Showing posts with label Tony Blair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tony Blair. Show all posts

Friday, 1 August 2014

Herald wiping comments and manipulating debate ?

On the following page on Frank Skinner, www.heraldscotland.com/politics/referendum-news/comedian-fears-england-may-go-right-wing-if-scots-vote-yes.24817570, in the Disqus comments section is the Herald showing a manipulation of heard debate to favour Yes? It has excluded the following 2 posts from being posted:
  • In answer to a racist called Alex who wrote "You are not in your country, unless you were born there":

    The school bully prejudice of claiming that birthplace dictates country divides siblings and has been visibly wrong ever since the ancient Jews' exile in Babylon. Tony Blair is English and was born in Scotland. Eamonn da Valera was born in America. The Silent Twins, Barbadian, were born in Yemen simply because their family was in the RAF there, left it at age 7 months and had no further connection with it in their lives. Among Scots, Alexander McCall Smith was born in Matabeleland, Fitzroy Maclean in Egypt, Edinburgh council leader Andrew Burns in Germany, Eric Liddell in China. Lesley Riddoch, Alec Home, the Queen Mother, and former Plaid Cymru leader Dafydd Wigley were born in England, while famously Norwegian author Roald Dahl was born in Wales.
  • In answer to "Simon Harries, Cambridge" post beginning "I was born in Africa":

    "Simon - Yes has ratted on a former SNP pledge of automatic citizenship for everyone born in Scotland and is confining that to inherited British citizenship, in that negative way it is not defining citizenship by birthplace. But in another negative way it is. Scots who were born outside Scotland to emigrant parents, mostly in rUK, and can't arrange to be resident here on indy day, they won't budge on making their citizenship only discretionary and refusable. A humanitarian betrayal which will divide families, against ECHR article 8, preventing them coming together to support each other against poverty or in time of medical need, and means the Scottish nation rejecting and excluding a large part of itself.

    "Civic nationalism" has turned out to mean a selfish anti-outsider racism of only caring about the population who chance arbitrarily to already live here, thus totally hostile to moving around and orientated to making it harder. I got that from 3 sources at Yes events.

    Pat Kane told me he would be first to speak up and say "this is wrong" against any further openness to the diaspora. Jim Sillars, considered a leading nat speaker who is doing many meetings for them, answering my question on dividing families said he wants our exile-born children subjected to the same filtering for skills as migrants from anywhere with no roots here at all, and openly told an audience "We must not be afraid of this". Those of the exile-born who have suffered from bad education systems or corrupt abuses like Savile, and that is their reason for not having high value skills, will be further punished and rejected by their country for being abuse victims. A stallholder for Radical Indy, told about this, defended it and called it good socialism to treat all outsiders from everywhere the same and racist to give preference to "someone who happens to be descended..." and he never answered on the practical impact of dividing families, dodged it several times by just repeating the racist jibe "how far back do you go?"

    That the Yes we are faced with is as nasty as this is a humanitarian emergency in our history. But it's by enquiring and digging and going to meetings that I have discovered it, not by passive listening to the campaign. In the British-wide racist mood I can't make the media or No campaign focus on it, so have had to make personal efforts with a "no to a new clearances" campaign in the Borders, and a Euro petition against accepting a new state as fairly mandated if voters were unaware of this horror."


A Facebook link showing horrible cybernats giving a birthplace racist reaction to Rod Stewart, in their usual emotional haste forgetting that their position would apply against their own Lesley Riddoch too.

Thursday, 7 March 2013

Explain why don't we have to get out to stay in?

Tony Blair today says independence is bad for the same reasons as leaving the EU is bad. Cutting ourselves off into a small bubble instead of being cushioned by belonging to a bigger whole in an era when economics works on the big scale. Okay, follow his own reasoning?

What happens in the event that Britain chooses not to listen to him and continues its anti-EU drift that has so swiftly accelerated to such a serious scale that nobody expected. We will see Britain heading for the separatist choice, and largely for racist reasons that will make it a very ugly scenario for many of our continental friends who live here and have important places in our lives. Already it includes right wing moves against the principle of human rights. Then exactly in order to choose against separation we would have to choose to separate from Britain. In order to follow Blair's advice on the EU and stay in that European bigger whole, we would have to leave the British bigger whole, so as not to be included in its leaving of the EU?

With the 2 decisions forced on us in the wrong order, the Scottish decisison happening before the British EU decisison and not informed by its result but forced to gamble on what it will be, won't it be a safer way of following Blair's own reasoning that we separate from Britain for fear of it separating from Europe, and we seize on the support of figures like Blair for the desirability of not shrinking the EU, to use in fighting our way back into it if we get the accession problems the unionists are having us threatened with? Blair obviously would not say it was bad that smaller countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, separated out from the former bigger unions of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, and have joined the bigger EU instead contributing to its expansion, before it was possible for them to bring the whole of the unions they left into the EU. Scotland will be in exactly the same moral position if we buck a very nastily anti-democratic swing to Euro-hate by Britain.

This surely is the only really strong argument the Yes side can use to climb out of the hole the SNP's secret economic nerves have put them in, also today! It means being strong on human rights to differentiate from, and to raise clear alarm against, the way England is turning. But that will only work if it overturns the SNP's own eagerness to attack human rights arm in arm with the Tories, if the Yes side disown and cease to be burdened by Macaskill making you pay for a court defence when charged with a crime. Otherwise, being part of big or small wholes ain't what it's about at all. Survival of free society and getting out of the hole that both sides at once have thrown our civil liberties into, will be the primary item to vote on.

Thursday, 21 June 2012

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.