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.

abridged

It was the SNP government who chose in 2010 not to go ahead with maintenance work on stressed joints on the Forth road bridge. They had engineering reports that it was needed to avert the present closure crisis. It has been uncovered here.

Some nats on Facebook are arguing that other parties who were reluctant to support building the new bridge (arguments should it be bridge or tunnel, etc) should be blamed. Regardless of what views on the new bridge were right or wrong, they are not causes of the present situation - because the new bridge is not yet completed so it has not yet taken any traffic off the old bridge. It's entirely the choices made about the old bridge that lead to the old bridge's situation. Including, to the engineer of the Skye bridge, who lives in Queensferry, telling the Daily Record it may never be reopenable to heavy lorries.

When they were consulting the public on starting the new bridge, some of us pointed out that the known overstress wear on the old bridge, from the heavy freight beyond what it was designed to take, was continuing all the time and they could stop it by diverting the heavy freight onto a ferry. Did they? They may now have to do that, but it will take them time to arrange it and obtain appropriate vessels, and meanwhile the lorries can't cross or have to clog up the Clackmannanshire bridge. If they had arranged a freight ferry back c2010, as an outcome of studying the situation towards needing the new bridge,they would have had time to plan and work it out properly.

You notice we are getting help from the union with extra train rolling stock sent from England, because Scotrail is not already have it, either for emergencies or for relieving the overcrowded too short commuter trains in the Central Belt that have been suffered for years.

Shout down all other parties.

A selection of the words of SNP supporters at present.

Labour's Kezia Dugdale in yesterday's daily record thought voters need to contemplate that this is who the present SNP are, on this wave of emotion:

• Candidate known on Twitter as "Paco McSheepie" calls No voters quislings, thinks pensioners should not have the vote, and says an SNP majority in this election would be grounds to declare independence unilaterally.
• Candidate in Paisley says an SNP win of over 30 seats would be grounds to call a second referendum. Called that "the rope that a hung parliament hangs on."
• Candidate in Inverness: "Never mind the referendum, just declare independence."
• Candidate in Midlothian: "It wasn't a No vote, just a not yet."

There was more talk of UDI in the latest Scots Independent pamphlet, not one you see on the newsstands, I saw it on the reference shelf of a library in Edinburgh. Gordon Wilson, former SNP leader, whose anti-gay religious views hardly make him seem the SNP's radical wing, is another one writing of a UDI without a referendum. So radical it's treasonable, he wrote for the nats to prepare to do that if a British referendum on the EU goes for leaving it.

Then there's this I found through Facebook. A vision of democracy tweeted by one "Mulder1981":
"The SNP winning another landslide victory shows that Scotland wants change. The SNP should shout down all other political parties in Scotland and self-govern the nation towards independence. It's the will of the people who are politically engaged and care about the country's future and potential. Alba gu braith."

This line is familiar from some well known nationalist histories just across both the Irish and North Seas from us. Not good ones.

Divided world shut doors

As anyone on Facebook or following the proliferation of new Yes sites will know well, the loud mass of Yes supporters, their movement, are neither healing the divide nor accepting the outcome as holding for the longer term, at all. All the correct noises that they should do that, made by SNP leaders in the days after the result, have become a lot of hot air. They intend to pester and peer pressure the country non-stop, blame everything that happens on the No vote, and invent accusations of betrayal of the Vow no matter how much new devo we get, and starting before there has been time to do anything.

So we don't have to take any notice? Maybe, but there is a sinister detail their messages are now becoming tauntingly open about. If they can keep pestering the political culture to treat elections every couple of years as votes on indy, and/or if the SNP government continues and finds excuses to hold further referendums within a short time, even illicitly without British agreement, then they are looking for only one win. They intend to get their state by non-stop cultural persistence effecting a culture shift by the immoral means of peer pressure until they can cow the culture into considering the Vow broken even if it has not been, and win a vote that the system will accept. They are totally open - that after this they can take for granted that nobody will listen to any campaign to restore the Union. Indy once done will be perpetual.

This does not make sense, from the unionist point of view. To accept that the union could never be restored puts its defenders at a disadvantage which they don't need to volunteer to accept. It comes from the present post-Imperial world culture, the fragmentation of countries, and from ruthless neocon capitalism's culture that we all leave each other to sink or swim alone and don't help each other. Applying that to countries, it means that in the modern world there is no culture, as there was in 1707, for states to unite.

We have the EU, but it is a sharing, rather than a merging, of aspects of statehood by what remain independent countries. Its biggest problem is the conspiracy theory of a long term plan to be a single state. Hence even its measures towards a citizenship union are now suffering a disastrously inhumane racist reaction against them, that is so distressing to watch.

A nationalist movement which has turned out contemptuous of democracy and based on emotion, mob culture, intolerance, conformism, and able to produce threat feeling, must not have historical odds of winning handed to it on a plate by its opponents. If the world culture of the time has that effect, it must be changed.

Nats are keen on repeating that no country nowadays seeks to give up its independence. The world culture at present does not offer that option. When Bob Geldof backed the Union and the nats cried hypocrite because he is a citizen of independent Ireland, they complained he had not asked for it to rejoin Britain - but has anyone suggested the option exists? He could still historically wish it had not seceded, but see more nationalist trouble in trying to make it culturally possible to reverse that. As part of countries'selfish nastiness and excludingness towards each other's citizens, what the racists want to restore in Europe, states don't want to grow and take on other citizens.

The nats are wrong, in Lesotho landed by the postcolonial world with its awkward statehood inside South Africa, there is the People’s Charter Movement seeking annexation. They see Lesotho's statehood as just making it an economically disadvantaged ghetto, a reserve of vulnerable workers, excluded from citizenship equality in South Africa, who by fair common sense should be the same as all the surrounding peoples and have what they have. So to get it by union, by joining South Africa. But South Africa does not want to take them, cynically they would be an extra load of citizens to have to treat more fairly than now.

The nats are wrong to claim that no ex-British country has ever wanted to give up its independence - Newfoundland 1933, also for economic reasons. But see how long ago that was, it was before the present postcolonial culture. The concept was still allowed then. Zanzibar, in a not quite democratic way but that's the same as 1707, was able within the postcolonial culture to opt out of statehood and form a union with Tanganyika in 1964, Tan-zan-ia.

Contrary to the barriers between states that the nats are relying on, in my submissions at both Brit and Scot level to the devolution consultations I am proposing again what I did in the endgame, of the referendum - a full CITIZENSHIP UNION of as much of the free world as will join it. At minimum including the 3 countries that asked us to vote no but are ex-British themselves, they need to do it to make their position to us sensible and not contradictory. A citizenship union does not take away any participating country's independence, it does not require a union of government, it is simply a step in recognition of the humanitarian common sense of global culture and dispersed families and friends. It is simply an agreement between countries that all of each other's citizens are their own citizens too, and to no longer have citizenship exist of any one of them singly but only of their whole union.

the side without credence.

BUSTED !

A Facebook photo from a No-voting page identifies planted SNP members faking at being indy-supporting Labour members.

www.facebook.com/#!/VoteNo2014/photos/a.177722718953393.48305.174186732640325/735570689835257/?type=1&theater

Yeah - and?

www.facebook.com/VoteNo2014/photos/a.177722718953393.48305.174186732640325/658717074187286/?type=1&theater

Summed up perfectly by the SNP's incredible non-reply, on TV last night, just of "Yeah - and?" to the point that their policy is to surrender sovereignty into a union! and by these Facebook comments on it:

• When Annabel Goldie asked Fiona Hyslop about the ceding of sovereignty a currency union would create, she had a very simple response "Yeah....and?", It now seems like SNP ministers don't have much to say on some of the most important issues in this debate!
• So, having won your Independence, you're going to give some/all of it back to the people you've just won it from, except WITHOUT any input into ANY decisions that will be taken on your behalf by those very same people. Is it just me or is this a totally bonkers suggestion!
• At last an honest response from an Independence supporter. It's a shame it's a mere foot-stamping, petulant response worthy of a teenager who has just been found when she lied.
• Wanting both to use the pound and have the Bank of England setting your fiscal policies for you. That is Independence so light it is verging on Featherweight.

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.

Yes for who?

On the same day as the news of their sudden narrowing of the polls gap, the Yes side may have blown any deserving to win. Unless they put something right, they have let it slip through their fingers just when your spirits were highest, tragically by a thoughtless piece of racist sloppiness from the ideas-conservative heart of the SNP.

The latest Yes paper, which came through my door today, states "all British citizens who were born here or live here on day one of independence will have a right to a Scottish passport." It said nothing at all about the diaspora born's position, it was written in a way that the public can read as meaning the diaspora born who can't move back here before independence day are not necessarily entitled at all. It presents the exile born as not counting if they are not already here, it does not present the diaspora as equal.

They may be kids who will only be adult after the date, or young adults stuck in the family economic dependence that is deliberate Tory policy,

I know the White Paper clarifies that the exile born for 2 generations can also register for a passport by right - btw a betrayal of Salmond's plan of only a few months previously, to make it 3 generations. But this point is about the public message, rather than the less known detailed facts. The presentation has suddenly sloppily slid back to the 1999 election, when the SNP made that crucial policy foul-up and was open to attack by Labour as dividing families. This may cause racist bullying, among the thick laddish type of adult, and among schoolkids some of whom are in the 16 franchise where already before this Yes was said to be trailing unexpectedly.

An interesting site linked to by Yes supporters on Facebook is "100 Artists and Creatives who support Scottish independence." The list includes diaspora born Lesley Riddoch. Were the folks in the campaign she supports remembering all their supporters when they wrote the paper?

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.