grave for community councils

Community councils - they are defined by law as to represent communities, yet they consist of self-appointed volunteers. Any time they choose to ignore or not engage with an item that protects some local businesses, they misrepresent the community, and liably harming those local businesses by it. Also breaching their constituted function by it.
Such is now the position in South Queensferry, whose community council is choosing not to record or address, in its picture of the local economy, an ethical protection of local funeral businesses. It has been created by an apology obtained for a very nasty anti-social action towards all bereaved people, in a community event at a venue used for funerals. This passed to a funeral director and further minuted in an affected church's AGM. Hence the community council system is proved deficient towards wellbeing of businesses in communities, and owing to businesses to repair this.
A councillor on the real council wrote "there are council officers within the governance department who are responsible for the oversight of community councils". But that office itself, "Under the Standing Orders, it is up to the Chairperson of the Community Council to determine what additional items of business will be included in the agenda of the Community meeting," one person's fief to do that completely unaccountably yet get taken as speaking for a community. This when "3.7: Community councils should be able to demonstrate how they are fulfilling their responsibilities as representative bodies by provision of an annual report and other forms of engagement such as newsletters, surveys, websites and use of social media."
The bureaucratic inaction line contradicts this, and interorets the Standing Orders such as makes them contradictory. Meanwhile, businesses are left without the benefit community committed upholding of an ethical protection for them.

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.

the debate Better Together won

In the lives of ordinary voters, it's No supporters who win debates because the Yessers are fearful of debate, they only ever want their own points heard one-sidedly. Show you have an answer to them and they make a fast getaway.

Of course, the picture does actually favour us at the TV debates'level as well. Darling won the first debate, on actual substance, and what he established then about our chaotic unformed fiscal prospects in Salmond's hands still stands without any further answering in the second debate which consisted mostly of noise and shouting down by Salmond indulged by the host. Some one just said BBC Scotland want to be the head TV and Radio producer in Scotland and that is why they are leaning over backwards with the Yes voters: anyone hear this? Today's Times p4: "BBC Scotland have a proud history of ensuring that every audience is stacked with nationalists and that every question is plucked from the nationalists' greatest hits. They did themselves proud on Monday." Another source said "Alistair said he looked out and all he could see was folk growling."

But with the world of TV debates being a general turn-off, especially to swing voting women, and remote from our own lives, look at what debating with nats is like at grassroots level.

Here is what happened when Jim Murphy's speaking tour for Better Together visited South Queensferry last week. It took place outdoors, by some restaurant tables on the sea front. His message was well received by the voters who were there. A good natured discussion was going on, when there arrived 2 men wearing Yes badges, who asked to offer a couple of questions.

They proceeded to talk non-stop, and never paused to hear more than half a sentence of anything anyone on the No side said. They would promptly interject with another point of their own or even another question spontaneously changing the subject. They were simply hooligans, this approach was a disruption. Telling them so made no difference, they were practiced in this way of behaving and being in a pair as soon as one came to a halt the other would start.

It was more than disruption of a No event from taking place properly. The content of what they said was full of scaremongering Yes arguments of the type that could be stated quickly in brief. Their obvious purpose was a hope to influence some voters by it - and in a way where no reply arguments would be heard and no debate would happen. Also they made a false accusation that the event had not been advertised, which the voters present rebutted and took a dim view of hearing, and they performed a stunt of making a mobile phone call which they claimed was to an office number for Murphy's tour, who they claimed were not telling them where he would be next day - this when it was already billed online where he would be next day. We could not see who they were phoning if indeed anyone at all, or hear what was being said to them, there was no evidencing of their claims, they were able to entirely pretend the whole thing to attack the host's character. They did this in a tide of non-stop talking in the face of being told they were disruptive and needed to listen as well as talk.

They did not even stop when the whole group of us around Murphy regrouped further away from them. But here is when they did stop, straight after that. They got up and left VERY quickly - as soon as I showed I had an answer to their point on Tory governments and started to make it. THEY LOST THE DEBATE THEY STARTED, as they fled from treating it as a debate at all as soon as their question was answered.

This type of behaviour from nats matches the experience around Better Together street stalls. There is always a nat who comes along and picks a debate with individuals in the stall team, probing our strength, testing whether you can stand up to a set of prerehearsed statistical arguments. The last one I got blew his own argument when shown our economic arguments, just airily snapped "that's just propaganda" - entitling me to do the same to all his claims. Wanted his claims scrutinised but not willing to scrutinise ours - so lost the debate, again. That is the whole nat approach to debate. Shout down, disrupt, seek to generate peer pressure, run away from listening, have a double standard of expecting to be heard but not to hear the other side. That is not a character of movement fit to vote a country's future into their hands. That is not a democratic standard. How in their new state would they debate the country's problems and the austerity created by their own actions? That is a prospect to be repelled away from now, by the character they show trying to create a cultural pressure in their favour from intolerant behaviour.

Will you write in and confirm to the readers?

Yesterday in the Sunday Herald, a letter from John Jamieson of South Queensferry claimed to refute the claim that the White Paper will not give automatic entitlements to citizenship by descent. To do this, he just quoted what the White Paper says about registering for citizenship. the Yes campaign itself has never said it means an entitlement, and at their public meeting in Gorgie Edinburgh on mar 12 Alex Neil said it does not.

So there is a question of campaign propriety, over whether they will mislead voters, over whether the Yes campaign will take ownership of this letter that has been written on their behalf and will confirm that what it implies is accurate.

I have mailed back to Yes, and copied it to the Sunday Herald, and to Lesley Riddoch's Nordic Horizons as she is an exile born Scot whose support for Yes is absurd unless this issue is fixed the right way:

" The above refers to a letter in today's Sunday Herald. It has pledged for you, publicly, a line on White Paper citizenship policy that you have never been willing to say to any voter's enquiry by me, and that Alex Neil told us the contrary to at your Tynecastle High School public meeting.

Is Mr Jamieson right? Did he write from you? Or will you recordedly let voters be misled in your name? Will you write in and confirm to the readers: will there be any power at all for the state to select to refuse any application for citizenship by descent, which meets precisely defined terms of supplying evidence of having a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship? "