lying about rape definitively provenly exists

The Eleanor Williams case in Cumbria is the most definitive proof that you or Nicola Sturgeon could ever need, that lying about rape exists. Hence that radical feminist dogma that it does not exist has always been a crime against human rights, conspiring to defeat justice. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/03/eleanor-williams-lied-grooming-gang-guilty-perverting-justice Convicted of the most publicly prominent, and on a group scale, with a made up story about a grooming gang, of serial crimes of false rape accusation, where there were clear alibis and evidences against the accusation. Whence is Rape Crisis's answer? Conviction on words against other words, whether it is 1 or even 2 persons' words, is never safe, never objective evidence. To allow it is always a most basic violation of human rights, the oldest human right of all. Usually Tory blogger Effie Deans, completely right about this, warned on Nov 14 of Sturgeon brewing a plan to abolish juries in rape cases, on grounds that they find innocent at a rate not fitting the witch-hunters' dogma. Including, any thinking observer instantly points out, in Alex Salmond's case, where Sturgeon herself had appeared to anticipate conviction and it was going to suit her in party. Remember too that Sturgeon was stopped, including by defence lawyers' opposition, from an attempt to suspend jury trials more generally at start of the Covid state of emergency in 2020. 20-20 vision on this will alert to and make the same law objections to every move against juries or for convictability on word, and will ever cite Eleanor Williams's case.

Union mandate !

3 Unionist parties 1 364 656
2 Nat parties 1 326 194

That is not a ref2 mandate, that is a Union mandate! Unionism won the popular vote. Our voting system of Additional Member may be PR but it's still not 1-2-3- preferential. Split votes on the same side can't be undone by the voters' second preferences. Hence, the side that is more split across parties can win the popular vote yet lose the election in seats.

Sturgeon of course knows those numbers. As popular vote, direct number of votes, determines a ref, we know quite safely tnat she does not want one now. Neither side can afford to risk one, as it does not take professorship for John Curtice to tell us. Sturgeon can't hold the SNP together without a nominal show of confrontation for one, but has just kicked safely imto next year any parliamentary action on it. Most of her followers understand that first she will try to whip up more support by grievancemongering, and see if they can climb out of thus 50-50 divide of the voters.

The Alba Party's failure suggests that nat voters are mostly on their movement's cautious side, not the emotionally raving militants' side. They are not bursting to force a ref2 when they know its result would be a complete gamble. This election was the first time that has been actually tested, between 2 nat parties with different views on speed of action.

Notable that Tommy Sheridan, who since 2017 has made speeches at indy rallies demandihg tnat ref2 be called unilaterally, joined the Alba Party.

Curious that both the Alba Party, and its Unionist counterpart George Galloway's All For Unity Party, both led apparently from the left, both chose to blow it with progresssive voters in the same socially reactionary way! Both supported the anti-transgender reaction against the self-identification law. Alba did it in a trans-excluding feminist way, you could find it on Youtube, women demanding a biological reality definition of women. All For Unity did it by arguing a family values line like the 1990s Major government, you could find it on its own site and Facebook, including a nasty sinister oppressive line for parents to have power to decide what to allow their kids to know. There was leafers' hubris in doing that. For Salmond, a recent survivor of the unjust witch'hunting of men, it ws surprising and seems illogical to side with the angrier more excluding type of feminism! Exactly the type that sides with the witch-hunting more fervently.

Labour comes out of the election best. Quite unlike the concerns of an unsure position that afflicted it in the Corbyn period, Labour stood on a definite manifesto line against a ref in this term of govt, and held its candidates to that line, with strong pre-election purging of candidates who haf aberrated from it.

guilt by quack theory

SOMEONE POSTING ON THE STURGEON/SALMOND SCANDAL HEARINGS - I have a background in understanding and teaching non-verbal communication having studied it at length, and delivered workshops and training to a multitude of groups including trainee psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, police officers and social workers.

ME - As a civil liberty concern towards this idea of "teaching non-verbal communication" from involuntary mannerisms not intended to be communication at all. - Post-traumatic stress and autism are both things that can make innocent folks show the same nerves or blanked emotion, as hasty or high-handed police/psychiatrists/teachers like to interpret as showing guilt.

Does what you are teaching incorporate that fact and avoidance of that danger? It can only be moral if it does.

#Saveourinternet

The EU is flawed. All acknowledge that, but for europhile nats surely this story is inconvenient in its timing. EU reforms of copyright systems are behind a threat to video freedom on the web. By making hosts like Youtube liable for copyright from the moment a video is posted, they would force then to block lots of stuff whose making certain of its content's copyright. This will stifle art. This is Youtube's campaign: www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/>www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/">www.youtube.com/saveyourinternet/

Meanwhile: deal Brexit, hard Brexit, People's Vote, indyref2, vote of confidence, election - anyone asks me or you what is going to happen, next there is only one honest answer! NO IDEA !

But the polls are hardening against an indyref2, for all the anger and pressures for it that are increasingly coming from the fundamentalist nats in parliament (Patrick Harvie) and in tge comments sections on the National newspaper's site and FB page. There are No leads of 4 to 10 points at present. Not an encouragement to Sturgeon to gamble !

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.

We will woo you with rudely blatant brush-offs

Sunday Herald: Sturgeon, ‘We will woo No voters to support the ‘beautiful dream’ of independence’
Me to Sturgeon's public message system: "We will woo Yes campaigners to the beautiful human rights duty, that the diaspora born offspring of Scotland's emigrants and travellers shall have unrefusable citizenship of their own country."
Reply: "Thank you for your letter of 15 March 2016. I have been asked to reply as our team is responsible for responding to enquiries to the Scottish Government about immigration. It may be helpful to know that immigration and citizenship are matters reserved to the UK Government and Scottish Government has no devolved powers on these matters.

I hope this information is helpful.
Yours sincerely Laura MacCallum."

They know perfectly well that a declaration to Yes campaigners is about conditions under independencem, and they answer with deliberate obtuseness about not having the powers now, saying nothing about independence at all. This is a STARK AND ARROGANT FAIL in Sturgeon's promised dialogue with No voters, right from its start. A contempt of the public in its blatantness of not answering. On the key item to whether a Scottish state will be human rights compliant to its own nation's families or a pariah racist state internationally.

This is a totally failed start for Sturgeon's wooing initiative.

no caviar thanks to Sturgeon

On Ed Miliband's Facebook page, a nat has written, about this devastating election:

- "You sealed your fate when you joined forces with Cameron and sent an army of MPs up to Scotland to bully,coerce and scare the Scots into voting no in the Indy Ref, that fate was further sealed when you treated the SNP as the enemy in the election. You are an idiot that has let the whole nation down."

My reply does not come from a voice who was always unionist, it comes from a voice who went into the ref open minded to see which side would be more liberal on keeping Scotland open to its diaspora, and suspected the nats might pander to racist voters by not being generous towards the broader diaspora gut never imagined they would actually taint our history with the fascism of betraying citizenship of their own country for the first generation diaspora. here is what I said on the economic issue, to the Tory near future we have all been slammed with, and remembering that the propsect of "no more Tory gvoernments we didn't vote fro" was the best sounding line in Yes's campaign:

- "The SNP made themselves an enemy and forced Ed's hand to do that, because they bragged so hubristically that they were going to dictate all his govt's actions. It's their fault. They cheated Ed of the win he was heading for, destroyed the govt they wanted to get, took away from us at the brink of reality the most progressive govt since before Thatcher and gave us another 80s-like trauma. They knew they were frightening voters in England and that the Tories were seizing on it.

Sturgeon said they were going to force CND disarmament. Any surprise at an 80s-like result to saying that? They were going to force a highly austere and absurd fiscal independence for Scotland, and force what Labour's economic policy would be - and talking so dictatorially made it credible for the Tories also to stick on them that they would force another referendum. In fact they were on a carried away ego trip, campaign publicity was their only means of leverage on Ed's govt towards even the more meritorious of their ideas - their anti-austerity line which only stood up if they did not get fiscal indy! - the SNP would not have had any means to force Ed's govt to do fiscal indy or CND, for their only threat was to put him out and Tories back in, electorally impossible for them to do hence already pledged not to. But only the minority of voters who take enough serious interest in politics to understand the system's workings realised this. The tragedy of this election is it has been swung on irrational feeling, that could not have happened if more humans were disposed to think.

We would still be worse off if Yes had won the ref, and if this election still had the same outcome in rUK despite no nationalist scare to cause it. As a so-called independent state avoiding the austerity burden of creating currency reserves by instead choosing to keep our spending and economic policy dictated to us by the Bank of England, we would now be under this Tory govt which would have a stable big majority instead of a precariously tiny one. We would have no future prospect either of voting it out or of having a leftward leverage in parlt if they lose their majority mid term. That's the difference if you take Scotland out of the election, last time we made the difference of the Tories not getting a majority, this time we made the difference of keeping it tiny enough to be unstable. "

frank

Comedian Frank Skinner, in advance of coming up to the festival, has given a muddled view of the ref. Desperate nats could take it as a celeb endorsement of voting Yes, because he has said that from a selfish point of view he would vote Yes if he lived here. He happens to be factually wrong in that, he has listened to all the unevidenced propaganda that life under indy would not be, as it would, just as neocon as British life. But the muddle is, from the point of view of living in England he has also endorsed us to vote No, saying that would be better for them, that seriously telling argument of the fear of rUK being left more right wing by our departure.

A reply to him, as posted under the Herald article:

Mr Skinner esquire, You might not vote Yes if you lived here and had done some digging for yourself into Yes's plans in an are the campaign has not focussed on: citizenship. Being conceived in Scotland would not be enough for your son to get their favour. They intend to make it refusable by the state, not an innate right, for the Scots who were born in the rest of Britain and can't be resident here on indy day to inherit citizenship from their parent. I have often found decent but overfaithful Yes voters shocked to hear of this, and generated a few extra enquiries by it, but always with the same answer. With government, Yes campaigns national and local, including Helensburgh who checked it with a lawyer, and all the yes supporting parties, they won't budge - they won't make this class of citizenship unrefusable. This is a basic assault on family life, against ECHR article 8, and a new clearances, an intention to reject Scots from their country. If the British or European shared travel areas break down, citizenship will affect who can live here - and only last week, totally slipping the mask, we heard Sturgeon's seriously unpleasant threat to throw out all the EU citizens here if we hit any problem with rejoining the EU. The so-called "civic nationalism" they have claimed is wonderfully progressive and non-racist turns out to be so deeply racist and anti-outsider that it even kicks away Scots' extended families - for what it means is only caring about the population who chance to already live here. Even when emigration features in Yes arguments!

Dividing families is a very practical matter preventing them caring for each other or supporting each other against poverty and welfare troubles. Yet a stallholder for Radical Indy kept dodging answering this with the diversion "How far back would you go?" and called it good socialism to subject the exile-born children of our emigrants to the same filtering for skills as Yes proposes for migrants from anywhere with no roots here at all. To reject our children taking no account of life misfortunes, education systems working badly, abuses hushed up by punishment as was revealed in Savile, as causes of not having high value skills.

I have petitioned the EU not to accept the ref process as legitimate or a new state as mandated if the mass of voters were unaware of these sick plans. Now the Yes campaign especially its meetings consists of an ever more raving Project Fear threatening all sorts of lurid right wing prospects if we vote No, without any disproof that they would happen the same under indy too as our major parties are just as neocon inclined as the British ones. Everything they threaten is actually a reason to vote No, in order not to betray branches of our families who have already suffered life misfortunes to also suffer rejection by their country and being abandoned to suffer all the threatened things living in the rest of Britain, cut off also from the help of their families here unless they emigrate too, and shorn of our leftward impact on British elections. While in the union we can vote against right wing horrors instead of having them thrust on us by a big powerful neighbour with no say in it, let's take your endorsement of voting No for that reason.

XENOPHOBIC MASK TOTALLY OFF THE NATS NOW!!

From the Scotsman, www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/sturgeon-warns-europeans-could-lose-right-to-stay-1-3475453 - STURGEON WARNS EUROPEANS COULD LOSE THE RIGHT TO STAY if we find ourselves outside the EU with a hiatus in that same rejoining process that Salmond lied about having legal advice on.

A big serious mask has now slipped. Now displaying to all a seriously unpleasant scale of anti-outsider character to the Yes cause and its so-called "civic nationalism". This use of a new clearances as a political bargaining tool is a wake-up call against voting Yes! to all voters with European friends.

This comes as no surprise to all voters who had checked up on Yes's citizenship plans, who already know that they will not budge from planning to divide families and shockingly close Scotland to some Scots by not giving unrefusable citizenship to the children of our emigrants who are exile-born and not resident here on indy day. I have often found decent Yes supporters shocked to hear of that and unable to answer it. Many of them must now be further troubled trying to explain their side putting this shadow over European guests.

I suggest they change side. You will feel refreshed in conscience and know that was the right and best step you could take. As can be followed in the back posts here, as a voter whose moral priority is pro-immigration and border liberalism my conversion to No has copnsistently become ever more right, after I had leaned cautiously to Yes in the early part of the campaign in 2012-3, when before they had revealed any plans their rhetoric was in favour of border liberalism, all now long since totally thrown away.

it was bluff and bluster by the Scottish govt too

Especially in arguments on the web, folks on the Yes side always claim to be the underdog with the media unionist and loaded against them.

The coverage this morning of the so-called exposee about currency union, coming from an unnamed minister who we as yet only have the journalist's word for exists, is a quite contrary example. It has been covered in a totally Yes biased way. Any media unionism, even by the BBC, has been totally swamped by the priority of getting the government. Why don't they want to get the Scottish government too? Is it taking so long for the penny to drop about what Sturgeon's rush to welcome the unnamed minister's comments, which were in fact an offer of a deal involving a significant climbdown for her side too, has indicated?

I have made the following bias complaint to the BBC:

Coverage of the Guardian's expose on an unnamed British minister's comments on a currency union. It was treated as only emabrrassing the No side and the British parties, and being an admission that the refusals of a currency union have been just a bluff. Yet if, as is not yet proven, this minister actually exists, his/her quoted comments are actually just an offer of a deal, a currency union in exchange for nuclear bases. That is not a one-sided granting of a currency union so it was misleading to treat it as if it was.

For parity of coverage between both campaigns, the following should have been noticed and analysed. As named minister Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the comments, that implies a Scottish government openness to making the proposed deal, and that indicates their position of refusing to keep Trident and the Clyde nuclear bases has also just been "bluff and bluster". So logically the story is equally as much an embarrassment for them and the Yes side as for the other side.

Be part of silly

Gordon Bennett. Just blimey and gasps. When is SNP unionism ever going to stop?

The lagging polls show folks already need more imaginative inspiring motivating to vote Yes than they are getting. The campaign has already made itself sound silly with the whole palaver of we are going to keep a currency union with the country seceded from, on demand and even though they say they won't agree to it. The strongest reason the Yes folks have held onto, have not toed the British line on, have kept rightly telling us is where there could be a big difference to be gained from going our own way, has been on social conscience standards of welfare and escape from the British austerity agenda.

The reason why real folks in Scotland have to continue to suffer trashed disability benefits, unemployment sanctions lasting 3 years, the bedroom tax, and pension worries, for over a year to come, has always been so that we will be convinced to vote against continuing to suffer them. (Hasn't it?)

And now, when we are already in the middle of a mood of hollow scepticism that independence is really intended to mean it at all - Sturgeon turns round and accepts a naff proposal, FROM HER GOVERNMENT'S OWN ADVISORY GROUP EVEN, that we should stay in a union of welfare systems with Tory Britain for a so-called "transitional period" whose length is not even defined, that is open ended. A Guardian story places it at at least to 2019 !!! where it far exceeds the Cameron government's full term so still inflicts its whole austerity programme on us. Through it, we would still get the social wrongs that most practically of all we are being asked to vote against still getting.

Silly silly silly. Who conceivably has been increased in belief in the whole Yes offer by this? In the Scottish National Party having the confidence to separate our state from the British state, which is supposed to be the whole point innit? "Be part of better", they told us. The Silly No Party, who just want to throw every last strand of our statehood away!!

See, folks might conclude this is a handy way for the SNP to make sure they can keep us neocon, the same as every major party wants to do. Just the same as Labour about this. So what do the other Yes supporting parties have to say? Are they going to be part of silly?

Safe in whose hands?

We may be driven to independence no matter how badly the SNP treats us in the process and hushes up ordinary people's unrecognised needs from getting heard in the Yes campaign or in the published contributions to its consultations. As Sturgeon is now well saying, and she is onto something, we may need to escape from belonging to Britain and become a place of refuge for the fair minded English too, as English politics swings further to the right than has been possible in the human rights era.

Today the Mail On Sunday claims an anti-European campaign success as it reports an apparent Tory policy pledge by Theresa May to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

An illegal obstruction of justice will be committed, and widely witnessed, BY HUMAN RIGHTS' SUPPORTERS AND DEFENDERS !!! - mark that !!! - if they let a leaving of the convention happen without exposing and publicising the court change.

Thanks to the court change, there is open ended non-final court case content in both Scottish and English law. As that open ended case content will always be there, it is irreversible. So the court change itself is an irreversible progressive advance in liberty. Britain was one of the Convention member countries brought under the court change when European Court of Human Rights case 41597/98 brought the court change into existence, in 1999. So originally it was because we belong to the Convention that we got the court change. But BECAUSE THE COURT CHANGE IS IRREVERSIBLE, BECAUSE OPEN ENDED NON-FINAL CASE CONTENT STAYS IN OUR LEGAL SYSTEMS NOW IT IS THERE, WE WILL NOT LOSE THE COURT CHANGE IF WE LEAVE ECHR.

The court change will still exist and it may be our only barrier to the social repressions and danger to democracy that would follow leaving the Convention and would ride on any political current capable of leaving the Convention.

All progressives now contemplate the blood you can anticipate will be on your hands unless you now get off the fence and directly committally acknowledge on open record that the court change is there and needs to be used.

Yes to save the Union

Vote Yes to be sure we will stay in the EU. So the Sunday Herald and Nicola Sturgeon portrayed it.

That is how it may well turn out, but they are being too sure too hastily. Spain's capacity for wrecking vetoes in the EU remains. Reasonability is never to be relied on. Nor is "oh but you want all our luvly oil."

If England drifts as clearly anti-EU as the tabloids there are now trying to take it, which will be a sinisterly deliberate drift to racism in our politics like we are supposed to believe can only happen in Germany or South Africa, then even with the concerns of wrecking by Spain it will still be a better choice to take the pro-EU path of voting Yes. The referendum would then be a choice between 2 ways of having our EU membership interrupted, and Yes would be the choice that says we want it back. But it won't wash without specific answers from the Yes side explaining how we could trust our new state, explaining how they can bind it ahead now, to keep upholding the EU citizenship we already have and the secure place here of all our European friends who have come to live here. e.g. I have been greatly helped in some medical work by a Polish friend who came here without the type of already lined up employment that racists would demand, and who now has employment doing key good in the field concerned. Whether we end up back in the EU or in a Norway position in both EFTA and Schengen, just as good because it keeps the European open borders, we need to know what safeguards that no racism will be pandered to during the long haul.

It is being talked up that the British major parties will all come behind a EU referendum for 2015/6. That deprives Scotland of a properly informed decision in its own vote. It is happening the wrong way round, and no journalists yet are challenging that. But by becoming better at dialogue with voters than they have been, the Yes side have an opportunity to show they will be the safest choice. Only if they take said opportunity will they be the safest choice.

voting Labour no more?

Nicola Sturgeon in PMQs today, said independence will mean no more getting taken into illegal wars by Labour Governments.

No it won't. Unless it's a one party state, independence will have no means to mean anything of the kind. We might elect a Labour Government, that is very likely on Scotland's voting history, and it may make the same choices as Blair's did. It's this fallacy again, that is happening on both sides, of assuming independence will mean SNP policies. Why should it?

Even if it was an SNP Government, look at the SNP's manic fetishing over regiments and military traditions because of the patriot vote around them? They were close to the media tycoons, how can we know they would not be close to the pushes for Western interventionist wars?

Johann Lamont's comparison of all the SNP's recent watering down of independence with Life of Brian and its famous scene What Have the Romans Done For Us, was so accurate and apt. Spot on.

Banned demo

On Saturday a demo in Glasgow which I was on, in support of refugees who are housed there, was shut down in mid rally by the police and everyone sent home. We were not even told the reason why, but that it would involve a fascist counter-threat was fairly guessable. Speakers sent away who had not yet spoken included political ones.

The demo organisers are lodging a complaint over this. It has turned out that the police threatened use of the Public Order Act to ban a hundreds strong demo on grounds of public safety, force its participants by law to run away, because just 25 members of the SDL were counter demonstrating.

Nicola Sturgeon had sent a support message to the demo, and the Green leader Patrick Harvie was among the speakers present. So what do both say about whether independence will reduce the prospects of this type of thing happening?

The demo was about how new business contracts for housing refugees have resulted in sudden evictions of them onto the streets, including them coming home to find their locks changed. Speakers cited that under human rights throwing anyone onto the streets is illegal. They will all be interested in taking up my case that rent and mortgages no longer constitutionally exist, then? As explained here to the housing policy consultation Firm Foundations in 2008.

There was some sentiment expressed that independence will enable us to stop being part of British policy to have refugees treated like this. The corruption and absurdity was highlighted, of a policy that allows them to refuse a person refugee status when the country the same person has come from is acknowledged as too dangerous to return them to !!!

If independence is going to make that humanitarian difference, they should be getting on with it, not waiting another 2 years. eh? But it is time to clarify what protections against racist policies will be built into the new state? and built in whoever wins its first election, not assuming it will begin with an SNP government? There is a discrepancy. the SNP has appeased the racist vote by saying we will stay in the British Isles travel area and not join Schengen. How will we stay in the British Isles travel area without staying in the British humanitarian disaster of the present ayslum system? On what basis does Sturgeon promise we will not stay in it?