Show we have caring values by making you wait 4 years on the street

Yesterday I was on the demo at the Border Agency "reporting" office in Brand Street, Glasgow - is it Govan or Cessnock? a yukky office of global apartheid. Ypeople, a name for the YMCA incredibly, has been housing asylum seekers, under a contract now being switched away from them, and they are simply throwing them out, regardless of nowhere else to go, and with no state support even at the same time as they are not allowed by law to get jobs. So enforced homelessness.

As the speakers said we should not even say "asylum seekers", as the Tories made up that term to spare the hate newspapers from having to use proper factual terms like refugees. So that is the term we should use. Along with Green and Solidarity, but nobody from Labour it was mentioned, there were 2 SNP MSP speakers who are trying to raise it with their own government but this week were unlucky in getting a question into Salmond's PMQs. Yes I will call it PMQs, "first minister" also being a silly made up term. Across the speakers it was criticised that the SNP government takes a position against these evictions but it not taking any step to provide for their victims, to help out practically.

Given that the evictions are a result of policy at British level so forms part of the SNP's case against the British system's whole culture, mention was made of how the SNP has trumpeted a "new Scotland" that will be more welcoming and decent than that, and the inaction conflicts with this.

Something else conflicts with it. That they plan still to stay in Britain for another 4 years. If you are on the side of folks in immediate need, and if you include in your case for independence that Britain is leaving them abandoned in need, and the picture that Glasgow wants to be a decent community and win back these folks' means of viable subsistence, then it makes no sense to plan to keep them waiting, still under the British policy and potentially on the streets because of it, for as long as 4 years! For remember how oddly Salmond does not want independence until 2016, a year and a half even after a Yes vote happens. Sounds really keen on it he does?

Will we get a Yes campaign that majors on inclusion and prevention of race hate, the message that 2 of the SNP presented as popular yesterday? If it does succeed in getting a good response, will that speed up the referendum timing? If not, then what will the Scottish government do for the victims of Ypeople and all victims of British asylum policy during the wait of its own choosing? If the cuts were fought by a spending increase under the devolved tax power, this is one drop in the ocean item it could deal with.

How is it a crime for a juror to say they disagreed with the verdict?

The left wing parties who back independence and might take part in any referendum campaign, SSP and its offshoot Solidarity, have ignored the court change just as much as the SNP has. Yet if anyone could do with it now, it is Tommy Sheridan. The one thing that without stating any view at all on his guilt or innocence, it can still be said is self-inflicted in his present situation: is that he is now suffering from the court change not being in operation and from his own ignorement of it.

So the court change was too bourgeois and reforming of the legal system as it already exists, was it, to fit into his agitational dreams for the march of the workers to win evrything only by demos and strikes? How come then was it not too bourgeois to go to court in its present form to sue a newspaper? It seems to be coming out that some of his friends reckoned it was. It always sounded dangerously reckless to me, when after winning his first case, he was full of rhetoric on accepting a jury's verdict! He chose that personal overconfidence in being a winner, which has failed him now, instead of choosing the court change which gives folks more sensible protection against things going wrong in court cases.

Even if he is so doctrinally closed minded even in adversity as to continue not to want the court change for himself, there is someone else on his side who now needs it entirely because his case happened, and whose need he will let down if he says nothing on the court change.

Sunday Herald front page splash, on Jan 9, on the Tommy Sheridan juror who is threatened with prosecution herself for saying on Facebook she thinks he is innocent and hates the other jurors. Where is the crime? The Herald's story is totally factually on the side of stating that she has done something illegal, yet the same story's content nowhere subtantiates so.

It asserts: "it is a criminal offence to reveal a jury's deliberations" and "Under section 8 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, it is an offence to breach the confidentiality of a jury's discussions."

"In particular it is an offence to disclose or solicit any particulars of statements made, opinions expressed, arguments advanced or votes cast by members of the jury in the course of their deliberations in any legal proceedings."

So how exactly has she done any of those things just by stating her own verdict? It is already a publicly known fact that there was a majority verdict of 8 to 6, which is far too thin a majority to give the confidence in a shared agreed verdict that is supposed to be the whole purpose of juries. It sounds to me like the jury failing to agree, it is not the sort of majority to base a conviction on. It is great cause for any juror on the losing side to feel upset about. Such a juror has an obvious personal need to make known her own innocence of blame for the verdict. Otherwise she could feel tainted by feeling perceived by others as being behind the verdict, when she is not.

By stating that personal position for herself, she has not said anything at all previously unknown about what happened in the jury room or about what any identified other juror did. So what the hell is the Sunday Herald's justification for siding with making a fuss? How the hell has she breached "the sanctity of the jury room", as they quoted a lawyer on, in any way?

If there is any question of prosecuting her, she needs the court change. As she won't get it from the Sheridans or Anwar, I earnestly hope she googles on her own case and finds this page and reads about the court change here. The details are all in the second post in this blog, "this is the submission that was not accepted." But for clarity I will now put up another post that is only about the court change. Someone else in the news who needs it right now is Julian Assange.