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

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.

response open letter to Lisa Nandy, to Mark Frankland's

Response by Maurice Frank to Mark Frankland. He is a Yes supporter, English and liking Scotland's political life better - though his argument from no visible homelessness in his home Dumfries does not ring true at all to the Central Belt cities. On Jan 18 Frankland wrote and blogged an open letter to Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy, in an angered response to her Andrew Neil interview. It s going viral akonv nats on social media. This response is to Lisa Nandy too, + is confirmed emailed on 20 Jan 2020 -

In urgent factual correction of MARK FRANKLAND's open letter to you on SCOTLAND, here is a too underreported fact about our situation. There is in fact a shocking family-wrecking racist prejudice that the Yes movement and SNP have, to date, still never removed from their policy. It is just as bad as anti-Semitism or Windrush. It has been there ever since their White Paper in 2013, it also surfaced as far back as our 1999 election, when a Labour broadcast warned: "If you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a Scottish citizen? No! They will have to apply."

It is a prejudice against nationhood through family ties, against being Scottish and entitled to citizenship by the practical connections that routinely go with having a parent who is. Copied from Quebec, they proposed in the referendum that automatic citizenship should only be by birth or residence at the instant of statehood.

Now, calling any category of citizenship automatic can be problematic, as a person with several possible citizenships may not want the one that some official wants to deem automatic: so I have no problem with asking claimants to descent citizenship to take an active step of choice for it. But obviously what must be automatic is that they get it. That is, it must be unrefusable.

Faced with inability to get any Yes source to say this, during the campaign, I lodged EU petition 1448/2014. This was not the naive humble type of petition making a request, it was a citation of ECHR article 8 on family life: so it remains a legal resource for anyone to cite and use. It cites, that article 8 obliges the EU to disown shun and sanction as an international pariah racist state, and not build any relationship with, a Scottish state where citizenship by parental descent is refusable.

Since then there are 3 limited successes to record fairly:

• In the National of 9 Jul 2016, Paul Kavanagh's column included parental descent in a list of European norms of citizenship.
• only verbally on a stall, a self-declared international law expert in the Yes Marchmont and Morningside group in Edinburgh concurred that ECHR will require us to honour this citizenship entitlement.
• at Perth's hustings last May 16, which was recorded, the Greens' Maggie Chapman gave the right answer on this.

There are good "Yessers" who persist in an unsecured faith that this will not be a problem. Some are my friends. But there are frequently encountered Yessers with the prejudice, to show it is a serious problem. Many of them hold that their theory "civic nationalism" defines a country as its presently in situ population, and makes it virtuous to reject anything to do with "blood and soil" - and they will class family ties as implying blood and race. They faithfully think it is a progressive line against genetic views of race, to reject our emigrants' offspring from being Scottish, hypocritically at the same time as claiming emigration as a Yes issue! As well as simply being xenophobic excluding and hateful, this line breaks apart families. Nationhood by parentage has always come from the life practicality of folks’ ties to their families, to the places where their families’ lives are rooted, and to family’s mutual support and sharing of resources. All nothing to do with genetics and long predating all knowledge of its existence.

They won't budge when you explain that. They cling to a seeming fear that to admit any practical humane argument for families will be a blunder into a naughty endorsement of blood-related thoughts. So they put themselves in an absurd mirror-image position, of calling inclusion racist and calling vile family-breaking exclusion anti-racist and progressive. During the campaign I had a bonechilling conversation of this nature with a Radical Independence stall, arguing that line in all theoretical earnestness, opposing and calling racist any parental descent citizenship at all, constantly asking "how far back do you go?" to everything I said for nuclear families whose practical position is obviously not the same as the distant past's generations. MP Angus Macneil denied to the Sunday Post 23 Feb 2014 that anyone who has never lived here is Scottish.

The position of an emigrant's child, born in diaspora and growing up in the wrong country, has a parallel with the transgender position in the wrong gender: it too can be an emotional dysphoria with a practical basis. Not to uphold it is a social inconsistency. Their identities collide with the horrible school bully attitude I propose to name "birthplace racism", even dividing siblings: the bigotry of regarding country as dictated by birthplace. Then should the racists could get to see their victim rejected by the country they identify with?? Birthplace has visibly not correlated with country ever since the ancient Jews' Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, many folks are born in places they have no further connection with, Labour's morally outstanding recent election policy of right of return for the Chagossians recognised descent nationhood, it features on both sides in the Israel/Palestine problem. But given that common sense life practicality makes citizenship by birth also a natural right, notice a cruel exclusion by the Yessers here too. Against an older SNP pledge, they wanted to make citizenship by birth only apply to preexisting British citizens, thus continuing to cruelly exclude folks born to visiting parents who the British rules have excluded since Thatcher's changes in 1983. I met such a person online and failed to get Yes to solve his position either!

Just as Tory ministers with immigrant backgrounds have been happy to do anti-immigrant things, existence of some diaspora-born Scots in the independence movement's lead names does not disprove this descent citizenship scandal. The onus can only be on Angus Robertson, Lesley Riddoch, Mike Russell, Iain Macwhirter to explain why they support a movement containing prejudice against themselves. Meanwhile, by human rights there is never in the world a duty, there was not in 2014 either, to allow independence votes for any nation unless it is known that its citizenship rules will always comply with all family and personal practicalities without any cruel gaps.

Maurice Frank

This is what 100K looks like

This photo from last year's events in Barcelona elpais.com/elpais/2017/10/03/inenglish/1507033493_729669.html. This is what a crowd of 100 thousand looks like.

It's not what the crowd at the nat's "All Under One Bannner" Edinburgh rally looks like in the photos, the 2 days of photo page spreads in the National, or looked like if you were there. The figures that match what it actually looks like are 6 to 10 K.

They were clumpily and thinly spread out. They were surrounded by wide tracts of empty meadow, which they were all on one side of. It was far smaller than their last couple of years' Glasgow Green rallies. Smaller event and smaller crowd.

The 100K figure then is fake news and nonsense. Yet it is repeated in Lesley Riddoch's Scotsman column. The Disqus commenters know what to ask? Where were the coaches or cars parked, needed to bring a crowd of that size?!! Good minds to think of that. With no temporary toilets set up where were a crowd of that size peeing? Desperate to invent a momentum that's not there, while the polls remain unsafe for them to call a ref, and the infighting over it is audible between rally speakers.

Marchmont and Morningside

This National story, on "Yes surveys" by local groups in hope of getting through to undecideds and "mibbes" - comes from the experience of a local group in a No-voting and affluent part of Edinburgh - from Yes Marchmont and Morningside, Of interest because they also have a guy claiming expertise in international law, who was on their Meadows Festival stall.

So as well as doing the surveys they can put in writing anything that voters need put in writing. Specifically, that guy can get Yes to issue in writing in Scottish govt's name, what he told me only in unrecorded speech at the Meadows Festival. That our treaty obligations in Europe, to Council of Europe not just EU, will guarantee that citizenship by parental descent will be unrefusable. That the strand of nats who are racist against that, who were the dominant voice in ref1, won't get their way.

History is full of states breaking treaties: I can't take his word that any treaty will enforce it. Can only be sure you will observe it when as an internal action within Scotland you directly write it into our proposed state's red line human rights standards. According to him you have to. But can he put your pen where his mouth is? That is my survey question back to Yes Marchmont and Morningside.

/div>

in a little box with nasty barricades

For the anti-outsider racism against Scotland's diaspora which made it morally necessary to vote No, the worst of the leading nats was Jim Sillars. He it was who actually proposed that the Scots born in diaspora as the offspring of our emigrants - whose emigration itself was supposed to be a nat issue - should be filtered for desirable skills the same as migrants with no roots here, before they can live in their own country. He took this line of xenophobic hate speech towards a section of his own nation, in his campaign dialogue with George Galloway and to the Yes meeting on 7 May 2014 at Liberton school, Edinburgh. SSP leader Colin Fox was sitting beside him and continued to do a campaigning tour with him calling him a friend.

I saw it because it was my question on citizenship by descent that he was answering. He told the same meeting that he was a Eurosceptic who would rather Scotland be like Norway and join EFTA, he retains from 70s nationalism its anti-EU strain, the idea of sacrosanct national sovereignty not getting pooled and united with anyone. Anti-Europeanism is now another racist anti-immigration position, because it means, and at British level much of it is motivated by, ending the union of free movement and travel. Going back to having nasty barricades up to the rest of the world outside your little box of global apartheid.

It fits him perfectly that he has now announced he's campaigning for an Out vote in the referendum, and splitting with the SNP mainstream by it, as he has ranted against the party control created by Salmond. The nats are better off without him, but will they realise it and break with his sick level of anti-diaspora bigotry?

Sillars will have no claim to moan or to claim any crisis if Scotland votes In and Britain votes Out. It is a matter of record that he wants the opposite.

stall mart

Both sides had stalls inside an Asda shop, at Chesser in west Edinburgh, on successive Sats. Both sides as a result have an ethical responsibility to their volunteers, to continue to lean on Asda for an answer, until it gives one, as to how safe we were. Politicans who supported or took part in the stalls need to do this, to make sure their own ethical position is secure for the future, to make sure it stands that they supported something ethcial and cared about participants' safety. In the postmorteming of the referendum, this scrutiny will be there.

The problem? It dates back to the 1990s without it having ever been exposed as a big consumer story and without it yet being known to have ended. There was an issue known to solicitors then, where Asda security would arrest anyone high-handedly on arbitrary accusation from anyone else without willingness to listen to any explanation. A solicitor in Fife recounted from an actual case, that they refused to admit even in court to a sheriff's question, that there had been any error of judgment in refusing urgent toilet access to a person they were holding, with the result of forcing him to defaecate on the floor, in a food shop.

Asda security still stride around in black slack uniforms with a heavy thuggish air unlike in any other supermarket. Their hand may have been stayed, protecting us, by the note I handed into customer service 20 minutes before we began, raising this. But they have never given any actual answer to it. Not while we were there, nor ever since. Undoubtedly they never want to. Sorting out all outstanding questions of campaign ethics from this campaign after it is over, which wil happen for both sides, will include forcing this question with Asda, getting them for broken ethics unless they give an answer that means the end of that bad corrupted security culture.

Among Asda's responsibilities to show we were safe, is to force the question that no one who has ever experienced that security culture shall fins they have any difficulty in visiting the US. Its position as an American-owned company, part of Walmart, helps in enabling it to do this. It arises because the US has long had a practice, in violation of the oldest basic human right of all, innocent until proved guilty, of judging foreign visitors from arrests where there was no conviction and asking them as a single question "Have you ever been arrested or convicted?" The lack of media focus on this, happening even to citizens of the US's closest allies, has always been a particular failiure in our political system. This is a moment of opportunity to work against it, so it must be seized.

Herald wiping comments and manipulating debate ?

On the following page on Frank Skinner, www.heraldscotland.com/politics/referendum-news/comedian-fears-england-may-go-right-wing-if-scots-vote-yes.24817570, in the Disqus comments section is the Herald showing a manipulation of heard debate to favour Yes? It has excluded the following 2 posts from being posted:

• In answer to a racist called Alex who wrote "You are not in your country, unless you were born there":
  
  The school bully prejudice of claiming that birthplace dictates country divides siblings and has been visibly wrong ever since the ancient Jews' exile in Babylon. Tony Blair is English and was born in Scotland. Eamonn da Valera was born in America. The Silent Twins, Barbadian, were born in Yemen simply because their family was in the RAF there, left it at age 7 months and had no further connection with it in their lives. Among Scots, Alexander McCall Smith was born in Matabeleland, Fitzroy Maclean in Egypt, Edinburgh council leader Andrew Burns in Germany, Eric Liddell in China. Lesley Riddoch, Alec Home, the Queen Mother, and former Plaid Cymru leader Dafydd Wigley were born in England, while famously Norwegian author Roald Dahl was born in Wales.
• In answer to "Simon Harries, Cambridge" post beginning "I was born in Africa":
  
  "Simon - Yes has ratted on a former SNP pledge of automatic citizenship for everyone born in Scotland and is confining that to inherited British citizenship, in that negative way it is not defining citizenship by birthplace. But in another negative way it is. Scots who were born outside Scotland to emigrant parents, mostly in rUK, and can't arrange to be resident here on indy day, they won't budge on making their citizenship only discretionary and refusable. A humanitarian betrayal which will divide families, against ECHR article 8, preventing them coming together to support each other against poverty or in time of medical need, and means the Scottish nation rejecting and excluding a large part of itself.
  
  "Civic nationalism" has turned out to mean a selfish anti-outsider racism of only caring about the population who chance arbitrarily to already live here, thus totally hostile to moving around and orientated to making it harder. I got that from 3 sources at Yes events.
  
  Pat Kane told me he would be first to speak up and say "this is wrong" against any further openness to the diaspora. Jim Sillars, considered a leading nat speaker who is doing many meetings for them, answering my question on dividing families said he wants our exile-born children subjected to the same filtering for skills as migrants from anywhere with no roots here at all, and openly told an audience "We must not be afraid of this". Those of the exile-born who have suffered from bad education systems or corrupt abuses like Savile, and that is their reason for not having high value skills, will be further punished and rejected by their country for being abuse victims. A stallholder for Radical Indy, told about this, defended it and called it good socialism to treat all outsiders from everywhere the same and racist to give preference to "someone who happens to be descended..." and he never answered on the practical impact of dividing families, dodged it several times by just repeating the racist jibe "how far back do you go?"
  
  That the Yes we are faced with is as nasty as this is a humanitarian emergency in our history. But it's by enquiring and digging and going to meetings that I have discovered it, not by passive listening to the campaign. In the British-wide racist mood I can't make the media or No campaign focus on it, so have had to make personal efforts with a "no to a new clearances" campaign in the Borders, and a Euro petition against accepting a new state as fairly mandated if voters were unaware of this horror."

A Facebook link showing horrible cybernats giving a birthplace racist reaction to Rod Stewart, in their usual emotional haste forgetting that their position would apply against their own Lesley Riddoch too.

room 101

It happens to be 101 days to go. The unanimous agreement to treat it as 100 today instead of tomorrow, as if Tuesdays are uncool, gives you no confidence in the campaign's relation to facts.

Total journalistic failiure by Radio Scotland's phone in this morning. They let the Yes speaker use emigration as an argument and talk of encouraging emigrants to return, without challenging him a shred in any way with the question of whether citizenship for our emigrants' children will be refusable. With Yes's betrayal of the diaspora. Do you still take seriously the common assumption that BBC is biased to No?????

Iain Macwhirter, ranting with less objectivity and more personal emotion than ever in the Sunday Herald yesterday about "who believes this stuff?" in relation to the No campaign, is still being allowed to get away with saying nothing about why he, being exile born, is a Yes supporter and is not making any fuss towards Yes on behalf of the exile born, to prevent betrayal of their citizenship and of the automatic right to live here that they have under the union.

Jun 11,, 99 days to go: The following bias challenge made to the BBC about that phone-in:

" c9:58 the Yes speaker was left unchallenged when he commented on the emigration rate from Scotland and encouraging expats to return.

Never in the entire programme was it mentioned, let alone the Yes side questioned on it, by either the presenter or a caller, that their citizenship policy does not guarantee unrefusable citizenship to the children of emigrants, to Scots born outside Scotland - those of them who neither chance to live here on independence day nor to be born after that date to a parent holding Scottish citizenship at the time. If they fall into either of those groups their citizenship is automatic. All the rest have a provision to "register" for citizenship, evidencing their descent, and ever since the White Paper came out, no Yes source will say to any voter enquiry that these applications will not be refusable. Alex Neil told the Yes meeting at Tynecastle High School, Edinburgh, on Mar 12 that it will be refusable. Nickola Paul, Policy Officer on Migration + Citizenship, told me by email May 27 that "any discretionary elements" in the citizenship policy, and even the evidence required of applicants, will only be decided after the referendum!

Willingness to divide families, against ECHR article 8, by excluding Scots from their own country for the chance of an exiled birth, is an obvious practical obstacle of family life against any encouraging expats to return. Bias that no BBC coverage at all has mentioned this issue's existence or questioned Yes on it.

Will you write in and confirm to the readers?

Yesterday in the Sunday Herald, a letter from John Jamieson of South Queensferry claimed to refute the claim that the White Paper will not give automatic entitlements to citizenship by descent. To do this, he just quoted what the White Paper says about registering for citizenship. the Yes campaign itself has never said it means an entitlement, and at their public meeting in Gorgie Edinburgh on mar 12 Alex Neil said it does not.

So there is a question of campaign propriety, over whether they will mislead voters, over whether the Yes campaign will take ownership of this letter that has been written on their behalf and will confirm that what it implies is accurate.

I have mailed back to Yes, and copied it to the Sunday Herald, and to Lesley Riddoch's Nordic Horizons as she is an exile born Scot whose support for Yes is absurd unless this issue is fixed the right way:

" The above refers to a letter in today's Sunday Herald. It has pledged for you, publicly, a line on White Paper citizenship policy that you have never been willing to say to any voter's enquiry by me, and that Alex Neil told us the contrary to at your Tynecastle High School public meeting.

Is Mr Jamieson right? Did he write from you? Or will you recordedly let voters be misled in your name? Will you write in and confirm to the readers: will there be any power at all for the state to select to refuse any application for citizenship by descent, which meets precisely defined terms of supplying evidence of having a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship? "

grim purist racism becoming clearer step by step.

Very unpleasant racially excluding themes are now emerging consistently, if you look out for them, in the Yes campaign and case. It is a particularly tragic turn in the history of a dispersed people historically subjected to worldwide clearances. despite the plan to have a Homecoming Festival this summer, present day nationalism is showing selfish forms only caring about the home population and betraying the diaspora. If it stays this way, everyone with family links to the rest of Britain, or with friends who have family links to the rest of Britain, will have strong humanitarian need to vote No.

I have mentioned before getting ignored by every part of the Yes campaign enquired to to establish that our new state will not have a power to say no to any of the applications to "register" for citizenship by descent, as the White Paper describes. To this you can now include Labour For Independence. The position is no longer left to assuming the worst from silence and from Yes newspaper number 2. On Mar 11 there was a Yes public meeting in Gorgie, Edinburgh. there, to my question on this, Alex Neil confirmed the worst, the answer not wanted. That yes the new state would hold onto a choice how to respond to the citizenship by descent applications. He offered as an excuse for this that it screens out undesirables like serious criminals. He made the usual noises about the Yes side wanting to encourage new population, but that can not take away that when pinned down in front of a public audience as to their position he has gave a position that would take away the automatic unobstructable access to their own country, that exists now under the Union, for Scots who were born in exile because their parents/grandparents moved away, and who already have the pain of not having been able to rush back to live here on independence day and qualify for automatic citizenship that way. To vote for that is to commit a new clearances, to divide families and effect a division of hate between Scots potentially closing our country to some of our own offspring. That is not national renewal or liberation, that is national betrayal and severely serious purist racism.

In that meeting there was no comeback to the answers given, so that the speakers could get away with evasions. So there was no comeback to ask him: how do we know you won't discriminate against the unemployed and the poor. Any time politicians are not tied down against doing that, you know as surely as clockwork it is what they will do. These are the same folks as inflicted Trump on Aberdeenshire against the locals' will and who are abolishing corroboration and tampering with free criminal defence, always remember that.

A letter in the Sunday Times, responding to the birthplace racism in the legal challenge for expats to have the vote, pinpointed exactly what is involved in these attitudes. Written from England by Andrew Lockhart, it said "There are many people born in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or abroad who, for ancestral reasons, have emotional ties with Scotland and deem themselves Scots. That does not mean they would wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state..." and "Alex Salmond should not assume that even those born in Scotland and who live elsewhere would wish to accept what he so condescendingly offers." It now seems to be the No supporters who are conscious of these ties. Alternatively they might well wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state if one is created, and stronger practical factors than just ancestry and emotion are at stake, family ties and background, when your status is made different even than your siblings' and the rest of your family are all in the homeland whose government, claiming to be progressive, asks to be allowed to exclude its own.

You might say that no excluding will happen because we will all still be in a common travel area. Even if that was true it would only hold for those of the offspring born in exile who live in the rest of Britain or the EU. But as we rationally know, there are considerably big chances that common travel areas will break down, through either country ending up outside the EU or through England fulfilling its threat to put a border onto us. If those situations happen, citizenship does translate into being allowed to live here at all.

Then yesterday I attended a lecture in Glasgow by a Yes campaign leading name, supposed to be a lefty one into popular participation. In the informal time after the lecture I asked him what ordinary people should do to make the Yes campaign take a position guaranteeing the children of exile their safe belonging here and citizenship. What I got back was a volley of disgustingly hard man conservative attitudes about folks who live here and pay their taxes here, something about a standard process for citizenship taking 3 years! that is not even in the White Paper, and no promises or straight answer at all for anyone not already living here to live here if free movement breaks down. He actively said he would speak up and say this is wrong, if citizenship was being opened up any further to diaspora who do not already live here. By this he showed a very dark racism, only further confirming the seriousness of these concerns against voting Yes on present terms. He seriously imagined himself in the lecture a progressive calling for our news state to do lots of left wing things, and disturbingly undemocratically he called for it to be governed by a left wing consensual partnership between the major parties instead of a proper party contest, that was sinister too. yet he has no feeling or consciousness for the diaspora at all, all his imagined empowerment of the nation applies only to the folks who already live here, that is all he sees the nation as. Narrow minded, sweepingly excluding and with mental walls up against the rest of the world and everyone in it including exiled Scots, this nastiness follows naturally on from, continues, the recent hating action of Angus Macneil MP who denied that the childen of exile are Scots if they have not yet lived here. This is very ugly, very bigoted, very divisive and a threat to families, a far worse line on citizenship than Britain's, this is not liberation or progression at all, this is an inward turned grim racist horror prospect. Step by step this dystopian appeal to narky inward focussed outsider fearing bigots is becoming too stark not to see.

Listen to your expat families. They are real people.

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?

rallying call?

The unionist press today are all jubilant that the rally was so small. They are bound to be, but they are probably right. The audience fitted into the close vicinity of the Ross Bandstand under Edinburgh castle, slightly overspilling the actual seating. I was there, not in the audience of supporters, but in the outer watching fringes suitable for agnostic voters.

Much as the rally was filled with typical SNP history-patriotism, it was very clearly a fearful occasion. In over 2 hours of speeches and music, never was one word said about the zionist return entitlement for all the Scottish diaspora. Instead of the historical reawakening claimed, it was a historical betrayal to watch that omission happen. It meant the rally was not addressed to the Scottish people in our full number 25 million. It had the same most serious omission as the Yes campaign as a whole has. This is even though there was a "New Scots" speaker speaking up for the racial pluralism of our new state and the adopted Scottish identity of folks who have come to us from elsewhere. That is good in itself and one way our political culture is less nasty than England's at present - but see the contradiction between this and the total omission of talking about all the Scots in exile and their opportunity to come back.

A song about that silly lump of monarchism the Stone of Destiny said "How can anyone wipe away the tears of 700 stolen years?" - as if the centuries of statehood we still had during the stone's captivity don't count! Far more practical to real lives is the personal question for the disapora, about growing up in exile: How can anyone wipe away the tears of 26 stolen years?

The best point was made by the Green leader Patrick Harvie, who said the Yes campaign can't expect to sell just a Scottish version of the status quo as worth voting for, as the SNP has so clearly been trying to do, it has to float more radical possibilities for why independence would make a beneficial practical difference. There won't be agreement on what these should be, so different conflicting possibilities must be floated and will be issues in future Scottish elections. Entitlement for all the diaspora to return, is one such possibility that Harvie did not mention, but is the key radical difference determining whether independence really is even nationally just at all or not.

It was an entirely left wing occasion. What is strongly part of Harvie's radical agenda, and was in all the speakers' agenda, was the Yes side's wearyingly constant assumption that its new Scotland will be against the Bomb. No contrary voice to that was heard, though a contrary view to the SNP's on NATO was heard. With Isobel Lindsay speaking too, the rally was totally dominated by CND and it gave a dismal picture of the Yes campaign itself being controlled by them.

At the back of the garden, on the Princes Street railings, there was a disturbing banner about Padania, an alleged nation in north Italy that was only invented in 1992 by the Northern League there - which has a terribly anti-immigration reputation and of being the bad type of nationalism. Was there anything official about their presence? Actually maybe not, because there was a rally speaker from the Venetian nationalists, whose territorial claim directly contradicts Padania because would just be arrogantly included in it. It shows how you have to sort out the historical authenticity of nation claims before leaping to embrace all secessionist movements as your allies.

Secret session

In this quick new drama of the Information Commissioner taking the government to the Court of Session, over it legal advice on our future EU membership, both sides are at fault, for not disclosing that the court change exists.No matter which way the court decides, no matter which side's campaign it turns out to help, the winning side will miss a way to make Scotland better and the losing side will miss an opportunity to fight back against the damage to them.

As a result the issue will not be portrayed accurately to the public, who all have an interest in the court change becoming properly publicly known and functional as a result of this case. The court change is a massive advance in democracy that the media and political class have kept silent for 13 years, despite nobody ever having any argument to give against the clear reasons why it is real. Whatever is the position on Scotland's EU membership and whatever the court says about it, it includes that all its details are contestable under the court change.

What will you hear of this tomorrow, if you go and watch the Yes campaign's rally in Edinburgh?

Neither Trump nor economic separation may happen

2 consultations. We have already had one in 2010, as the ending of the National Conversation, and this blog exists because of Salmond choosing to keep unpublicised some submissions to that consultation, including mine. Does anyone still remember the National Conversation?

Another consultation fills more time while the SNP continue to consent voluntarily to keep us in the Union for 2 years as their best shot of obtaining the national mood they want, and it generates some legitimacy for Salmond's particular plan for the vote in the form it has reached now, with the Devo Max question included. But will this consultation be any more opne than the last one? Will there still be any selective and unexplained non-publicisings of any of the responses to it?

Even while Salmond launches it showily in Edinburgh Castle's Great Hall on Burns Night, the Tripping Up Trump campaign has celebrated the same Burns night with this news of the project, destroying a piece of Scottish coastal environment, that Salmond took powers over Aberdeenshire council to allow to go ahead:

Dear Friend,

Trump's future is blowing in the wind.

Trump's already told us the world's gone bust, so plans for his housing development, hotel and crazy golf courses have been shelved.

And now Trump's back to being described as a millionaire, not a billionaire. Maybe he'll sue the Guardian for writing that, like he did to another writer.

So as a potential escape route, Trump's escalated his fight with a wind farm* that might spoil his view.

If the wind farm goes ahead, Trump will pull out altogether. And this time it's reported that Trump's favourite First Minister - Alex Salmond - is refusing to intervene. We shall see.

Unlike Trump's plan, the wind farm promises skilled and well paid jobs, in an industry where the Scottish Government is committed to be a world leader, estimated to be worth up to £100 billion by 2020.

Let's help get this wind farm approved.

ACTION

Please take a minute to send an email to - iain.todd@aberdeenrenewables.com - with your comments in support of the wind farm.
You could even copy Alex Salmond's Special Advisor - geoff.aberdein@scottish.gsi.gov.uk
You can also send your message of support to the development partner, here.
And if you're on Twitter, you can tweet Alex Salmond, here.

Meanwhile, the film - You've Been Trumped - continues its travels, most recently appearing on The Rosie Show, part of the Oprah Winfrey network. Please watch this clip.

A lot of natural sand dunes have already been dug up and ruined pointlessly, as anyone who has seen the film saw, and this will be the permanent scar of Salmond's judgment on Scottish soil.

Same day, Salmond says we will still be in a currency union with England and admits the Bank of England would decide our monetary policy. Yet he calls that independence. it's not separation, anyway. It must get a few heads scratching.