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.

Yes's hypocritical ranting Project Fear

Now that the Sunday Herald is a Yes propaganda paper, Iain Macwhirter's column has lost all pretence of objectivity and become a scaremongering rant every week. It is particularly hysterical today, threatening the worst right wing possible future that can be imagined for Britain in the short term, and using it as a base whence to call No voters naive to think we will have any electoral leverage upon major parties that all endorse increased devo to actually get any.

No mention of his own naivete in swallowing Yes's citizenship policy and remaining totally silent on how it affects the freedom of exile born Scots ACTUALLY LIKE HIMSELF, he was born in England, to move back here like he did and rejoin their families!! An entitlement they will need at a VERY PRACTICAL level to stand up to any economic woes caused by Tory governments. No explanation either of why we should assume that the type of future he paints for the Union could not also happen to us under indy, IT COULD. Lefty Yessers themselves speaking at Common Weal 2 weeks ago recognised that. The Tories were only 80K votes behind the SNP in 2010 and are totally serious challengers in the next Scottish election. The panel at Common Weal, Yes supporters, were seriously alert to that fear as both SNP and Labour would be caused existential crises by the change to indy and would have to redefine themselves as parties, and both are being pulled erightwards by financial forces, the Tories are ready to raname and seize a ready vacuum to makwe the same elctoral challenge based on social prejudices as they have done elsewhere.

Most of the Yes case is based on optimism and shouting down questions, hence on NAIVETE, and that is why the hypocritical and NEGATIVE PROJECT FEAR that Macwhirter is indulging in now, frantic to intimidate us into voting Yes over the head of all the questions he has not answered, won't wash. It has been apparent for months that he is a propaganda mouthpiece, he has never been opbjective over the EU issue either where Yes's claims continue to suffer deaspite his arbitrary confidence in them.

room 101

It happens to be 101 days to go. The unanimous agreement to treat it as 100 today instead of tomorrow, as if Tuesdays are uncool, gives you no confidence in the campaign's relation to facts.

Total journalistic failiure by Radio Scotland's phone in this morning. They let the Yes speaker use emigration as an argument and talk of encouraging emigrants to return, without challenging him a shred in any way with the question of whether citizenship for our emigrants' children will be refusable. With Yes's betrayal of the diaspora. Do you still take seriously the common assumption that BBC is biased to No?????

Iain Macwhirter, ranting with less objectivity and more personal emotion than ever in the Sunday Herald yesterday about "who believes this stuff?" in relation to the No campaign, is still being allowed to get away with saying nothing about why he, being exile born, is a Yes supporter and is not making any fuss towards Yes on behalf of the exile born, to prevent betrayal of their citizenship and of the automatic right to live here that they have under the union.

Jun 11,, 99 days to go: The following bias challenge made to the BBC about that phone-in:

" c9:58 the Yes speaker was left unchallenged when he commented on the emigration rate from Scotland and encouraging expats to return.

Never in the entire programme was it mentioned, let alone the Yes side questioned on it, by either the presenter or a caller, that their citizenship policy does not guarantee unrefusable citizenship to the children of emigrants, to Scots born outside Scotland - those of them who neither chance to live here on independence day nor to be born after that date to a parent holding Scottish citizenship at the time. If they fall into either of those groups their citizenship is automatic. All the rest have a provision to "register" for citizenship, evidencing their descent, and ever since the White Paper came out, no Yes source will say to any voter enquiry that these applications will not be refusable. Alex Neil told the Yes meeting at Tynecastle High School, Edinburgh, on Mar 12 that it will be refusable. Nickola Paul, Policy Officer on Migration + Citizenship, told me by email May 27 that "any discretionary elements" in the citizenship policy, and even the evidence required of applicants, will only be decided after the referendum!

Willingness to divide families, against ECHR article 8, by excluding Scots from their own country for the chance of an exiled birth, is an obvious practical obstacle of family life against any encouraging expats to return. Bias that no BBC coverage at all has mentioned this issue's existence or questioned Yes on it.

registered dilemma

With the formal campaign period's approach, I have been enquiring to the Electoral Commission about how any folks who share my voting position can register as campaigners. You can register to cover the possibility of big spend without having to already be committed to planning a big spend, and the benefit of enquiring about registering is towards getting answers in the campaign.

The system is that you have to register whether you are campaigning for Yes or No, so how is it possible to register for campaigning one single view that might mean either Yes or No depending on the govt's answer to a policy detail it won't answer?! i.e. the view that we have a humanitarian duty to vote for the side that will give the most open position towards the returning diaspora, the maximum citizenship entitlements for them subject to a priority of not taking automatic citizenship away from anyone who has it now. This will mean voting No if registrations for citizenship by descent, as described in the White Paper and qualifying with its terms, will be refusable, Yes if they won't be refusable.

I put to the commission, that they need to tell me whether this campaigning position should be registered a Yes or No, and in order to be able to tell me they have to make the govt tell them. They have tried to refer the question back to the govt and say, oh I understand your position but it's really for campaigners to choose which side they support. So I have asked back (and copied in a paper that might be hoped to take a neutral interest): right then, if the govt won't answer, "will it be illegal if we do not register that it is for Yes or for No, because it is for a single view whose logic means voting either Yes or No according to the government's answer to a policy detail it has not answered?"

This question is now for the electoral reform and democracy standards scene too: can participation be gagged by one side's withholding of information about its own policy?

Meanwhile, I have made a bit of progress by making this enquiry - At this time of asking govt what the position is, it's with the commission's backing as needing and expecting an answer so that anyone who agrees with me and wants to register as a campaigner can know whether to register as Yes or as No. So that, if govt still won't answer after the commission referred me to them for an answer, they are seen to commit a referendum irregularity. Already govt's first answer just said, full details are in the White Paper and descent citizenship will be "available", and "further details of the procedural requirements and administration will be available when the legislation is drafted." That of course is not an answer to voters now, and I have mailed back that they have only answered the question when they say what one word means. "Does "available" mean refusable or not refusable ?"

Meanwhile, the Sunday Herald, a week after backing Yes, has not chosen to answer the following, I had written in:

As part of backing Yes, you owe to the public, and you must want, to pin down as news any facts doubted by voters that will make the Yes case socially fair. Thus: any time you can report government or legally sourced, that registrations for Scottish citizenship by descent meeting the White Paper's terms will not be refusable and will all be entitled to acceptance, you will instantly convert from No to Yes any voters like me whose concern is to uphold the diaspora and their families.

On Apr 13 the Sunday Herald printed a letter that claimed to answer my concern about citizenship just by quoting the White paper, which without the clarification as above on refusability, does not answer it. They have shown they realise that by never printing any request for clarification. But why is their own Iain Macwhirter such a keen Yes supporter that he keeps crediting the White Paper and SNP with being pro-immigration, without this question clarified, when he was born in exile himself, he is exactly the type of diaspora child who my concern is about. he risks his position closing to others like him the door he found his way home through himself.

They have reported as a splash that Kenyon Wright now backs Yes, yet it takes other sources to point up the remarkable irony that he now lives in England and can't actually vote. How well informed is he, in his chosen exile, about citizenship policies in the way of future freedom to make the same type of cross-border move as he has chosen to make>?!

the voters who matter behind the fermenting polls

There was nothing in yesterday's (Apr 20) Sunday Herald to the above. Scottish govt and Yes campaign both seen to make no response to the enquiry put to them, and copied to the Sunday Herald: asking them to clarify to that paper's readers, whether the letter printed last week claiming the White Paper's existing content as an answer to my concern about citizenship, was accurate. They knew they were going to be seen as misleading the voters unless they clarified that the letter does not do that. They chose not to clarify. So they have let the suggestion stand of misleading the voters. Now it stands as an indication that Yes rhetoric on this subject is misleading the voters as to their actual policy.

The Scotland on Sunday's headline was that voters born elsewhere, which includes Scots born in exile as well as foreign guests, are now decisive in which way the close polls will tip. This heightens the importance to the Yes folks and SNP OF GIVING A STRAIGHT ANSWER.

The Sunday Post's headline also welcome, its poll finding that there is a crisis of trust in the whole campaign, with BOTH SIDES largely mistrusted, and so trying its new initiative "Independence On Trial" to focus on what concerns from the people have been missed in the campaign. It obviously should include this one on citizenship. This will come under "Would Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the UK and the world be better or worse?" and "Would Scotland be a fairer place to live?"

May 4:The above was the background to which the Sunday Herald has now declared as supporting Yes.

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? "

taking to the hills in Russia?

Green leader Patrick Harvie is gay, and outspoken on gay equal ops. Russia has swung to a chilling explicit state anti-gay hate policy, showing that modern diplomacy does not tie dodgy states never to breach those lines. So it seems logically natural, as well as right, for Harvie to talk of "Putin's brutal regime": against the Sunday Herald's creepy story of Britain wanting to draw anti-separatist diplomatic solidarity from Russia and imagine that actually winning voters!

But Harvie leads a CND party that has always wanted us to live stripped of defences against Russia. Does he no' find the brutal regime a worry that way? It's a very unusual acknowledgement of fact from a Green. They never call Russia a brutal regime, not even back in the Soviet era did they do that, it sat so ill with the CND policy. Why does he think the good pro-gay folks in Russia are not stopping Putin's policy by means of the type of civil resistance movement that CND believers have always claimed we could beat off an invasion by? Because it doesn't work, that's why. Because populations, full of political apathy and social nastiness to each other in normal times, can't suddenly stick together in comradeship to achieve a solid mass effect whose first pain is upon themselves, and can't halt all the functioning of social services and food supplies they need for themselves too, see. As the fuel blockaders found in 2000.

This thought's noticeability goes against his own Yes side, if it persists in being intellectual-left fashionably CND and ideologically revelling in defencelessness as a great cool option. All the smaller Yes parties, including his, are pushing it that way. But looking at Putin's regime, in order to vote Yes we need to see the intellectual-left CND posturing watered down enough that de facto we will still be under the West European Bomb, allied to it and seeing that its coverage won't in fact be capable of restriction to only a part of this island and not to the whole.

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.

die of debate

According to the Sunday Herald's last front page, reckless new workfare rules for disability/sickness benefits are going to cause a lot of health damage from pushing folks into unsuitable placements they can't cope with. This comes from the British end, under whose powers the welfare system still rests. The Yes campaign will say this is a good humanitarian reason to leave Britain. Become a state where both major parties are progressive, "no more Tory governments" as had been on the SSP's Yes voting posters in Edinburgh.

But look at the independence timetable. It is actually longer than the British government's term, Salmond the reluctant seceder will take until 2016!! to actually do it. Clinging to every crumb he can on Britain's table. All this suffering will still happen while we are still waiting.

Oh but me must have a good long debate. So if folks die under pushing around by the benefits system and Atos, under 3 1/2 years of us still subject to this new system, they die to give us something to debate, do they?

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.