It was natural for society to wind down gradually

I have been interested to observe this. Every frequently meeting group known to me has been psychologically reluctant to stop. It was always been irresistible to go on and achieve their next meet so long as folks generally seem well. There is that mismatch, then, between a thinking group's natural instincts and the advice. Folks have stayed active until last weekend before the move to major shutdown from Mar 16, feeling they owed to each other to try not to drop activities, and there was always a next meet that would still be good to get done if folks were still well. Precautions like separately wrapped food started, and Anglican churches stopping their handshakes and shared communion wine from a shared cup; but knowing there were not yet many cases, folks all seemed to need the week of build-up of threat awareness, before the govt announcements of Mar 16, to get mentally ready to stop their social activities.

That felt right. It's particularly reasonable for support activities for vulnerable groups. It points against the kneejerk armchair opinion there was on Facebook for a sudden instant "lockdown" on the shockingly authoritarian model seen in some countries like Italy. As a report by Robert Peston raised, heavy handed lockdowns put the elderly at risk of unseen neglect inside their homes, which counters the argument that the authoritarian lockdown makes them safer from the virus. I agreed with the government keeping the country active as long as we were still mostly healthy, and being driven by events re when we had to tip over into shutdown. Because it all matched folks' irresistible common sense day-to-day behaviour in my experience, mine included. That has been the real practicality of folks' social and political lives, during the descent into this health emergency.

media snobbery

The media should be treading warily of disgusting us, lately. How much deeper disgust can there be than when a columnist, with a public platform herself, uses it to write blatantly against public platforms for everyone, for you. Rarely as they as blatant as Joan Smith was in the Independent yesterday, in what is supposed to be a progressive paper, in directly arguing that free speech is bad for us and leaving all the thinking to a nasty elite is better.

The new e-petitions site at British government level catches up with a modernity we already have years of experience of at Scottish level as part of the reform push that came with devolution. Smith paints both the whole e-petition idea, and blogging and all political debate online, as actual perpetrations of bullying and prejudice. She openly blatantly suggests, using her own free speech and public platform, that it proves free speech in a public arena is not good for us and only our nobly responsible political class should be trusted with public voices. Knowing this gagging will not happen to herself, and knowing she already has more platform to attack our liberties than we have to defend them.

Her point comes from how much oppressive and far right sympathy there is among the e-petitions, reminding more intellectual readers of Independent columns miserably what the barbarians at the gate believe in and are petitioning for. Capital punishment, bread and water in prison, anti-immigration, repealing the Human Rights Act. Even leaving the EU is naughtily listed and made to sound as bad as those other items are. I'm pro-EU but that was a mischievous spin to constrict what her readers can feel allowed to think.

It should be agreed that it would be dangerous to have a system where just public support for a measure actually enforced its passing into law, the uncurbed form of "citizen's initiative and referendum", INIREF, as in Switzerland. The government should be entitled to give as human rights defence against enacting any measure that violates human rights, no matter how majority supported it is. But that is the safeguard needed, concerning what is actually enacted - not to suppress what is debated. INIREF should be used to guarantee the claims to enact any issue a hearing on their merits. so that things are aired and not hidden, but with a human rights safeguard to block the actual enactment of evil measures, alike whether it is people or government who want them.

What Miss Nursemaid here is not explaining, is how a petitioning system that gives ideas a hearing can result in having to implement them. There is a total difference between folks saying they want racist and far right measures, and having the means to make them happen. Also she is reading actual social persecution into the presence of any bad ideas among the petitions at all, despite the presence of at least as many and more petitions that are progressive. As other media have identified, a petition against capital punishment has more signatures than the for. She is reacting to the existence of any petitions like that at all, not to the absence of any more decent ones. She says not a word about where the folks behind the nicer petitions are supposed to get noticed instead.

So what is this threat Smith asks us to feel? She is just expressing snobbery that voice for real people is so uncouth don't you know, and so beneath our natural leaders' noses. Bloggers and online debaters are all knee-jerk anger, journalists reflect more on what they write than bloggers, she ludicrously writes right in the face of all the recent events. If any perspective is knee-jerk oppressive from lack of reflection, that is. Who is her own writing accountable to for its reflectiveness? Does this Edenic picture include the tabloids, Joan?

She gives us a lesson she did not intend, that to have politics's content kept limited and filtered by an elite is indeed a squashing of free speech, knowingly, calculately. She thinks that is good, despite all the history that unfree societies do exactly the things in the petitions she dislikes !! A clanging contradiction.

The same elite filtering of thought is what Salmond and the SNP have done by selective refusing to issue in public some of their national conversation's responses, hiding what they like from us. Hiding the court change which abolishes judges' power to take wilfully bent decisions and call them final, and hiding the issue of the state being racist to returners to Scotland from the diaspora. Hiding those makes us all safer, does it Joan?

leave to appeal

Yesterday's Herald headline on raising the age of buying alcohol, is all I need to feel the most immense moral relief that I did not vote SNP. How many youth votes did its emotional landslide sweep up?

Older voters too already have grave cause for uneasiness, from the present row about the Supreme Court. The SNP blatantly does not want folks to have access to a means some have already used, to establish breaches of human rights. It wants to suppress access to something that even covers the safety of convictions. This is supposed to whip up national pride and a feeling of insult at British interference in us. This exactly parallels how many dictatorships in Asia and Africa used to call the outside world's human rights concerns interference and associate it with colonialism. Robert Mugabe and Lee Kwan Yew still do that.

They want you to have to go to the European Court of Human Rights instead, knowing that will take longer, so if your case is about being in jail it will mean you stay in jail for longer, and if it is civil law and you need a lawyer to do it there will be more chance that you can't afford it. On Radio Scotland last night the SNP speaker could not answer these objections from Labour and kept changing the subject when asked about them.

Noticeably exactly since the SNP has been in government it has grown a monstrous morally authoritarian streak. It does not bode well for handing them increases of power. This is quite as big a letdown for folks who used to support the SNP as a banner for democratic reform, in its underdog days, as Clegg tying the Lib Dems to stick for another 4 years to a deal to attack vulnerable groups and their safety nets. These are not happy days at all for the reformist parties as were.

On this court issue too, the SNP is ignoring the "court change", the abolition of final decisions, which the whole political elite have kept hushed up ever since 1999 and which I described in my feeback on the referendum bill, last year, which they refused to issue publicly. The cause of this blog's existence.

A massive benefit done by the court change, is that it abolishes the horrible concept of "leave to appeal." That blatantly absurd corrupt mediaeval device, where the same court as makes a wilfully dodgy or corrupt decision also chooses whether to allow you to pursue any objection to it. The court change establishes a perpetual right of faulty finding, by any party, against every legal decision ever. That is what democracy needs. It extinguishes the nonsense of anyone ever needing leave to appeal. In the Supreme Court row, The SNP's minister of justice, Kenny Macaskill, is focussing his argument on leave to appeal. He wants folks to be required to get it before they can bring cases. Openly publicly he wants he wants a device applied at the discretion of the same courts as would be challenged, which is blatantly an unjust corrupt trick, to serve as a barrier to doing anything about safety of convictions.

The court change would protect your liberties from that trick and from an agenda as sinister towards your safety as Macaskill's. The SNP kept the court change out of the public record.

minging towards the AV referendum

Given the fact that we are in Britain and nobody can forsee when we might leave it, our access to accountability and half-decent treatment by decision makers is affected by the Alternative Vote referendum, open endedly into the future. The SNP has always, always except 1974, been disappointed with its results in British elections, and been a squeezed smaller party, so it has an obvious interest in AV.

So it is completely stupid that SNP flyers are ignoring the referendum. After urging you for their vote, they just mention, there is a third ballot paper which is on the British election system this has nothing to do with the Scottish election. Not a word about voting Yes, just this has nothing to do with the Scottish election. Just contemptuous.

That does not show caring about your interests, for all of the unknown future duration of the Union. There is no gain to the independence campaign made by doing this, nothing would be lost to it by supporting a Yes vote in this other referendum. They are just being emotional and minging because it is a British issue.

The censored referendum this blog was concerned with was the independence referendum: but it is worth mentioning that the AV referendum is also effectively censored, in the balance of its reach to households all over Britain. No provision has been made for the Yes campaign to get literature sent to every household, and that is not happening, it is being left to volunteer leafletters to reach where they can, while the No campaign has been amply funded by the Conservatives to do a national mailshot of a booklet to every household. This is not parity, and it will pose a challengeability to how the referendum has been conducted. It breaks the precedent of the EU referendum in 1975, when both the Yes and No campaigns were resourced to mailshot a booklet to every household.

As one of the volunteer leafletters, I have had to make a complaint to the NHS in Fife, [update: who have made a proper check and now confirmed these nurses were not NHS] against a nurse who was arriving at a house to do a home visit at the same time as I reached it in my leafletting, and who put on authoritarian airs trying to stop me leaving a leaflet, entirely on her own without the householder knowing let alone authorising it. The Yes campaign is up against illegal interference like that, to No campaign is not.

police station lawyer access

The SNP government has gone out of its way never to sound liberal or enlightened on any issue. To project a severe image of society appealing to the authoritarian vote, which is hardly a vote for healthy accountability of the state in a new independent state, is it? (Yes2AV)

For the folks of their country to feel safe, today's must be the worst item on this list. It has taken a human rights court case at British level to enforce access to a lawyer for everyone being held and questioned by the police. The SNP have never campaigned about this, and on the day it happens, do they come on TV beaming with pleasure for human rights here? Not zilch. Macaskill, and remember he is a lawyer, sounded totally displeased and bothered. His first reaction? To increase the hours the police can bang you up for without charge. To make it the same as England, 24 hours, so that we lose the good side of only being lockable up for less time in Scotland, 6 hours.

There are other times, outside formal questioning, when the police in an English police station can intimidate you without a lawyer seeing, and yes we have custody visitors in Scotland so whatever way the police tried to frighten you, if they held you for long enough for the custody visitor to see you then you could tell them about it. So it is not the case that before today the Scottish position was disastrously worse in human rights terms than the English. It was worse in that way, the detention without lawyer for 6 hours, but better in other ways, the lesser detention time and the procurator fiscal check on charging decisions. It was swings and roundabouts, by accidents of history. There was no need for nationalists to feel miffed or defensive. But above all there was no need for them to defend what was bad and to introduce something else bad in cancelling out of today's step forward.

In making it a lot worse and a lot less safe going through daily life for how long the police can bang you up for without charge, the SNP government is inflicting on itself a lot more cause for the court change to arise in court cases, and for folks to make use of it. This totally sits in conflict with their unworkable effort to continue to ignore the court change, and with suppressing the decription of the court change in my consultation response. The only course it fits with logically, is to openly announce the court change and take a position on it.