citizen holes?

"Any person who at present is entitled to British citizenship for any reason of Scottish background, will be entitled to Scottish citizenship." - is this the case?

And indeed: "Any person born after 1983 who would have been entitled to it if born before 1983".(When Britain made its rules viciously worse allowing itself to exclude kids born here to non-citizen parents.)

This is the simple statement the Yes campaign needs to make to prevent there being any gaps or loopholes in the description of citizenship in the White Paper. Voters could campaign for this statement, to the Yes campaign and our MSPs of Yes supporting parties. With this on simple statement, any flaws and loopholes anyone finds in the table of proposed citizenship criteria in the White Paper, which you can find at the end of chapter 7, will be automatically solved.

Without this, the campaign could be thrown away by any loophole found. If it was shown that any Scots from the diaspora were going to find it harder to belong to their own country when it is its own state than they are under the Union, bang would go the moral and anti-racist case for statehood which is based so strongly on reacting against the present frightening racist drift in British politics.

The references to parents who qualify for Scottish citizenship are a sloppily worded loophole that badly needs clarifying by making the statement proposed. The table is worded in the present tense, implying the parents qualify now hence are alive now, and if one of the possible qualifiers is to live in Scotland on independence day, then it implies being alive on the day. However, the question what if parents who met all the proposed citizenship critieria at the time of their deaths had died before independence day, is answered in question 379 of the question section at the end of the White Paper. Only when you see that do you see how it removes a danger there would be from reading only the table literally as it is written. For someone who would need their forbear's residence on the day as affecting whether the forbear was a potential citizen, the danger of a loophole is certainly still right in there, for from the wording it is not clear whether a parent who died before the day is considered for which country they were intending to live in on the day, and what if they died before their intended move?

The White Paper's wording suggests the SNP has not listened to anyone or learned anything since it was tripped up by Labour in the 1999 election over defining citizenship in much this way: a Labour broadcast that said, if you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a citizen? no, they will have to apply.

The White Paper has messed up here, also in describing as automatic the citizenship of all the non-Scots living around the world with no connection with Scotland who but who chanced to be born here. It is an obvious fact that they will not become citizens against their will of a state they don't live in or want anything to do with. Obviously only if they register their existence will they be citizens. This means in practice the position for them is the same as for Scots born in exile and returning from it through their parents'/grandparents' etc. It is bad that for hastily written rhetorical purposes it has not been worded the same, when sat down and reasoned on it amounts to the same in practice. The White Paper's questions section seems to say it is for an international law reason so that they will be our citizens rather than stateless, but again, logically that should apply the same to both groups.

It is good, though, that the word "register", which means taking up a right, has been used, rather than "apply" which would imply the possibility of a no. But the inconsistent arrangement as described in the White Paper has allowed some of the papers, describing it, to use the word "apply" and frighten voters by it.

A much worse example of racial mischief features in the right wing Spectator's article on the White Paper. Its its list of what it contrives to present as surprise developments, under citizenship it says: "It had been assumed that only those living in Scotland at the time of independence would become citizens of the new Scotland. It has now emerged that Scottish citizenship will be an awful lot wider than that. The White Paper reveals that anybody who was born in Scotland can become a Scottish citizen and have a Scottish passport. Not only that, but all those with a Scottish parent or grandparent could become citizens of the new Scotland too."

"It had been assumed" by who exactly? Only by said Spectator itself. Never has it been suggested at any point in the campaign that Scots living in economic exile who can move back now within the Union would suddenly cease to be able to move back. No national liberation that would be. Only mischievous appealers to the racist vote would conceive the thought.

On the question of whether anybody who was born in Scotland can become a Scottish citizen, rhetoric had always suggested it but the White Paper is cagier than that and is actually CONTRADICTORY! The potential Scottish or British citizenship eligibilities that your parents or grandparents had are involved in the tables of different categories of opportunity to register, including for folks born here. Though it is good that this means the White Paper is at odds with birthplace racism, it would be bad enough to blow the whole Yes campaign apart if loopholes are found that exclude anyone with a background here that could be registered through their birthplace, from citizenship and being able to live here. Hence the need for a simple policy statement as suggested above, to keep the position clear and just. The contradiction is between question 379, which says citizenship by descent would require a parent or grandparent to have been born here, and the table, which does not say that and just says those forbears needed to qualify to be citizens, which could be in other ways than birth.

What if the campaign is delegitimised after the result ?

When voting on a break between countries, that is too permanent and serious to expect you can undo the result if it loses its legitimacy at a later time because one side's campaign gets shown to have majored on a lie.

"* That if, either during polling hours or after them, the winning side lets it be known, either voluntarily or by an admission under questioning, that one of the factual claims made in their campaign, against the other side's position, had been false, then the result should not stand as valid. "
is what I lobbied to my MSPs after the AV referendum. It is vital for the independence one. Should we choose either way on it, as a result of factual claims made by the winning side that later get proved to be lies? How clear will Scotland's status be then, and how happy will you be with it?

Then make sure this proposed rule gets adopted. yes it reopens the legitimacy of the AV result too. Here is today's news from the Press Complaints Commission, from the AV campaign:

www.pcc.org.uk/case/resolved.html?article=NzIyMQ%3D%3D the Daily Mail
www.pcc.org.uk/case/resolved.html?article=NzIyMg%3D%3D the Sun
had both reported that an organisation supporting the Yes campaign would profit from selling voting machines if they won. Yet the AV proposal never required voting machines. 8 weeks after the result it influenced, this report is now found to have been not true. i.e.
stephensliberaljournal.blogspot.com/2011/06/and-another-thingpcc-says-chancellor.html - and another thing...PCC says the Chancellor lied for #No2AV

I think Andy May who posted this here on another Lib Dem blog www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-unfair-and-unbalanced-the-scandal-of-print-media-referendum-coverage-24623.html, wants to spread the message and will be happy to have this quoted:
" Let’s just think about the context in which this fallacious claim was printed:

• The Chancellor of the Exchequer stands up and makes false claims designed to damage the credibility of the Yes campaign at a point in mid-April when the campaigns were running neck and neck in the polls.
• 2 newspapers with a combined daily circulation of 6 million reprint these controversial claims several days before the postal vote ballots drop and give no right of reply to the organisation involved.
• A central plank of the No2AV campaign was the £250 million claim which, as David Blunkett later admitted, was also made up. The Sun and Mail took the lie one stage further, making it appear that not only did AV cost the taxpayer large sums of money but that the Yes campaigners were being made rich out of it. All totally false.
• Polling day is May 5 yet the Press Complaints Commission takes nearly 2 months to rule against the papers despite the impact of their false claims potentially affecting the referendum vote of millions of people.
• Despite the original prominence of the stories on page 2 of the sun and the front page of the Mail, 2 short letters are the only required retraction.

This case and plenty of others like it in the referendum and the last general election highlight a huge imbalance in election media coverage between broadcast, which has strict balance guidelines and print which has no balance guidelines and near impunity when it comes to what they can print. Not only can print journalists take an angle on a story and decide whether or not the target individual or organisation has a right to reply, they can get away with repeating false or dubious claims safe in the knowledge the PCC will do little or nothing about it.

The PCC is toothless, stuffed full of self interested journalists and so weak it is unable to stop unscrupulous party hacks and biased journalists and editors misleading their readership on serious political issues.

What does this example actually demonstrate? That there was collusion between press and politicians to repeatedly mislead the public over a crucial constitutional issue to secure their own power base through illegitimate means. "

Both sides' plans for our next referendum will need to sound less corrupt than this.

The next referendum must be protected from the last one's failings

So as the AV referendum ends, defeated by the irregular disparity allowed to happen between each campaign's reach to voters, and the media and money power behind No, so from the same day the SNP's majority victory makes the independence referendum a live issue considered certain to happen. Salmond wants to wait a few years for fear he would lose it now, but some Conservatives, including Michael Forsyth in the Scotsman today, have spoken of raising the bill in the British parliament to call the referendum now, in hope of a Unionist win.

All the more reason why public availability of all the info that was submitted to the Scottish govt in its consultation on the referendum, matters for purposes of informing the voters in their coming decision. Why, as is the point of this blog, none of the submissions to that consultation must stand censored, and mine stands made public in the second post made at the beginning of this blog.

The SNP's landslide is also all the more reason why accountability for its actions matters. This is one to keep an eye on, especially for (1) the voters believed to have voted SNP as a presently preferred government without being convinced on independence, or (2) the voters who prefer another party's picture of independence, e.g. Green or SSP, than Salmond's economically conventional picture.

When the new MSPs get sworn in, they should all be asked what safeguards they support for the referendum's fair conduct, in the light of what we have just experienced this week. It is also an issue for MPs, as from today, with the declared possibility of a referendum bill in the British parliament. I have just mailed my Lib Dem MP and asked if he backs the following measures, to be enacted as conditions of any referendum being legitimate. See if they raise a smile:

* That both sides should be required, and fully funded with parity, to send a booklet mailshot on their position to every household in the country that is voting. This surely was established constitutionally as a precedent for a campaign's fair parity, by the referendum in 1975 when the government arranged for these 2 mailshots to happen.

* That any factual claim made by one side's campaign about the other's position, the other campaign should be entitled to an equal scale of distribution to voters, in all ways, of their answer to the claims, as the original claim had.

* That if, either during polling hours or after them, the winning side lets it be known, either voluntarily or by an admission under questioning, that one of the factual claims made in their campaign, against the other side's position, had been false, then the result should not stand as valid.