bank snooping, abolishing juries, suing governments under trade treaties, the drift

A twin terrible moment for civil liberties, sending civil liberties voices' alarm setting sky high. The present move to massively reduce use of juries in Englandandwales, and now passed the present Britishwide introduction of snooping powers over welfare recipients' bank accounts. Both these at once. Both need the COURT CHANGE used by all parties resisting them.

On juries, this is both to cite the court change against the change happening, and if it still happens, to use the court change in actual cases. In Scotland, where the extent of right to juries is weaker, still 2 recent attempts to partly abolish them were successfully stopped, including by lawyers' opposition. The SNP government tried to suspend juries entirely at Covid's outset. Then straight after a jury defeated its attempt to frame Alex Salmond, it stood on a policy to abolish juries in sex cases where even the present English proposal keeps them, and where even without doing that, the Supreme Court case recently proved Scottish law to have practised unjustly in the witch-hunting of men.

So the political elite, including from the left, has been dangerously after juries for a long time already. All organisations who stand for civil liberties, who voice any resistance to this change, are evidenced only to mean what they say if they acknowledge the court change, cite it against the juryless process's demerits, and are not ignoring it. The court change is a serendipitous resource in this which they can't afford to leave aside.

The move against juries is part of shift from proper democracy to business controlled government, corporatism. A Guardian item on which by George Monbiot, Dec 1, has been welcomed by Helena Norberg-Hodge of the Local Futures mailing list. To which today she wrote in response, it -

《 details the ISDS clauses, written into free trade treaties, which give foreign corporations – and only foreign corporations – the right to sue governments, sometimes for many times their annual GDP. This is what I mean when I say, as I did in a recent video currently doing the rounds on social media, that this is a completely illegal global system.

Trade treaties have been the dark secret of the global economy for decades. Both the Left and Right have been handing over their wealth and power to global monopolies, making a complete mockery of democracy and giving rise to Corporate Rule. This lies not only behind the complete failure in the climate arena, but is also a primary reason why more and more people are forced to run faster and faster just to put food on the table and a roof over their head. As a consequence of these increasing pressures on people, we are witnessing a frightening political swing toward fascism.

And the good news is that this is not so much about "good guys" and "bad guys" as it is about blindness. It’s my experience that the majority of our political leaders have not had a clue about this, nor have most social and environmental activists at the grassroots – not even the majority of people inside these giant monopolistic corporations! 》

She asks for circulation of it - 《 That this corporate empire threatens all of us gives us reason to unite like nothing else.

Please help us spread the word. Share Monbiot’s article along with our video, Trade Gone Mad.

Big hugs,
Helena Norberg-Hodge  》

But with the court change too. This campaign too will unaffordably miss a resource if it neglects the court change. George Monbiot has not exposed the court change, and nor have campaigns against corporatism for a generation already. Uniting includes automatically taking up all resources contributed by anyone. It will visibly only be meant if it acknowledges and uses the court change.

#FreeTradeAgreement #freetradetreaties #tradetreaties #CorporateGovernance #CorporateGovernment #corporategov #oligarchpolitics #oligarchy #LocalFutures #helenanorberghodge

yes George, show us what the democratic means is

Because as we are now, devolved, eveyone living in Englandandwales is at liberty to escape this shocking pre-fascist virtual banning of protests and demonstrations there, by moving to Scotland. Compare that to how a Scottish state under racist "civic nationalism" would want to reject even some Scots from making that move. To make citizenship by descent tefusable is to hand over our economic emigrants' families, on a plate, to what George Monbiot has described in the Guardian.

Paragraph from a Guardian article by George Monbiot, 19 Oct 2022, on public apathy towards environmental protest:

《 Writing for the Mail on Sunday, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed: “There is widespread agreement that we need to protect our environment, but democracies reach decisions in a civilised manner.” Oh yes? So what are the democratic means of contesting the government’s decision to award more than 100 new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea? Who gave the energy secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a democratic mandate to break the government’s legal commitments under the Climate Change Act by instructing his officials to extract “every cubic inch of gas”? 》

But George Monbiot himself ignored the court change, after he spoke at a Globalise Resistance conference in Glasgow 2001.

The court change benefits fightability of everything he urgently cares about. Since he has experienced arrest on an environmental protest, intentionally indeed, George Monbiot arrested for defying Extinction Rebellion protest ban - 2019,  he surely has every personal motive to care against the largely media-ignored violation of the human right to presumption of innocence, by the US and Canadian border systems giving innocent arrested people a worse status for entry. The court change helps fightability of that too.

So WHEN MONBIOT URGES YOU TO LISTEN, ON THE ECO EMERGENCY, MAKE IT CONDITIONAL. ONLY LISTEN ON CONDITION THAT HE EXPRESSES SOME LISTENING TO THE COURT CHANGE.

the jury is in

The SNP govt wanted, during the present state of emergency, to abolish juries. No attempt to do that has happened in Englandandwales, where jury trials are simply postponed for the duration. Mercifully, within a day they were stopped by all the Unionist parties: and okay, as the Unionists are not in a majority, also by the opposition of law professionals from their own ranks.

Human rights here have just passed through a breathtaking moment of emergency, and who from? From the reputed progressives who have told us for years they want to give us a nice more progressive state of our own, and campaigned against Brexit's likely rollback of ECHR-associated human rights safeguards. The independence movement's entire claim that Scottish governments and state would be innately more progressive and fairer, now stands smashed by this. This will always be there as a fact of history in the debate.

Notice it follows within days the MeToo extreme feminists' oopenly disliking that a woman-majority jury found Alex Salmond innocent. This has rightly split the nats into a bad fight on Facebook and in the National, where both the loyalists who saw politicality in the whole trial, and the scrupulous over the vital human right to presumption of innocence, have seen through the evil raving believe-what-we-want injustice of the radical feminists and their witch-hunt of men.

The Crossgate Centre on Mar 24 displayed on Facebook a reply to that character of radical feminists, that they well deserved, and deserve everyone to contemplate:

《 This tweet from Rhiannon Spear, the SNP National Women's Convener, in response to the Alex Salmond verdict yesterday is absolutely appalling, and has drawn a well-deserved backlash from SNP members and the wider Yes movement on Twitter. Her contempt for the principle of presumption of innocence, juducial due process, and not least the jury, 9 of whom, the majority, were women - makes her unfit for office.

Never mind respecting entitlement to presumption of innocence, clowns like you can't even respect a verdict from a female-majority jury if it goes in the accused's favour. You epitomise the entryism piggy-backing on & destroying an SNP where it is because of indy supporters. The tweet itself, Mar 23, and its reactions, are here.

/div>

Missed opportunity or a meant miss?

This national survey is an absurdity. It is so incapable of obtaining any content of value, that surely that can't be accidental? Surely it's just a ritual the SNP is doing to make itself look, to the sheep, like it's doing something? while running scared of receiving any actual feedback from the issue driven No voters, so not providing any space in the survey for giving them issues.

They must know you can't answer the survey questions on ranking issues' importance to you, in any way that reflects accurately what your voter view on the issue actually is. e.g. immigration. If you are a nice caring pro-immigration Europhile, firstly you won't like to say that immigration matters to you, because that is usually taken to mean you are a racist anti. Suppose you clear that hurdle, and because Yes was pro European open borders they read your answer to mean that you are too. Then they celebrate and count it as a good Yes issue to use to appeal to your vote - and they are deluded, for in fact the issue swung your vote to No. You will vote No again if they again propose, as the White Paper did, an injustice over giving citizenship by parental descent. You may also have voted No because Sturgeon threatened to take residence away from EU citizens, as a negotiating weapon, in exactly the way she now condemns May for doing.

If you are a citizen of another EU country and had no vote in the Euroref, how do you handle the question of which way you voted in it? They must know that poser would arise. If you are Polish, Danish, Irish etc, how do you answer the question whether you feel more Scottish or British?!

Sturgeon's absolute claim that we must stay in the actual EU and somehow defy both the Euroref's British result and Spain's veto on EU membership for us, is running out of momentum. Alex Neil, SNP minister, is now telling his own side to swallow that they are going to get less. That is a crisis of dream for the nats' wish driven sheep, who also are seeing that Brexit is not causing a tipping of public opinion in favour of indy. To retrieve anything, such as our place in the single market, we need to engage with doing that.

Neil says that a hard border with England is a disastrously unpopular vote loser, such that with it they can't win another indyref. But the unpopularity comes from folks expecting to actually be subject to this border and experience it as a barrier, as it would be if it was between 2 states. But not, if it was within a united Britain, such that British citizens and residents have this status on both sides, so can cross the line freely. They would not experience it as a hard border, and nor would anyone making a permitted visit to the whole UK. It would only be a hard border for the EU citizens exercising free movement to Scotland when they no longer can to England, and others who are allowed into only Scotland under a home rule power over immigration. That is how we could keep a united Britain with its importantly united citizenship and yet keep Scotland (and NI with us) in the single market while Englandandwales leaves it. Indeed, we could join the Schengen area too under this arrangement.