer union."

the land of hope is poverty

It has been said that unionism, voting No, leads in the polls among the young and this is supposed to be an irony given how the referendum is making a first by lowering the voting age.

How many aged under 25, now threatened by Cameron with cutting off of support when in need, are still going to see the union as a country "sticking together"? From the voice who tells them "the land of hope is Tory"? The land of hope is not sticking together with its mass scapegoated young, is it? He tells them - "think of all we've achieved together" and deaths in a war of occupation that we should not be fighting are actually his own example!!!

Due protection of the law under neither choice

Today's Daily Express front page, with its usual racist glee, delights in having Cameron float to them a policy to cut availability of legal aid to immigrants. Perfectly legal immigrants including EU citizens who are entitled to be here as citizens. Indeed testing the water of explicitly going against that principle, through an anti-EU paper. It is obviously a beginning of campaigning for the EU referendum on a basis of competing racism.

Thanks to the fight for semi-federalism in Britain being already won in 1997, Cameron's threatened measure would only apply to England. Salmond But in Scotland we already have in parallel with this Macaskill's flagrantly sinister cutback to free criminal defence, for all of us, and putting that under legal aid limits. Which no media are running with as an issue against the Yes campaign here.

Instead of voting for hope or positive new futures, we face voting between 2 options of statehood both offering breach of the human rights standard of access to law, and to put a money power in the way of all justice for society's victims. Both our Yes and No options are offered through, both sides come from, a political class making these core undemocratic moves, that endanger us all, syncrhonised at at the same time.

Now who are the tartan Tories Alex?

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.

scarred by 10 months and a random bit

An awful lot of 16 year olds are going to feel damagingly betrayed, from the British end not Salmond's, and alienated from politics yet again, as the media now will spend 2 years keeping telling us they have been given the vote. When the great day comes they will find they have still not been after all. For Cameron has forced the trick device only allowing Salmond to use the electoral register complied with the 18 age limit, so that 16 and 10 months and a random bit is the actual age the referendum franchise will be given at.

Unless of course, unless the agreement now gets the fight for a lower voting age won within the next 2 years. We must all try for that.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/votes-at-16-a-seminal-moment-for-scottish-democracy.1350307449

Diaspora back to the 90s

More Tory suffering here that Salmond will make us wade through. Salmond??? Indeed so, because he does not intend independence to actually happen with the present British government's term up to 2015, so how absurd to base his campaign on our suffering of its actions?

This is back to the 1990s, when Major said that for morality and "family values" and "back to basics", all that front of bogusness to win old bigots' votes, it was somehow morally better for young adults to live with their parents and to remain financially dependent on having to. So the benefit system should deliberately inflict that, make them do that. The new proposal from Cameron in this link, cutting off housing benefit from young adults, is exactly the same agenda brought back again. Make them live with their parents - but that means, make them live in the same country as their parents live in.

DIASPORA OPPRESSION ALERT here, how are the SNP going to respond to this? Are they going to say a word for, a word acknowldging the existence of, young adults of the Scottish diaspora stuck living in exile not in Scotland? Like I was in the early 1990s. A Yes campaign now exists. It can speak up for the diaspora, it can sell us independence as a means to stop this ethnic violation of our diaspora, this entrapment of them cut off from their own country's life, a means to bring them home" and be damn quick about it in case any of them die in exile after never having the chance to live in their own country in their lives. If the SNP won't do this, what say the other Yes parties, whose relations with the SNP are already fraying over control of the campaign, about this?

Next day's news brings us some more clarity, that Cameron can't do all this now because of the coalition and it is going to be Tory policy next time. Okay, then it is still dangerous to the diaspora if we have to wait until 2016, which could be well into his next government if he gets in, before independence. So still what says Salmond to that? The same as he says, which is nothing, to all the folks continuing to suffer the already existing Tory measures up to 2014?

But we ain't falling for a mystery tour to nowhere

Let's at least join with Salmond in saying nobody is going to swallow from Cameron a meaningless lure with no content, vote No then gamble on what I might do by surprise. We remember what happened when Home said exactly this in 1979: his word broken by Thatcher and 20 years of nothing. It's not devo max he's promising, that is all he has told us about it. It's some undisclosed mystery less than that. Proper salesmen show us the product before we pay, and proper customers don't buy spivvy noncommittal mysteries whose details they are not told.

Unionist move's oppression of the young

The office of Scottish secretary was supposed to be abolished when devolution came in? All voices were quite certain it would be. So what happened? Ooh it feels quite useful to have a focal point in the Cabinet for putting up barriers to what the devolved government can do, as an layer of insurance for the union. That was the Labour government who first made that choice, so it's only thanks to them that Cameron has a Scottish secretary at all.

So today the said Michael Moore has been offering terms for a referendum, if held on a faster timescale than Salmond wants, to have a binding result. Is this necessary? Generally no referendum's result is binding unless the British parliament has passed a law saying it is, because default sovereignty is with parliament. But where national self-determination is involved, so is international law. At United Nations level going back to the decolonisation era and the UN's early principles against conquering countries, in votes on independence the country concerned has a sovereign decision: self determination. That stands over any British law on competent status to call the vote.

The present unionist position is going against that international law. But any problems with courts striking down the referendum, as today's papers are full of imaginings of, will also be the SNP's fault if the SNP continues to ignore the court change described twice in this blog. The court change, the development since 1999 that court decisions are always open-endedly faultable on their reasoning and are no longer ever final, is exactly what the SNP needs to stand up to any unionist court antics to declare void a Yes result to a vote called by the SNP.

A vote imposed from British level should also be held void, illegitimate, if its franchise excludes any population groups who would have a vote anywhere in the world. The Tories are following their demographic as the home of narky old bigots against youth, they are against votes at 16 and their proposed terms for an authorised referendum by 2013 specifically exclude votes at 16. Though Moore himself is a Lib Dem and going along with this. Folks with the vote's result ahead of them for a lifespan will live with the memory of contemptuous rejection from taking part in it, when they have the vote in the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Austria, Nicaragua, and Brazil. To have self determination be a sovereign principle of international law, for votes on it that can happen anywhere in the world, means having all votes on it held on no lesser a franchise than exists anywhere. A No vote on an 18 voting age will absolutely not legitimise the union, nor a Yes vote legitimise its end. It will not be a conclusive outcome, it will not be visibly sovereign.