THE SCOTTISH REFERENDUM IS A HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCY.
THE YES SIDE IS SNEAKING PAST VOTERS UNAWARES A HORRIBLE RACIST PLAN TO DIVIDE FAMILIES, RUINING THEIR PRATCIAL ABILITY TO HELP EACH OTHER AGAINST POVERTY OR IN TIME OF MEDICAL NEED. A POWER FOR OUR NEW STATE TO TURN SCOTS AGAINST SCOTS BY REJECTING WHOLE GROUPS OF SCOTS FROM THEIR COUNTRY.
THEY WANT TO GET RID OF THE COMMON SENSE OF INHERITING CITIZENSHIP AUTOMATICALLY, AND TO MAKE IT REFUSABLE BY THE STATE FOR THOSE SCOTS WHO CAN'T ARRANGE TO LIVE HERE ON ONE PARTICULAR DAY, AND WHO WERE BORN OUTSIDE SCOTLAND TO EXPAT PARENTS, TO GET CITIZENSHIP. THAT WILL AFFECT THEIR ENTITLEMENT TO LIVE HERE, IF COMMON TRAVEL BREAKS DOWN. THEY WANT TO PUT EVERY POSSIBLE PREJUDICE IN THE WAY OF SCOTS' ENTITLEMENT TO LIVE HERE, AND TO MAKE CITIZENSHIP SO RESTRICTED IT AMOUNTS TO A PURGE OF THE NATION. IT IS A TOTAL BETRAYAL OF SCOTS WORLDWIDE.
I wrote this for those friends who tend to follow the organised lefty scene and are voting Yes on its tide of optimistic dreams, and kept sending me Facebook invites to Yes meetings. Always trusting that scene and anywhere its group, psychology leads, they simply have not noticed or thought to check up on Yes's plans for citizenship. They have trusted that all is bound to be well and non-racist with anything the lefty parties support. With good welcoming pro-immigration consciences, just like mine, they have only heard Yes's progressive sounding spin during 2013 on encouraging a certain number of new entry.
In Britain's present racist mood, neither side nor the media have seen fit to draw your attention to a betrayal of Scottish families against ECHR article 8 on family life, an anti-immigration hate crime on the Yes side. Do you have a real enough conscience to take pause and look into that when you hear of it, now? Not like the fanatical nationalists you know your conscience does not sit easily with, willing to vote for this betrayal just out of abstract national pride, like the 2 I got when leafletting in Dumfries who just shouted out "this is a disgrace, it's all lies" and probably will be too scared to check up and discover it's not.
Yes will make inheritance of Scottish citizenship from a parent refusable by the state. It will take away the common sense principle of family life of automatically inheriting the background citizenship from a parent's origins, of the country your family life might want to resume in. Folks who move away often intend to return, the prompters to move away economically reluctantly have even been cited as a Yes argument. So it makes no practical sense, it is spiteful racial hatred as bad as any other you have ever encountered in citizenship rules, to put a question mark over such returners bringing their offspring with them. No Scots who have moved away, mostly to rUK, in recent times and who have families there to be caught by present events, had any expectation that it would result in a threat to their offspring's entitlement to live here, this is the last thing they imagined possible to come actually from the nats who are supposed to care about us as a people.
But you will notice in hindsight that return of the diaspora, undoing the Clearances, is not a principle you have ever heard about from nats. It shows the betrayal has been long prepared, it is an electoral choice to appeal to a bigoted version of nationalism that is anti-outsider, motivated by fear of the world beyond our closed little huddle, that only likes or cares for the population already here. Hence, in a racist period, to jettison being associated with immigrant unpopularity for returners. This is hidden deceitfully in the concept "civic nationalism", a term that has been claimed to be ever so enlightened and avoidant of racial attitudes, but no attitude can be more racist and hating than the "civic nationalist" line that the whole project is only concerned with the folks who already live here. This is how Pat Kane, after a lecture he gave, came to tell me that he would be first to speak up and say "this is wrong" to making any further provision for the diaspora.
Is that what organised left optimism made you think you were voting for? I discovered the betrayal, and that No is the less racist vote, from enquiring into the White Paper plan that citizenship by descent can be registered for, giving evidence of the descent. From as soon as this came out, I went through all possible routes, the government, Yes campaign national and local, and the Yes supporting parties, asking to know simply that this registering would not be refusable. The registering provision covers grandchildren too, so simply by saying it was not refusable they could have put themselves in the position of offering a better deal for the diaspora than the status quo, and then, if the continuity of the principle of unrefusable inheritance was firmly built into the new state and under no threat, that would have made me vote Yes. I am a supporter of global free movement, I hate the global apartheid of any borders, and that points in favour of No that you have to think thrice before creating any new border, throwing away a well-integrated union of nations that already exists with a long history of free movement. But it can be right to do that if you are going to resist a racist move in the state you are dividing and make borders more open overall. What I most want from either side is the most humanitarianly generous borders we can get but specifically starting from the moral priority of our country's openness to its own diaspora. I have no innate loyalty to a state, on either side, so they were not wasting their breath on an already unbudgeable voter. Instead, they are the ones who showed they won't budge.
The answer, which you can check on by your own enquiries, is IT WILL BE REFUSABLE. It will affect who can live here if the common travel area breaks down as it easily can. Of people already living at the time of independence, only the ones who are preexisting British citizens, on top of chancing either to be resident here on one particular day or born here, get unrefusable citizenship. The system is not even tied to one form of prejudice, it mixes every form of prejudice you can think of to be as restrictive and anti-outsider as possible. Though it discriminates against exile-born Scots, it is not exactly what I call "birthplace racist" -the horrible school bully bigotry of regarding everyone's country as dictated by birthplace, which everyone exile-born has encountered as a form of racist bullying and which has been visibly wrong ever since the Babylonian exile of the ancient Jews. The system actually also rats on an old SNP pledge of citizenship for everyone born in Scotland, it requires inheritance of British citizenship too, some nationalism and an obvious appeal to racist voters. As a result they never gave any answer for a real cruelly treated person in America, who I have met online, who can't get British citizenship or live here because he was born in Glasgow just after a rule change in 1983 to parents who were only here on temporary student permissions - he was hoping for better from the indy movement, instead his case does not create the moral dilemma of owing to him to vote Yes because they have given him absolutely nowt. None of you however wishfully optimistic can look away from that revelation of Yes's real character.
So the system is residency-racist - designed to be only for the narrowest conservative view of the folks who are already here and who do not fall under any of several prejudices against belonging, and to make the rest of the world rejectable including the rest of Scots. That means to vote Yes is to vote for A NEW CLEARANCES, the massive hate crime of a rejection of Scots by a Scottish state, a hating xenophobic purge of the nation that will scar our history. It is more than just emotional, important though that always is against racism's impact, it goes directly to the practical economic survival of families. Families divided into different countries against their will are prevented from coming together to support each other against poverty, including by taking each other in, and in time of medical need.
The Yes argument of no more Tory governments, even if it was right, is totally answered and thrown away by this. Yes means creating a power to reject Scots in rUK, to abandon them to stay there, under governments made more often Tory by our departure, to suffer every hardship thrown at them cut off from any family support available to them. This of course impacts on the lives of families they have here, e.g. parents who left temporarily and have returned. In having a conscience against racism you have already swallowed that it's wrong to vote for hateful purges against parts of society even if the folks offering them also offer good economic promises for the other parts of society they favour, as the Nazis did. You have felt horror at that how that wins anti-immigrant parties votes. If you are a left winger and vote Yes because you want no more Tory governments, knowing what Yes intends for citizenship, you will do exactly the same thing, purge a country of a population group, as well as you will vote upon our own families and next of kin an actively increased vulnerability to Tory governments.
Besides, I actually heard at Common Weal's big day, which was Yes-supporting, a panel of lefties including SSP discuss post-Yes prospects and they expect indy to be such a shift in both SNP's and Labour's definition of themselves that both are bound to go through an uncertain period of redefining who they are and what they are for, which will be an electoral weakness for them at a time when the Tories, renamed, will be released from their unpopular association with distant-feeling British governments and will be well placed for a serious electoral challenge. So lefty Yessers themselves are not expecting no more Tory governments, it's just another of the SNP's many wishful myths, and in 2010 the SNP vote was 491386 and Tory vote was 412855, not that much different! And where is no more Tory governments in the nats wanting a gradual several years transition away from using the British benefits system, totally exploding every unevidenced claim that voting Yes might be an escape from austerity? As also do the impacts on trade and world ratings of us using another country's currency without permission or any role in running it or of a collapsed currency union. I learned only from a public debate, not from any media why? that you can't even join the EU without a central bank.
The other Yes argument usually popular with left wingers, and not half as popular with the whole country as nats used to keep saying, is Trident. Tommy Sheridan called Trident "scrap metal", on the reasoning that it will never be used. Look what moral perspective that puts the racism issue into - there would be nothing moral whatever in taking scrap metal as a morally driving reason for voting for the persecution and cruelties described above. This would be so even if CND's persistent wishful claim that us getting rid of Trident would result in it going completely, was right. You would never consider voting for far right types of racist persecution to get rid of Trident, so don't vote for this one either. But adding to that, you know anyway it's a clutching at straws dream whose high chance of not happening could leave you having voted for racial hatred for no gain at all. rUK has it planned out to build a new base and keep Trident temporarily in America until it's ready, and you have heard many nat voices wanting to trade keeping Trident for the currency union in which we also absurdly would not be fiscally independent and would still have our spending controlled by British Tory governments we could no longer vote against and will be more frequent as a result, again so much for no more Tory governments or for escaping from austerity.
That inherited citizenship will be refusable I first got admitted by SNP minister Alex Neil, at the first Yes meeting I went to - where there was no comeback to answers. He said it's because of keeping out undesirables. If you have any critical thinking capacity, your alarm bells would go off instantly, to ask exactly who the undesirables are and does it mean the poor or the unemployed? Absolutely key Yes figure Jim Sillars, who is doing loads of touring meetings for them, confirmed it probably does, he would would want it to, and he claims to be a socialist. To an audience to whom my question had already raised the thought of dividing families, he opened with the instantly familiar racist sentiment "We can't have an open door", where within the Union we already do have an open door, and he said he wants the exile-born to be subject to filtering for desirable skills exactly the same as is planned for migrants without any connections here at all. He openly told them "WE MUST NOT BE AFRAID OF THIS".
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD ANYTHING SO INHUMANLY RUTHLESS RACIST FROM ANY FIGURE OUTSIDE THE FAR RIGHT PARTIES? Yet SSP leader Colin Fox sitting beside him said not a word to disown it and has continued to do touring meetings with Sillars and call him a friend at them. This remains unknown to the Yes faithful who are not following this question, so it is hidden from them in plain sight. Sillars is anti-EU too and to have Yes making so much use of him as a speaker, to trade unions too and incredibly the exile-born Yes supporter Lesley Riddoch is doing a meeting with him in Livingston, points further against Yes's reliability towards the EU. Think of that as you remember Sturgeon's recent threat to throw out all the EU residents already here, they will "lose their residency rights", if we get any trouble rejoining. That was a scale of slipping of the mask on nat racism that if you ignore it to cling to a dream you are part of something worse then UKIP. When I first became No I was worried about Britain leaving the EU and had to check my conscience with a Polish friend, who to my interest turned out already to be a No voter. Now the duty to vote No to protect Polish friends from the racially ugliest agenda you have heard from a major party, is clear and uncontestable.
That the Yes we are faced with is as vicious as this is a humanitarian emergency in our history. Sillars's tooth and claw capitalist plan to divide families takes no account of bad education systems, troubled families and interventions/social work situations, unrecognised conditions like autism or dyslexia, or Savile-type hidden abuses in institutions, all as causes of not having high value skills. This in a political culture that is still utterly closed to allowing evidence on these things, like mine against damaging education methods, to be heard. So it is a plan to further punish for being victims, all abuse survivors and all folks who had their childhoods damaged by unscrupulous adults, by having their country reject them for it. To vote Yes knowing this, is to vote to add to the longer life toll of crimes upon children and to punish their victims.
Yet get this, I have even found a Radical Independence stallholder willing to defend Sillars and call this unprecedented racism good socialism. He argued it is racist to give anyone an advantage from their background connections and fair to treat everyone outside the country the same. So the Marxists of Radical Indy want to select workers like so much meat for their profit value to the rich, to abuse abuse survivors, and to hammer ordinary families' liberty to come together to protect each other from poverty. He knew this practical point was unanswerable for he kept avoiding it by diverting onto repeating, several times after I had already answered it, the racist question "How far back would you go?"
Friends in Fife invited me to a Yes meeting in Kirkcaldy with Tariq Ali. Is all of the above any background to accept the pathetic "I would hope so" that was all he was left able to say on trusting Yes's intentions on citizenship? Where was the trustworthiness in the written answers my early enquiries got if answered at all, the obvious evasion of just saying read the White Paper - to a question on clarifying it? Not until it became possible to use enquiries on the campaigning rules as a lever for clearer policy answers did I get any, and they totally leave it open for these horrors to happen:
Policy officer Nickola Paul who wrote the policy: "Legislation will be made to establish detailed rules for Scottish citizenship in time for independence. Therefore further details of the procedural requirements and administration of the relevant rules in relation to Scottish citizenship applications will be available when the legislation is drafted." So vote not knowing what they are going to do. Yessers often fall back on this: oh the White Paper is only proposals and we will we will only decide all this after winning the ref and you can help us write our constitution. Spiv trickery, selling you a product with no guaranteed content, saying gamble on the outcome to a process that will be full of folks who were willing to follow such evil lead plans. Compare it to No's deal where the Union includes the status quo certainty already existing of a united citizenship. I met some decent-seeming Yessers from their strong Helensburgh group who were concerned to get their lead answerer to take it to their lawyer and see what solution she could get me, she ceased to answer any more after only coming up with this: "Apart from birth, parental birth and residence on Indy day there is no automatic right to a Scottish Passport. Our law incorporates the ECHR as will our constitution. Our political and social culture is to bring families together and not divide them. Our political class reflects our society which is compassionate. However we have a duty to our nation and the wider world to police our borders and be measured and responsible in our security and international affairs. There can be no carte blanche on this matter.."
Which is just proof of everything I have written. The "parental birth" reference is to the White Paper's provision for future born children, which is tied up in spiteful complex strings: it also requires that if they are born in Scotland their parent must already be a permanently permitted resident at the moment of birth, and if they are born outside, requires that their parents chose to register the birth in the correct way, though it's not the baby's fault if they don't. More nasty tricks designed to pile up the maximum of range excuses for power to reject folks, totally in the character of the worst racist-influenced citizenship provisions in other countries that have justice campaigns going on against them, and not at all in the spirit of Yes's propaganda claiming to be liberal, rendering it lies.
If you are going to trust a political class at its word on being compassionate where it promises nothing at all except to breach the citizenship inheritance principle and refuse any shred of safeguards, you are hooked to a cult. Indy has become like the new communism the way folks' desperate dreams are vested in it. The way Yessers will go on about economic sufferings and poverty, it's the first thing they do in all their meetings, to create a peer pressure, without giving any evidence that they will disappear under indy with our 2 neocon major parties and the Tories easily strong enough to come back. They just take it for granted and go for peer pressure to mask the lack of evidence.
This fits with the well known pattern cited by J K Rowling, that every doubtful questioning of any Yes prediction gets called scaremongering. It's a cult selling unevidenced dreams and shouting down questions. All its policies and prosperity predictions based on predicting that other parties will do everything Eck hopes they will do, when they can easily choose not to. The cybernats, I have had 3 encounters with their sham debate groups on FB matching the experiences of many who have been turned on personally for having any other view than faithfully uncritically following Yes. The national feeling of intimidation that is preventing folks from displaying No posters. The dishonest cult-like in-group intolerant character, of the form of nationalist culture that has prevailed, bears out the character of movement that would betray the diaspora.
So I included Helensburgh in my "no to a new clearances" campaign, which mostly has been Borders targetted. For the British-wide racist crisis certainly worsens the Scottish emergency, I have had 4 newspaper letters on it published but largely the media and indeed the No campaign have not chosen to focus on it, because they know it could raise a good pressure upon the British parties too to become nicer about immigration than they want to be. So I lodged a European parlt petition, 1448, against accepting the ref process as fair or a new state as validly mandated in all the EU's dealings with it, if the mass of voters were unaware of Yes's citizenship plans. A duty to voter awareness. Not naive enough to depend on the petition getting formally upheld in order to succeed. This petition makes the challenge that not to do these things would be a bad precedent for the EU against what it is, so just by being lodged it has already succeeded, putting this challenge in the record always there to refer back to.
