SNP’s Trident policy plays into Putin’s hands

A Herald article Jun 25,by Neil Mackay: SNP’s Trident policy plays into Putin’s hands

It complements my post here on 23 Jan 2022: Remember it was Ukraine who gave up the Bomb. This is a politics writer who has been trendily CND ever since the Cold War 80s days when it was so hegemonically the left fashion around its period in control of Labour. So when the Soviet Union existed, he was CND in face of it. But no more on face of Putin now after Ukraine.

A conversion like Einstein's in 1934. Saying that Putin's Russia now poses the same choices.

As left wing Unionists pointed out during the ref, indy won't remove the Bomb from Britain. It would just move it, and it would still have the whole island's safety as its meaning and red line, because letting an invader take Scotland just opens the door to England too. But instead, in a British election, as is on now, the concern is against the SNP exercising leverage upon British nuclear choices.

ex-PM and his party using the court change

A few days late with this, as I have had to carefully nudge my signs back in to Google, which it kept blocking on a main browser until updated, and even then, it had to be in a mobile site setting not desktop, and in a new window not retaining any code memories of the blocked sign-ins. Too much naff we get from Google's security. Hence, why had I ever signed out? knowing it has inconvenient results. Because, I had to reset all my identity indicators to do a survey from new again, that was programmed to pick up where you had got to and not allow you to start it from new again in the same browser! but one of the survey's option choices had been unclear and only after choosing, turned out to be a wrongly limiting choice, so that I needed to start it from new again.

Thus is an era snapshot of the fight to do your own simple things instead of confirm to what arrogant programs want you to do.

Okay. The real post. -

The Alba Party is loudly announcing and publishing an opinion by an international law lawyer, against the British Supreme Court decision that Scotland has no power to hold an independence vote unilaterally. It accuses the court of "significant errors" in the decision.

This is the new party set up in 2021 by former Prime Minister (okay officially they have the silly title "First Minister" to make them sound less like a national govt) Alex Salmond, after his falling out with the older SNP who he used to lead, but which conspired to get him jailed on word alone for accusations under the witch-hunting of men. The luck that an ethically conscientious jury did not go along with that, leads to the Alba Party's existence.

This opinion on the Supreme Court is a faulting of a court decision. Alike whether you agree with its content, or disagree with it and counter-fault it, it is an important democratic move to arrive at inability to accept as final what you perceive you can demontrate error in. Hence, is a use of the COURT CHANGE!

Nobody has ever offered any refutation of the reasons why the court change is real, but its ignorement by all the political elite includes by all the nat parties. There is the irony in now needing and exercising something whose existence they have ignored for a generation.

Wee Alba Book citizens

There is now the Wee Alba Book, newly published by the Alba Party, given out at demos. p55

《 " The plans for how to manage Scottish citizenship were set out at the last referendum and still apply. Anyone born in Scotland or born to Scottish parents or grandparents will have an automatic right to citizenship, as will people resident at the time of independence." 》

Claiming this was the position in the last ref is of course spin lies. Salmond himself would not say this position to me as a caller on his last ref phone-in. The White Paper and Yes policy last time, which the SNP has still never budged from, was a racist shocker appealing to the same type of nasty anti-outsider voters as Brexit. It made citizenship by descent refusable, it made citizenships by birth or residence conditional on preexisting British citizenship

Faced with this, during the indyref I lodged EU petition 1448/2014 which is a human rights law resource always there for anyone's use. ECHR human rights are part of EU law. So I cited that article 8, family life, wil oblige the EU to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state and make no dealings with us, unless citizenship by parental descent is unrefusable.

But that history only matters to defending that I + we were right to vote No because of it. Even if Salmond was not saying the right position then, his party is now.

This new book corrects the citizenship policy + states the perfect line on it. But it states it just for the Alba Party - does the Yes movement agree with it? Do the other indy parties agree with it?

Article 8 really is used

A link to a Europhile site on citizenship legalities with a global citizenship ideal. globalcit.eu/tying-up-historical-loose-ends-the-nationality-and-borders-bill-uk/ This link discusses changes and impacts from Britain's present Nationality and Borders Bill,

whose main purpose is to be nastier and less fair to refugees, but it actually also tidies up some fairness anomalies around the old British Overseas or Dependent Territory citizenships dating from the Imperial era. These anomalies included some racist anomalies around parents' marriages affecting getting those citizenships by descent, and through which parent.

The page mentions a case won using article 8, the European Convention on Human Rights article on family life. The same article as I have cited ever since the White Paper, in the long conflict with the indy movement and SNP for Scottish citizenship by parental descent to be unrefusable. I cited article 8 in my EU petition 1448/2014 during the indyref, to recordedly cite to the EU that article 8 obliges it to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state and have no dealings with us, until our citizenship by parental descent is unrefusable.

How totally vindicated I am now, in an action and a campaign basis that mindless cybernats have often rubbished. Article 8 already is used in court cases over citizenship and to overturn discriminatory citizenship rules. It was the right article to cite and it already used for this purpose. It is well founded.

Will the same people power be done against deportation of Scots?

《 It is increasingly apparent that the UK government is incapable of delivering an immigration system that reflects Scotland's values of compassion and dignity, the Justice Secretary has said.

Humza Yousaf ... 》 So reported the National, on the Glasgow People Power victory that stopped the immigration raid and 2 cruel deportations. All fair credit to the National, it has 3 times published letters from me on the citizenship concern, (11-7-16, 3-12-16, 6-11-20) it is open to it.

There is no compassion and dignity in having, under the name "civic nationalism", a theory of nasty insular disapproval of close diaspora and nationhood by family ties. Not including parental descent in the automatic conferrers of citizenship. Scotland may have values of compassion and dignity, but its indy movement has not towards a whole population group of its own nation.

To them, the Yes movement has made another hostile environment! Throughout the years of pursuing it I have found a shocking quite widespread adherence to theory that there is a moral virtue of rejecting "blood + soil" or "ethnic nationalism" by rejecting descent Scots and diaspora, and saying a nation is only its resident population. So that cruel bigoted exclusion breaking up families in breach of ECHR article 8, is getting defined as anti-racist, and nice inclusion defined as racist! Logically inverting that the whole point of being against racism is to protect inclusion.

All immigration control is global apartheid and will be remembered so in images of evil vans and raids, and in this inspirational people action. So - will the same people action be forthcoming to stop deportations of Scots, from their own country, under the indy citizenship rules that ever since the White Paper, the Yes movenent abd SNP have never budged from planning to have? Do they want to stop that hostile environment too? Will enough media ask the good folks of Glasgow that, to generate an answer?

way to go abolishing juries, for observing ECHR and qualifying for EU

The last possible way for the SNP govt to convimce anyone they want Scotland to be a progressive EU member complying with human rights, ECHR being part of EU law, is to abolish juries. Let alone, to do it exactly when it looks like done in reaction to not liking what a jury did, not getting it to do the dirty against Salmond.

"PLANS FOR RAPE SUSPECTS IN SCOTLAND TO FACE TRIAL WITHOUT JURY" - Times headline, Mar 18. (Times links are paywalled but the headline suffices,) Plans to put half the population under politically abusable arbitrary authority including in deciding serious crime guilt on one word against another. That is exactly the type of arbitrary authority culture that Salmond said in the recent scandal hearings, makes Scotland's polity not ready for independence.

In reaction to him saying that: instead of moving to fix it they are escalating, militantly making it much worse. Abolishing the safeguard that cleared Salmond's name, and straight after it did. Openly going for the arbitrary judicial authority that could have been used to jail him at plotters' convenience and for a discriminatory reign of terror against men with guilt in accusation, and decided on by one person who will be part of the state's political elite.

Too many keen to buy indy as the new standard lefties' dream, have chosen to forget how the SNP govt attempted, at the pandemic's start a year ago, to abolish jury trials for its duration. Now it clearly hopes for the PC gender prejudice around this area of crime to override the concern that reasoning voters should have: for jury trials and presumption of innocence, and for how it is never safe to take just conflicting words, one or several against another, as evidence of guilt. Evidence is measurable verifiable facts. Competing words never are that.

wilting Lily

Blogger "Lily of St Leonard's" is a strong Brexiter, and philosophically determined Tory, though she is adaptable as a voter and now backing Galloway's Alliance For Unity. Even for folks like me not sharing those views, she used to be a good read for following how Scots of her views were reading political events. Same reason as why it's sometimes good to read the National. But the lily is wilting! Her reading of the position, where she used to be confidently predictive of Brexit actually strengthening the Union, is shifting. Gradually, not too visibly until you check back.

Best about her used to be that she wrote well in support of Alex Salmond getting a fair trial, and against the MeToo-related witch hunt of men. She was willing to act across sides to do that. But now she is writing about Salmond's case making a party point from SNP inaction against him at the time in question and lack of Scottish media chasing of it: in a way that rather clearly assumes him guilty, and arguing it from exactly the MeToo-corrupted standards of conviction in the US that she used to condemn. It's a disappointing change. It may show an increased sense of all-out back-to-the-wall fight against the SNP.

An even more startling shift is from
www.effiedeans.com/2019/09/the-remainer-rearguard.html
to
www.effiedeans.com/2020/08/knowing-terms-of-divorce.html.

That's from
"It never crossed my mind in 2014 that if Yes won the Scottish independence referendum that Scotland wouldn’t get to Leave the UK. I thought the SNP’s claims about the Scottish independence were exaggerated at best dishonest at worst. But we all had had the chance to contest the political claims of the Yes campaign. If they had won, I would have accepted the result. It never would have crossed my mind not to do so. I did not expect to be given a second chance if my side had lost."
to
"Just as Nicola Sturgeon argued for a confirmatory referendum on Brexit, so too the British Government could require a third referendum on independence after the terms of the divorce were known. The same ten questions and more could be asked an answered during the transition period in which Scotland would remain an integral part of the United Kingdom. Only when all issues had been resolved would there be a referendum on the terms of the divorce. Scotland could accept them meaning independence would happen or decline them meaning independence would have been rejected."
!

the jury is in

The SNP govt wanted, during the present state of emergency, to abolish juries. No attempt to do that has happened in Englandandwales, where jury trials are simply postponed for the duration. Mercifully, within a day they were stopped by all the Unionist parties: and okay, as the Unionists are not in a majority, also by the opposition of law professionals from their own ranks.

Human rights here have just passed through a breathtaking moment of emergency, and who from? From the reputed progressives who have told us for years they want to give us a nice more progressive state of our own, and campaigned against Brexit's likely rollback of ECHR-associated human rights safeguards. The independence movement's entire claim that Scottish governments and state would be innately more progressive and fairer, now stands smashed by this. This will always be there as a fact of history in the debate.

Notice it follows within days the MeToo extreme feminists' oopenly disliking that a woman-majority jury found Alex Salmond innocent. This has rightly split the nats into a bad fight on Facebook and in the National, where both the loyalists who saw politicality in the whole trial, and the scrupulous over the vital human right to presumption of innocence, have seen through the evil raving believe-what-we-want injustice of the radical feminists and their witch-hunt of men.

The Crossgate Centre on Mar 24 displayed on Facebook a reply to that character of radical feminists, that they well deserved, and deserve everyone to contemplate:

《 This tweet from Rhiannon Spear, the SNP National Women's Convener, in response to the Alex Salmond verdict yesterday is absolutely appalling, and has drawn a well-deserved backlash from SNP members and the wider Yes movement on Twitter. Her contempt for the principle of presumption of innocence, juducial due process, and not least the jury, 9 of whom, the majority, were women - makes her unfit for office.

Never mind respecting entitlement to presumption of innocence, clowns like you can't even respect a verdict from a female-majority jury if it goes in the accused's favour. You epitomise the entryism piggy-backing on & destroying an SNP where it is because of indy supporters. The tweet itself, Mar 23, and its reactions, are here.

response open letter to Lisa Nandy, to Mark Frankland's

Response by Maurice Frank to Mark Frankland. He is a Yes supporter, English and liking Scotland's political life better - though his argument from no visible homelessness in his home Dumfries does not ring true at all to the Central Belt cities. On Jan 18 Frankland wrote and blogged an open letter to Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy, in an angered response to her Andrew Neil interview. It s going viral akonv nats on social media. This response is to Lisa Nandy too, + is confirmed emailed on 20 Jan 2020 -

In urgent factual correction of MARK FRANKLAND's open letter to you on SCOTLAND, here is a too underreported fact about our situation. There is in fact a shocking family-wrecking racist prejudice that the Yes movement and SNP have, to date, still never removed from their policy. It is just as bad as anti-Semitism or Windrush. It has been there ever since their White Paper in 2013, it also surfaced as far back as our 1999 election, when a Labour broadcast warned: "If you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a Scottish citizen? No! They will have to apply."

It is a prejudice against nationhood through family ties, against being Scottish and entitled to citizenship by the practical connections that routinely go with having a parent who is. Copied from Quebec, they proposed in the referendum that automatic citizenship should only be by birth or residence at the instant of statehood.

Now, calling any category of citizenship automatic can be problematic, as a person with several possible citizenships may not want the one that some official wants to deem automatic: so I have no problem with asking claimants to descent citizenship to take an active step of choice for it. But obviously what must be automatic is that they get it. That is, it must be unrefusable.

Faced with inability to get any Yes source to say this, during the campaign, I lodged EU petition 1448/2014. This was not the naive humble type of petition making a request, it was a citation of ECHR article 8 on family life: so it remains a legal resource for anyone to cite and use. It cites, that article 8 obliges the EU to disown shun and sanction as an international pariah racist state, and not build any relationship with, a Scottish state where citizenship by parental descent is refusable.

Since then there are 3 limited successes to record fairly:

• In the National of 9 Jul 2016, Paul Kavanagh's column included parental descent in a list of European norms of citizenship.
• only verbally on a stall, a self-declared international law expert in the Yes Marchmont and Morningside group in Edinburgh concurred that ECHR will require us to honour this citizenship entitlement.
• at Perth's hustings last May 16, which was recorded, the Greens' Maggie Chapman gave the right answer on this.

There are good "Yessers" who persist in an unsecured faith that this will not be a problem. Some are my friends. But there are frequently encountered Yessers with the prejudice, to show it is a serious problem. Many of them hold that their theory "civic nationalism" defines a country as its presently in situ population, and makes it virtuous to reject anything to do with "blood and soil" - and they will class family ties as implying blood and race. They faithfully think it is a progressive line against genetic views of race, to reject our emigrants' offspring from being Scottish, hypocritically at the same time as claiming emigration as a Yes issue! As well as simply being xenophobic excluding and hateful, this line breaks apart families. Nationhood by parentage has always come from the life practicality of folks’ ties to their families, to the places where their families’ lives are rooted, and to family’s mutual support and sharing of resources. All nothing to do with genetics and long predating all knowledge of its existence.

They won't budge when you explain that. They cling to a seeming fear that to admit any practical humane argument for families will be a blunder into a naughty endorsement of blood-related thoughts. So they put themselves in an absurd mirror-image position, of calling inclusion racist and calling vile family-breaking exclusion anti-racist and progressive. During the campaign I had a bonechilling conversation of this nature with a Radical Independence stall, arguing that line in all theoretical earnestness, opposing and calling racist any parental descent citizenship at all, constantly asking "how far back do you go?" to everything I said for nuclear families whose practical position is obviously not the same as the distant past's generations. MP Angus Macneil denied to the Sunday Post 23 Feb 2014 that anyone who has never lived here is Scottish.

The position of an emigrant's child, born in diaspora and growing up in the wrong country, has a parallel with the transgender position in the wrong gender: it too can be an emotional dysphoria with a practical basis. Not to uphold it is a social inconsistency. Their identities collide with the horrible school bully attitude I propose to name "birthplace racism", even dividing siblings: the bigotry of regarding country as dictated by birthplace. Then should the racists could get to see their victim rejected by the country they identify with?? Birthplace has visibly not correlated with country ever since the ancient Jews' Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, many folks are born in places they have no further connection with, Labour's morally outstanding recent election policy of right of return for the Chagossians recognised descent nationhood, it features on both sides in the Israel/Palestine problem. But given that common sense life practicality makes citizenship by birth also a natural right, notice a cruel exclusion by the Yessers here too. Against an older SNP pledge, they wanted to make citizenship by birth only apply to preexisting British citizens, thus continuing to cruelly exclude folks born to visiting parents who the British rules have excluded since Thatcher's changes in 1983. I met such a person online and failed to get Yes to solve his position either!

Just as Tory ministers with immigrant backgrounds have been happy to do anti-immigrant things, existence of some diaspora-born Scots in the independence movement's lead names does not disprove this descent citizenship scandal. The onus can only be on Angus Robertson, Lesley Riddoch, Mike Russell, Iain Macwhirter to explain why they support a movement containing prejudice against themselves. Meanwhile, by human rights there is never in the world a duty, there was not in 2014 either, to allow independence votes for any nation unless it is known that its citizenship rules will always comply with all family and personal practicalities without any cruel gaps.

Maurice Frank

Boris as an anti-racist card against SNP !

If Boris wins the druggies' naughty contest and becomes Prime Minister, he will be the second ever diaspora-born PM, relative to all Britain. First was the little known Bonar Law in 1922. That fact will actually give the Tories an advantage over the SNP in anti-racism! This makes unaffordable as well as ridiculous and obscene, for SNP and Yes to continue to cling to their racism against the offspring of our emigrants, and their ECHR-violating New Clearances hate policy against parental descent being an automatic entitler to citizenship.

When they ask us, do we want EU or Boris: how then is it going to look when a family-splitting cruel bigotry by SNP/Yes makes us invalid for EU, by non-compliance with ECHR article 8, petition 1448/2014 recording the EU's duty to disown shun and sanction us an a pariah racist state in international law for it, while the racist Brexit we are supposed to be escaping from is actually led by an example of what SNP/Yes is being racist against?

An example added to Angus Robertson, Lesley Riddoch, Mike Russell, Iain Macwhirter, 1930s SNP founder Eric Linklater, 1990s Plaid Cymru leader Dafydd Wigley who Salmond used to share election phone-ins with, and Ireland's indy leaders Eamonn da Valera and James Connolly.

(btw it has become accurate to say "SNP/Yes" since the welcome development recorded at Perth's recent hustings, that the Greens have come round to the right side of this issue.

videoed fascism

Perth4Europe videoed its hustings in Perth yesterday with a promise to publish it to give the hustings a wider reach.

It will show both good and bad news, botb progress and dug in bigotry, on the moral question that ruined Yes: citizenship by parental descent. It will show Green leader Maggie Chapman giving theright answer! at last doing what no Green would do during the indyref, placing them behind parental descent as one of the conferrers of citizenship.

But it will show SNP candidate Heather Anderson openly tell an audience "I'm not willing to do that" and parrot about the SNP being for civic not ethnic nationalism. The question had already cited European Convention on Human Rights article 8, family life, and how compliance with it is a condition for joining the EU.

Consider the reaction if a candidate declared as "not willing to say" black or Jewish citizenship? This is exactly the same, a stance of racial hatred of one branch of Scots - and when the sane candidate had even mentioned our emigration rate in her opening speech! What action would be available against a directly hateful election pledge to take citizenship away from a colour group? The same action applies against this.

It forms a decisive item in the legal evidence for population-scale racist crime in the Yes citizenship plan, and for ECHR requiring the EU to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state if it goes Anderson's way.

nat rally pathetically fading

Yesterday's annual, intended to be mass, nat rally at Glasgow Green was shrunken and declined in every way, compared to last year. Smaller turnout, fewer stalls, fewer performers, even pathetically few speakers, only 2 who the public have heard of, Tommies Sheppard + Sheridan.

Farcically, nats on Facebook are now slagging the Sunday Herald for Unionist spin to play down the rally. Like saying they showed the wrong photo of the encounter with Union Jack demonstrators, that failed to show Saltires streaming back down the road. But the Sunday Herald is famously the nat- supporting Sunday! Yes, NATS ACTUALLY SLAGGING THEIR OWN PAPER THE SUNDAY HERALD + ACCUSING IT OF UNIONIST REPORTING !!

When even the Sunday Herald has to go with a count of only 35K marchers, you know it was a flop and the TREND IS DOWNWARDS.

All ths SNP deputy leader candidates declined speaking invites, to the compere's frustration, + chose not to be there. No Greens or SSP either - clearly "All Under One Banner" is exactly what it's not. It's just a ritual by one set of the nat faithful, not driving any momentum towards anything.

Under the M8 footbridge at Garnethill, traffic jammed up chaotically at crazy angles was stopping a sirening ambulance from driving.

in bed with the Tories !

Since the indyref, nats of all their parties have repeated and repeated unto infinity their wrong accusation that Labour damaged itself by being allied to, or "in bed with", the Tories in the No campaign. Keep repeating something to generate a left wing doctrinal peer pressure to accept and believe it.

Today the now annual demo of Scottish feeling against Brexit was held at Holyrood. The speakers included Joanna Cherry, SNP, Patrick Harvie, Green, and - Struan Stevenson, Tory. The organisers the European Movement in Scotland praised cross party working for the objective of trying somehow to stop Brexit. Cherry thanked Stevenson for his participation and celebrated that she had shared a banner with him in this demo.They celebrated their working together on a single issue.

They were right to do that. But by it, they proved Labour also was right to do it in the No campaign. TO ANYONE WHO HEARD OR RECORDED WHAT THE NATS SAID AT TODAY'S DEMO, THEY HAVE EXPLODED AND FINISHED, UTTERLY REFUTED, THEIR MALICIOUS JIBE ABOUT LABOUR JOINING WITH THE TORIES IN THE INDYREF. THE SAME AS WHAT LABOUR DID, THEY ARE NOW DOING THEMSELVES BY THEIR PUBLIC ADMISSION.

May not get hard

LABOUR HAS CLOSED THE POLL GAP ON THE TORIES BY 10 POINTS IN A WEEK.

So it can win. If it keeps up that rate it will win. Thaf is s very rare rate of election campaign gain. It is standing up to scrutiny that its policies are not hard left, or hard Brexit. But they are hard no to deals with the SNP.

They can be, because SNP can't vote to put a Tory government in, so Labour does not have to make any deals to prevent that. They have to be, because the last election was stolen from Miliband by the SNP making their arrogant mud stick to Labour with English voters. Tragically, had that not happened, neither would Brexit and the whole situation behind this election.

Clearly now, the reality of all the loss of sensible European facilities in a pigheadedly nationalist Tory hard Brexit is daunting voters. Accelerate that process, go Labour.

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.

flirted with Trump

August 4 at 7:30pm ·
Dear Members and Alumni,

In every presidential election since 1888, the members and Executive Board of the Harvard Republican Club have gathered to discuss, debate, and eventually endorse the standard-bearer of our party. But for the first time in 128 years, we, the oldest College Republicans chapter in the nation, will not be endorsing the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump holds views that are antithetical to our values not only as Republicans, but as Americans. The rhetoric he espouses –from racist slander to misogynistic taunts– is not consistent with our conservative principles, and his repeated mocking of the disabled and belittling of the sacrifices made by prisoners of war, Gold Star families, and Purple Heart recipients is not only bad politics, but absurdly cruel.

If enacted, Donald Trump’s platform would endanger our security both at home and abroad. Domestically, his protectionist trade policies and draconian immigration restrictions would enlarge our federal deficit, raise prices for consumers, and throw our economy back into recession. Trump’s global outlook, steeped in isolationism, is considerably out-of-step with the traditional Republican stance as well. The flippancy with which he is willing to abdicate the United States’ responsibility to lead is alarming. Calling for the US’ withdrawal from NATO and actively endorsing nuclear proliferation, Donald Trump’s foreign policy would wreak havoc on the established world order which has held aggressive foreign powers in check since World War 2.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Donald Trump simply does not possess the temperament and character necessary to lead the United States through an increasingly perilous world. The last week should have made obvious to all what has been obvious to most for more than a year. In response to any slight –perceived or real– Donald Trump lashes out viciously and irresponsibly. In Trump’s eyes, disagreement with his actions or his policies warrants incessant name calling and derision: stupid, lying, fat, ugly, weak, failing, idiot –and that’s just his “fellow” Republicans.

He isn’t eschewing political correctness. He is eschewing basic human decency.

Donald Trump, despite spending more than a year on the campaign trail, has either refused or been unable to educate himself on issues that matter most to Americans like us. He speaks only in platitudes, about greatness, success, and winning. Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge on critical matters, meandering from position to position over the course of the election. When confronted about these frequent reversals, Trump lies in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.

Millions of people across the country are feeling despondent. Their hours have been cut, wages slashed, jobs even shipped overseas. But Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan to fix that. He has a plan to exploit that.

Donald Trump is a threat to the survival of the Republic. His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy. He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House. He is looking to to pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, American against American. We will not stand for this vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children.

President Reagan called on us to maintain this, our shining city on a hill. He called on us to maintain freedom abroad by keeping a strong presence in the world. He called on us to maintain liberty at home by upholding the democratic process and respecting our opponents. He called on us to maintain decency in our hearts by loving our neighbor.

He would be ashamed of Donald Trump. We are too.

This fall, we will instead focus our efforts on reclaiming the Republican Party from those who have done it considerable harm, campaigning for candidates who will uphold the conservative principles that have defined the Republican Party for generations. We will work to ensure both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands, continuing to protect against executive overreach regardless of who wins the election this November.

We call on our party’s elected leaders to renounce their support of Donald Trump, and urge our fellow College Republicans to join us in condemning and withholding their endorsement from this dangerous man. The conservative movement in America should not and will not go quietly into the night.

A longtime student of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

De Tocqueville believed in the United States. Americans are a decent people. We work hard, protect our own, and look out for one another in times of need, regardless of the color of our skin, the God we worship, or our party registration. Donald Trump may not believe in that America, but we do. And that America will never cease to be great.

put out by The Harvard Republican Club

Of course, to progressive society in Scotland it would be really nice if the conservative movement in America would go quietly into the night. But think about the depth of crisis when even they talk of Trump "flirting with fascism".

WHO flirted with Trump? ALEX SALMOND DID. He physically vandalised Aberdeenshire and destroyed a piece of its nature to do thatm and undemocratically overrode Aberdeenshire council on pkanning decision to force it through. What happened to folks' homes and local environments, what piece of Scotland was destroyed more irreplaceably than Palmyra, when the left talking SNP flirted at ordinary Scots' cost, with the tycoon whose own party accuse him of flirting with fascism?

Say it with me

"Say it with me: immigration has been great for Scotland and the UK, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise."
- So wrote MEP Alyn Smith in the National. He has been an SNP figure with an impressively liberal and positive sounding angle on borders and openness, going back as far as the 2003 election when I got a decent reply from him on "an open and welcoming Scotland", as their candidate for Edinburgh West, and voted for him.

How then can he possibly explain, excuse, or square his own words with, the indy White Paper's hate atrocity against our diaspora and the citizenship by descent of our emigrants' offspring???

When eager Yessers at South Queensferry's indyref local debate argued in classic racist words that there was not enough space not to limit immigration numbers ACTUALLY OF DIASPORA-BORN SCOTS TO LIVE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, were they saying "immigration has been great for Scotland and the UK ?"

Ah, but there was, visible in hindsight, a catch in what he wrote to me even back then. "Our definition of Scots is anyone who lives in Scotland". That left it open for the SNP to keep in its unity racist nats who did not want to include in our nation's definition its children of exile not yet living here. What was left open was exactly the hate crime that ended up proposed in Yes citizenship policy in the indyref.

You will have to fix this before you can make any bid for the open borders vote, and any campaign based on pro-immigration morality, in an indyref2.

HURRAY. LOST MAJORITY.

Even if you are Labour, the headline is hurray and celebrate. The majority SNP government is over. They have failed to be a barnstorming juggernaut sweeping an admiring country. They are being faulted by voters now. Down 6 seats. They have lost their majority.

-they have picked up the mindless tribal vote in Glasgow and Clydeside that used to belong to Labour. But elsewhere they have made losses, notably in their own former northeast heartland. They expected a majority and really wanted to actually up seats even more and look unstoppable. Nice bloody nose instead.

the party's over

You know well that the neocon economic era did not start with Thatcher, but with her predecessor Callaghan in 1976. His government swung to bankers' cuts and bankers' rule. In the face of bankers' games with the pound it failed to sustain financial independence even for Britain. Tony Crosland said of underwriting council budgets "The party's over." In the present, how much harder was it supposed to be to sustain financial independence for Scotland, and without it even having its own currency at all? The oil price plummeting.

Now for the SNP the party's over. The end of the council tax freeze won't bite jn time for the election, because it's put off for a year, so you are supposed to think it's never coming. But as you have seen across the front pages today, all except the National of course, the SNP budget has set a bomb of hammering rises beyond inflation, 3%, next year, to hit you like a released spring.

This instead of using Scotland's national tax power redistributively as Labour is standing for, and in a narrower single issue way the Lib Dems are too. SNP position is an embarrassment in contrast to them. So that SNP policy is austerity, and Labour's policy is redistribute and spend on need.

Scotland's much-claimed progressive voters have had a crappy history of taking several elections to make culture shifts when the progressive ground moves away from where their voting habits are. They stayed with Labour throughout the New Labour period then moved away from Labour on grounds of the memory of New Labour but aftet it was actually over. That was absurd. It's time to catch up. There is nothing progressive in voting SNP this time.

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.