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.

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.

Spot on question

Well done Johann Lamont, getting Salmond with the right question at PMQs yesterday.

Yes I will call it PMQs, the contrivance of "first minister" was never used for colonial Prime Ministers or the Canadian provinces or for Northern Ireland's in 1921-72, and a Prime Minster is a first minister.

Salmond needs to be more factual, in his position, than to make up speculations and claim they will happen because they sound sensible to him. Otherwise voters will start to feel he is selling them a dud. Saying that after independence, outside and separated from the UK, we could make the UK give us a seat in the bank of England's structure for issuing the UK's currency. Totally silly. Exactly as Lamont said, he was just crossing his fingers and hoping for the best: and trying to bounce it, too. Most voters, without needing to follow politics, know you can't take for granted without asking, a foreign country will provide you with a facility on demand just because you say it would be sensible. No wonder the Bank of England has said no.

Campaign questions intimately related to the question of honesty over the SNP filtering the public availability of consultation responses. Does Salmond listen to any items voters raise on the position around independence? Will voters get any position out of him on other issues than just those he has chosen for a fudged feelgood campaign for a statehood not fully explained in many of his aspects? So does he actually care where ordinary folks' state of life will be?