search yourself Lesley Riddoch

Riddoch has written a National column seizing on the opinion poll of Brexit-raving Tory menbers, that found a majority polling as preferring to lose Scotland than drop Brexit. Symptomatic of what Brexit has done to the Tories, and some commenters have suggested it comes from the weight of Brexiters who have joined the Tories to influence the leadership election. But the nats are all falling over it with glee.

They and Riddoch are making a logical fallacy typical of them, in declaring this the end of unionism. They are assuming that all u ionists are Tories. A piece of mud they would sneakily love to stick, and which makes no sense alongside what they often say on low Tory support here. i.e. the majority of Unionists are not Tories, and their Unionism is completely logically unaffected by the Tories' collective crack-up.

Here are Riddoch's words asked back to her. As I asked them back to her in a National site comment.

SHE WROTE

>
• As Stuart Campbell [Wings over Bath] pointed out: “Tories in Scotland and Northern Ireland are clinging to a nation from which their own Conservative colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb ... at the first inconvenience.”
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst Union-supporting Scots ? ... So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that “fellow” arch Unionists would throw you and your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cutting ties with the European Union – how do you feel about the Union now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• What on earth are we waiting for? Even Scotland’s No voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

ASKED BACK TO HER

Lesley: you are a diaspora-born Scot who belongs to your nation by family. The White Paper does not give, and ever since it SNP and Yes have refused to give, unrefusable citizenship by the family connection route, parental descent. For 6 years you have faced the question, and you evaded it when asked by me at a meeting you did in Edinburgh Friends' Meeting House during the indyref:

• Why are you an eager leading voice of a movement that is racist against yourself ?
• Yessers who either are, or care about family/friends who are, parental descent Scots, are clinging to a nation from which their own Yes colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb, by dogma without even waiting for an inconvenience.
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst indy-supporting Scots? So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that "fellow" arch Nats would throw you and your subset of your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cruelly dividing families in breach of ECHR article 8 - how do you feel about indy now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• As of Perth's recent hustings, Green leader Maggie Chapman has come round on parental descent citizenship. What are you waiting for? Even Scotland's SNP voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

No new case for nowt

Right - now that we've seen it online, we know it contains nothing but economics. Economics shown to be opinion, as it is argued over by columnists from both sides. The more militantly optimistic nats feeling let down by its recommendation that we go for a fiscally powerless unauthorised use of the pound, which they had not thought good to argue for in indyref1! Clearly the hired opinion makers for a new case for optimism have run scared of optimism in the fiscal cost + potential austerity of committing to try to create a currency.

Anyway - "Scotland:a New Case For Optimism" IS NOT A SECOND WHITE PAPER. The Herald had tried to bill it as one, ahead of it coming out. It contains no plans for a Scottish state outside its economic strategy. Mpst importantly it contains nothing on rules for citizenship. While it has a pro-immigration sentiment, it says nothing about remofing the bigoted racist atrocity against a section of Scots, that was in Yes's offer last time round, + making citizenship by parental descent unrefusable.

So it has changed nothing, as yet, around that moral reason to vote No. That supervenes over all the document's economic thoughts regardless of their merits.

"how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries"

From Paul Kavanagh's "Wee Ginger Dug" page in the National:

" It's quite likely tbat an independent Scotland will extend citizenship to every British citizen resident in Scotland when independence is achieved, and to everyone born in Scotland or who has a Scottish parent. That is, more or less, how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries."

This is not yet the atrocious racism problem in the last indyref solved. "Quite likely" of course is not certainty. But welcome, and record and keep, that a columnist in the National, the nats' own paper, has put in print that he finds parental descent citizenship natural and an axiomatic likelihood. Has he forgotten the White Paper or is he a welcome vanguard of the nats deciding to change it? Are they going to comply next time with the ECHR human right to family life? This writer has chosen encourage a spark of hope for it.

the popular will

news.stv.tv/scotland-decides/news/279363-survey-finds-more-scots-want-trident-to-stay-than-go-after-yes-vote/ Opinion Poll More want to keep Trident!! So much for Eck telling the pulse of public opinion.

There is something very unclear, very smoke and mirrors, about the new draft constitution they are consulting on. Because the consultation actually ends after the vote, so that it will presumably just have to be abandoned if No wins, none of the draft's contents are commitments or policies when we vote. this is particularly agonising to remember in relation to citizenship, where perhaps prodded by voter concerns about the diaspora, they have now used the word "entitlement" in relation to citizenship by descent, and having a "claim" to citizenship. Trouble is, this only refers to forms of descent which are not specified, in this draft they don't specify any details of how citizenship by descent would work, so it does not attach these words to the White Paper policy on parental and grandparental descent. "if either of their parents meets requirements set out in law" and "another connection with Scotland as set out further in law". Also left open for the constitution writers is what the "prescribed procedures" for applying will be. So it still remains that they need to say, and until they say it they have not said it, that applications on parental and grandparental descent evidenced in any way at all will not be refusable.

CONFIRMED, OUR NATS ARE BETRAYING OUR DIASPORA.

RECEIVED THIS MORNING FROM NICKOLA PAUL, POLICY OFFICER FOR MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP:

Dear Mr Frank,

Thank you for your response of 9 May.

As you reiterate, citizenship by descent would also be available to those with a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship. This will require the individual to supply evidence to substantiate their relation. Legislation would be made to establish detailed rules for Scottish citizenship in time for independence including both the evidence required and any discretionary elements. Therefore further details of the procedural requirements and administration of the relevant rules in relation to Scottish citizenship applications will be available when the legislation is drafted.

Kind regards,
Nickola Paul

OBVIOUSLY THIS MEANS VOTE NO. That could only change if the position got overturned as a result of being exposed, and it has taken this long since the White Paper even to extract it so clearly.

It took 2 mailings to them, linked to an enquiry to the electoral commission about registering rules, to get this, on a question I have pursued ever since the White Paper came out and never yet extracted this clear admission of what evasive answers had always indicated. They are refusing to make any commitment before the vote, that the Scottish offspring who were born in rUK to parents who moved there, and who are still there after independence day, can be sure of their citizenship. Hence, if common travel areas break down, sure of being allowed their natural right to live in their own country, as they are now under the union, which is not romanticism it is a humanitarian life practicality about dividing families.

A Labour broadcast in the 1999 election warned of this and was very effective. To choose not to learn from that, the nats must have some very sick forces they want to keep happy. has not learned from and happening again. This confirms our nats are xenophobically betraying the diaspora and prospectively dividing many families. This is an anti-outsider community hate politics worse than UKIP, it would be a new Clearances. Its timing is an ideal unionist answer to, and totally trumps, any scares about UKIP that the SNP still try on despite the election result's humiliation of their claim that we were immune to UKIP and splendidly different to England.

Why are journalists Lesley Riddoch and Iain Macwhirter still both Yes supporters, when they were both born in England so it is the Scots exactly like themselves whose racist betrayal they are now confirmed to be supporting?

Only a week ago, at Tom Devine's lecture at Glasgow university, I got in my question about betrayal of the diaspora and put it into the awareness of a big thinking audience many of whose own families stand to be divided by hate. Yet in the informal time after it, an inane smarmily smiling Yes supporter who works for Academics for Yes was introduced to me by one of those academics, who I know - and out of the blue he started banging on at me about the voting franchise, an issue I had never mentioned, and all about how "very progressive" the Yes side is to base that on residence. This was a severe example of a brainwashed fixed mind not listening. There was some time ago a diaspora-related controversy around the franchise, so just on hearing the word diaspora he had jumped top assuming that my question, which he had clearly not listened to, was about that, the question he was familiar with, instead of the very different question it actually was !!! What a dismal prospect of human stupidity at a time of humanitarian crisis against hate and division, in Scotland's life as much as in Europe's.

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>?!

Sabre man or deliverer?

A Yes supporter with expat-born kids who will need to register for citizenship by descent, has told me this on Facebook:

• I don't 'trust' that the White Paper means what I think it means, what I'm saying is that I am confident that I can successfully argue that it means what I think it means. In court if necessary. It duplicates, and slightly extends, current arrangements with regard to British citizenship for Scottish-descended overseas residents. Specifically, it's not 'automatic' now either, they already have to apply. And some specific exclusion clauses have been left out, which is why my kids, who are not currently eligible, will be, post-indy.

He said this in defence of the interpretation that the registered-for citizenship will be an entitlement and if all the criteria are met for providing evidence the Scottish govt won't have a selective power to refuse the applications. Any ideas where we voters can get some info on how right he is about court, to show us it's not just bluster and he could stop in court a govt operating the White Paper citizenship policy from turning down his kids?

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? "

grim purist racism becoming clearer step by step.

Very unpleasant racially excluding themes are now emerging consistently, if you look out for them, in the Yes campaign and case. It is a particularly tragic turn in the history of a dispersed people historically subjected to worldwide clearances. despite the plan to have a Homecoming Festival this summer, present day nationalism is showing selfish forms only caring about the home population and betraying the diaspora. If it stays this way, everyone with family links to the rest of Britain, or with friends who have family links to the rest of Britain, will have strong humanitarian need to vote No.

I have mentioned before getting ignored by every part of the Yes campaign enquired to to establish that our new state will not have a power to say no to any of the applications to "register" for citizenship by descent, as the White Paper describes. To this you can now include Labour For Independence. The position is no longer left to assuming the worst from silence and from Yes newspaper number 2. On Mar 11 there was a Yes public meeting in Gorgie, Edinburgh. there, to my question on this, Alex Neil confirmed the worst, the answer not wanted. That yes the new state would hold onto a choice how to respond to the citizenship by descent applications. He offered as an excuse for this that it screens out undesirables like serious criminals. He made the usual noises about the Yes side wanting to encourage new population, but that can not take away that when pinned down in front of a public audience as to their position he has gave a position that would take away the automatic unobstructable access to their own country, that exists now under the Union, for Scots who were born in exile because their parents/grandparents moved away, and who already have the pain of not having been able to rush back to live here on independence day and qualify for automatic citizenship that way. To vote for that is to commit a new clearances, to divide families and effect a division of hate between Scots potentially closing our country to some of our own offspring. That is not national renewal or liberation, that is national betrayal and severely serious purist racism.

In that meeting there was no comeback to the answers given, so that the speakers could get away with evasions. So there was no comeback to ask him: how do we know you won't discriminate against the unemployed and the poor. Any time politicians are not tied down against doing that, you know as surely as clockwork it is what they will do. These are the same folks as inflicted Trump on Aberdeenshire against the locals' will and who are abolishing corroboration and tampering with free criminal defence, always remember that.

A letter in the Sunday Times, responding to the birthplace racism in the legal challenge for expats to have the vote, pinpointed exactly what is involved in these attitudes. Written from England by Andrew Lockhart, it said "There are many people born in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or abroad who, for ancestral reasons, have emotional ties with Scotland and deem themselves Scots. That does not mean they would wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state..." and "Alex Salmond should not assume that even those born in Scotland and who live elsewhere would wish to accept what he so condescendingly offers." It now seems to be the No supporters who are conscious of these ties. Alternatively they might well wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state if one is created, and stronger practical factors than just ancestry and emotion are at stake, family ties and background, when your status is made different even than your siblings' and the rest of your family are all in the homeland whose government, claiming to be progressive, asks to be allowed to exclude its own.

You might say that no excluding will happen because we will all still be in a common travel area. Even if that was true it would only hold for those of the offspring born in exile who live in the rest of Britain or the EU. But as we rationally know, there are considerably big chances that common travel areas will break down, through either country ending up outside the EU or through England fulfilling its threat to put a border onto us. If those situations happen, citizenship does translate into being allowed to live here at all.

Then yesterday I attended a lecture in Glasgow by a Yes campaign leading name, supposed to be a lefty one into popular participation. In the informal time after the lecture I asked him what ordinary people should do to make the Yes campaign take a position guaranteeing the children of exile their safe belonging here and citizenship. What I got back was a volley of disgustingly hard man conservative attitudes about folks who live here and pay their taxes here, something about a standard process for citizenship taking 3 years! that is not even in the White Paper, and no promises or straight answer at all for anyone not already living here to live here if free movement breaks down. He actively said he would speak up and say this is wrong, if citizenship was being opened up any further to diaspora who do not already live here. By this he showed a very dark racism, only further confirming the seriousness of these concerns against voting Yes on present terms. He seriously imagined himself in the lecture a progressive calling for our news state to do lots of left wing things, and disturbingly undemocratically he called for it to be governed by a left wing consensual partnership between the major parties instead of a proper party contest, that was sinister too. yet he has no feeling or consciousness for the diaspora at all, all his imagined empowerment of the nation applies only to the folks who already live here, that is all he sees the nation as. Narrow minded, sweepingly excluding and with mental walls up against the rest of the world and everyone in it including exiled Scots, this nastiness follows naturally on from, continues, the recent hating action of Angus Macneil MP who denied that the childen of exile are Scots if they have not yet lived here. This is very ugly, very bigoted, very divisive and a threat to families, a far worse line on citizenship than Britain's, this is not liberation or progression at all, this is an inward turned grim racist horror prospect. Step by step this dystopian appeal to narky inward focussed outsider fearing bigots is becoming too stark not to see.

Listen to your expat families. They are real people.

Yes for who?

On the same day as the news of their sudden narrowing of the polls gap, the Yes side may have blown any deserving to win. Unless they put something right, they have let it slip through their fingers just when your spirits were highest, tragically by a thoughtless piece of racist sloppiness from the ideas-conservative heart of the SNP.

The latest Yes paper, which came through my door today, states "all British citizens who were born here or live here on day one of independence will have a right to a Scottish passport." It said nothing at all about the diaspora born's position, it was written in a way that the public can read as meaning the diaspora born who can't move back here before independence day are not necessarily entitled at all. It presents the exile born as not counting if they are not already here, it does not present the diaspora as equal.

They may be kids who will only be adult after the date, or young adults stuck in the family economic dependence that is deliberate Tory policy,

I know the White Paper clarifies that the exile born for 2 generations can also register for a passport by right - btw a betrayal of Salmond's plan of only a few months previously, to make it 3 generations. But this point is about the public message, rather than the less known detailed facts. The presentation has suddenly sloppily slid back to the 1999 election, when the SNP made that crucial policy foul-up and was open to attack by Labour as dividing families. This may cause racist bullying, among the thick laddish type of adult, and among schoolkids some of whom are in the 16 franchise where already before this Yes was said to be trailing unexpectedly.

An interesting site linked to by Yes supporters on Facebook is "100 Artists and Creatives who support Scottish independence." The list includes diaspora born Lesley Riddoch. Were the folks in the campaign she supports remembering all their supporters when they wrote the paper?

twin dilemma

A Better Together paper just came through my door, a lot of its content over several pages focused on British overlapping feelings of nationhood. It's good that after the White Paper they are seeing a chance to force the campaign's emotive level to start focusing more on that question. Among all the to and fro claims about economics there had seemed a risk of both sides slipping past us the due focus on this basic fairness question of making sure you get to belong to your own home. With the Yes side being slippery and spivvy on the issue, will it take the No side's pressure to make them address it more properly?

But will voters notice how selective the No side is being? They mention a lot about how many folks in the British countries are from each other's country. They select to mention nothing at all of the same about EU countries - when exactly the same arguments apply to them.

They feature a Scottish father who was born in exile with a family with a multiplicity of births, and they quote figures for how many folks in Scotland were born in the rest of Britain and vice versa. But this statistic is misleading, if you are a Scot who was born in the rest of Britain there is every good chance you disliked your exile and are pleased to be home, it does not make you necessarily want to keep the Union at all. Only if there is a weakness on the Yes side here, only if there are enough holes in their citizenship policy to cause there to be any exiles whose return to Scotland independence could make harder and any less of an automatic right, should this No argument have any effect. At present, after the shambles of the White Paper contradicting itself on citzenship and being full of gobbledygook about forbears and where they lived on independence day and its unclairty on where to deem thast they would have resided if they had not died, the Yes side is choosing unecessarily to be weak enough on this issue to constitute a betrayal of Scottish history, and deserves to have the No side attack on this. But our EU citizen residents don't deserve to be put in more danger, by it, of right wing British nationalism turning on them after Scotland fails to vote itself out of that process.

They feature a family with twins born on each side of the border because of the circumstances when the mother's labour began during as journey. It's an excellent case study against birthplace racism, the evil of all bigots who would deem these twins to belong to different countries if they don't personally identify so. It's morally right that it should turn anyone against loopholes in the citizenship policies, on both sides. But what is the No side's answer to the case, you could have just as easily, of twins born one in Britain one across the Channel? Do they agree with their own argument's implication that we should not vote to belong to a country that leaves the EU in an ugly mood of nationalist racism?

no bitterness no peace

The BBC was at its cultic drip-drip mind-wearing worst over its repetitive Mandela obituaries, which all other news was simply abolished to make way for. On radios Scotland, 4, and 5 last night, all of them alike, the so-called news consisted of only this one event and lofty top folks' remarks on it. Even when they paused to say, now the headlines, so you thought you were going to get something else, even the headlines consisted only of this one single item repeated again.

Yet the same day, we had had our strongest wind storm for years, with a startling total closure of our rail network, and the major bridges, stuff falling through the roof of Glasgow Central station, and a lorry blown over. You would think we wante to know about the immdeicate local situation of our own lives?

A dissenting blog here: www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2013-12-06/a-dissenting-opinion-on-nelson-mandela/, and Medialens who linked to it, shows that the reson why Mandela is getting so deified now is because during his government South Africa was bogged down into the neocon world economy and totally failed to solve the racially disparate poverty inherited from apartheid. Can well remember the serious papers, at the time, reporting about continuing ill-treatment of white employed black farm workers. John Pilger on interviewing him in 1996 on breaking his word on privatisation: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54583# .

As Pilger mentions, Mandela portrayed expedient deals with the old white economic elite as part of "reconciliation". And this totally illuminates why the BBC line has been all about how wonderful he was for choosing against "bitternesss" and "revenge". One BBC headline report, which is supposed to be fact not opinion, stated as a fact the opinion that Mandela saved South africa's peaceful outcome this way. All the while, because he is in such media favour, they choose to make no mention of Winnie Mandela and the necklace atrocities in 1986, and how though the Mandelas divorced it was ambiguous whether Nelson ceased to be aligned with her on that and certainly his death announcements treated her as a linked and a perfectly fine figure in the face of that savage history. Same as with Churchill, which this selective deification is similar to, they chose to forget that he had believed in forced sterilisation of the poor and in a lower grading of the races ousted by colonial white societies worldwide.

The fad for talk of reconciliation processes and anti-bitterness propaganda, and the age-old anti-revenge line by the major religions, are about taking away fairness and even its expectation. Their purpose is to acculturate ordinary people into a state of passive fatalism with whatever an unjust course of events has given them, away from expecting feeling any entitlement or claim to redress and the writing of wrongs. It is a way for political elites to avoid bothering with any outstanding injustices at ordinary people level, whenever they dispose of a difficult situation is the quietest life way for themselves that presents.

It is an agenda that threatens us in the Scottish referendum process too. It is the way any anomalies about citizenship, anyone unfairly left out of it, could be ever so gently hushed away by the BBC. It has already started in the media consensus that we should just treat the White Paper as a sketch of ideal wishes none of whose detailed contents are actually committal to anything. Suffer from this? Oh but that's bitterness you see, no no no, gotta have reconciliation, innit? or it will be the same with any deflated hopes felt after a No vote, and when the system clams up to give us no further political reform and reminds us it had always been noncommittal that it would. Oh no don't keep on about this at us, that's bitterness you see, innit, no no no, you had your vote, gotta have reconciliation, now.

That's how the trick will work. Be on guard not to accept it.

citizen holes?

"Any person who at present is entitled to British citizenship for any reason of Scottish background, will be entitled to Scottish citizenship." - is this the case?

And indeed: "Any person born after 1983 who would have been entitled to it if born before 1983".(When Britain made its rules viciously worse allowing itself to exclude kids born here to non-citizen parents.)

This is the simple statement the Yes campaign needs to make to prevent there being any gaps or loopholes in the description of citizenship in the White Paper. Voters could campaign for this statement, to the Yes campaign and our MSPs of Yes supporting parties. With this on simple statement, any flaws and loopholes anyone finds in the table of proposed citizenship criteria in the White Paper, which you can find at the end of chapter 7, will be automatically solved.

Without this, the campaign could be thrown away by any loophole found. If it was shown that any Scots from the diaspora were going to find it harder to belong to their own country when it is its own state than they are under the Union, bang would go the moral and anti-racist case for statehood which is based so strongly on reacting against the present frightening racist drift in British politics.

The references to parents who qualify for Scottish citizenship are a sloppily worded loophole that badly needs clarifying by making the statement proposed. The table is worded in the present tense, implying the parents qualify now hence are alive now, and if one of the possible qualifiers is to live in Scotland on independence day, then it implies being alive on the day. However, the question what if parents who met all the proposed citizenship critieria at the time of their deaths had died before independence day, is answered in question 379 of the question section at the end of the White Paper. Only when you see that do you see how it removes a danger there would be from reading only the table literally as it is written. For someone who would need their forbear's residence on the day as affecting whether the forbear was a potential citizen, the danger of a loophole is certainly still right in there, for from the wording it is not clear whether a parent who died before the day is considered for which country they were intending to live in on the day, and what if they died before their intended move?

The White Paper's wording suggests the SNP has not listened to anyone or learned anything since it was tripped up by Labour in the 1999 election over defining citizenship in much this way: a Labour broadcast that said, if you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a citizen? no, they will have to apply.

The White Paper has messed up here, also in describing as automatic the citizenship of all the non-Scots living around the world with no connection with Scotland who but who chanced to be born here. It is an obvious fact that they will not become citizens against their will of a state they don't live in or want anything to do with. Obviously only if they register their existence will they be citizens. This means in practice the position for them is the same as for Scots born in exile and returning from it through their parents'/grandparents' etc. It is bad that for hastily written rhetorical purposes it has not been worded the same, when sat down and reasoned on it amounts to the same in practice. The White Paper's questions section seems to say it is for an international law reason so that they will be our citizens rather than stateless, but again, logically that should apply the same to both groups.

It is good, though, that the word "register", which means taking up a right, has been used, rather than "apply" which would imply the possibility of a no. But the inconsistent arrangement as described in the White Paper has allowed some of the papers, describing it, to use the word "apply" and frighten voters by it.

A much worse example of racial mischief features in the right wing Spectator's article on the White Paper. Its its list of what it contrives to present as surprise developments, under citizenship it says: "It had been assumed that only those living in Scotland at the time of independence would become citizens of the new Scotland. It has now emerged that Scottish citizenship will be an awful lot wider than that. The White Paper reveals that anybody who was born in Scotland can become a Scottish citizen and have a Scottish passport. Not only that, but all those with a Scottish parent or grandparent could become citizens of the new Scotland too."

"It had been assumed" by who exactly? Only by said Spectator itself. Never has it been suggested at any point in the campaign that Scots living in economic exile who can move back now within the Union would suddenly cease to be able to move back. No national liberation that would be. Only mischievous appealers to the racist vote would conceive the thought.

On the question of whether anybody who was born in Scotland can become a Scottish citizen, rhetoric had always suggested it but the White Paper is cagier than that and is actually CONTRADICTORY! The potential Scottish or British citizenship eligibilities that your parents or grandparents had are involved in the tables of different categories of opportunity to register, including for folks born here. Though it is good that this means the White Paper is at odds with birthplace racism, it would be bad enough to blow the whole Yes campaign apart if loopholes are found that exclude anyone with a background here that could be registered through their birthplace, from citizenship and being able to live here. Hence the need for a simple policy statement as suggested above, to keep the position clear and just. The contradiction is between question 379, which says citizenship by descent would require a parent or grandparent to have been born here, and the table, which does not say that and just says those forbears needed to qualify to be citizens, which could be in other ways than birth.

Vote and seek

On the Scotsman's news page about the White Paper, a unionist commenter has already gone straight for the jugular, and correctly. Quoting: 11. Will an independent Scotland have control over monetary policy?

Day-to-day monetary policy would be decided independently of government by the Bank of England as it is now, taking account of economic conditions across the Sterling Area. The Scottish Government would seek formal input into the governance and remit of the Bank of England.

Effectively: we're bought and sold for English gold, such a parcel of rogues in a nation. An independent state will "seek" formal "input" into the central bank of another state, indeed of the state it has just seceded from. Sadly so ludicrous, and so unionist, it will be remembered all down Scottish history to come as suggesting Alex wants to lose.