still fighting fantasies

Ordinary nats are still fighting as they were during the ref, to get unverified fantasies taken as fact, and still calling it lies and scares to point out the truth that a fantasy has no basis.

That is still the level where a nat writing in the Metro this week is at. he called it a unionist scare and lie that there would be any border control with rUK, because there isn't any with the Irish Republic. He slags unionist readers and confidently calls all this unionist lying. And exactly the same facts still stand now as stood during the ref, that makes it the nats who are lying about this and unionists are simply citing facts sensibly:

* It is not Scotland's sole say for there not to be border control. Either state on either side of a border has the power to put control on. Relations with Ireland for no constitutional precedent at all.
* Yes there are identity checks in entering and leaving Ireland, and at present regular travellers to the Republic find it sensible to take their passports to avoid difficulties over whether whatever other form of identity they are carrying is accepted. Not only that, because the Republic has at present has a milder line on immigration than Britain has and Britain does not want to impact Irish politics by being too heavy on the border with the north, there are actually immigration checks when you cross from Northern Ireland to the mainland on the Belfast-Cairnryan ferry! I experienced this in April. The ferry tells you to carry identity, for that reason.

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>?!

nationalists continuing the Clearances

NATIONALISTS CONTINUING THE CLEARANCES !! Yes, you read that right.

Before campaign details and policy crystallised, the Yes position offered great possibilities of helping the diaspora and producing a more liberal regime over citizenship than the British one. That is all utterly extinguished now. In the time since the White Paper came out, the Yes campaign has turned very ugly and sinister. It seems to be pandering to the racist vote now popular in all British politics, and to an anti-outsider racist strand in the SNP's support. It is betraying and backstabbing the Scottish diaspora, in ways that actually form a continuance of the clearances, dividing families and taking Scots' country away from them.

Have already mentioned here how the latest circulated Yes paper described the terms of automatic Scottish citizenship as not including the children of exile, the Scots born in what we now call "rUK" (rest of Britain) if they can't move home before indy day to qualify for citizenship by the absurd arbitrariness of living here on that one day. Already mentioned that neither they nor any of the Yes supporting parties have answered enquiries about it, about interpretation of the provision for "may register for citizenship."

Now something has happened that clinches a turn to a sinister appeal to outsider hate on the Yes side. An SNP MP has actually denied that the folks at stake in this issue are Scottish. It was in this Sunday Post story yesterday.

ON WHAT ENTIRE BASIS, SQUARED WITH THIS, ARE THE SNP PLANNING TO HOLD A HOMECOMING FESTIVAL ????? This Angus Macneil, MP for the Outer Hebrides, may be remembered in history as the exploder of every decent opportunity this referendum could ever have been and its association instead with dividing families, with hate between siblings, with dividing Scot against Scot, with tearing a whole section of the nation out of it, absolutely the stuff of the clearances and racial persecution.

In the Yes campaign's absurd party of wishful thinking, saying just choose not to believe anything that gets in our way, they are all wrong and bluffing, just believe whatever Salmond wants to be true, they might answer this point by claiming that the pledge for the common travel area and an open English border means that foul play upon the Scottish diaspora does not matter. this is of course convenient wishful thinking and wrong. The EU common travel area might cease to include either country, either one, we know there are uncertain futures around that attaching to voting either way. rUK might put a closed border on, it has said so, it owes nothing to make Salmond's inconsistent promise, to belong to the British common travel area yet have an independent border policy, work. So exclusion from citizenship can translate into exclusion from living here.

So until he and the Yes campaign pledge automatic right citizenship for the children of exile without our new state having any power even in theory to say no to any of them as citizens, and they have been totally reluctant to do that as yet, many many Scottish families with cross border links now know that the practical and moral position has been totally swung to voting No. Done actually by nationalists' own attitudes to thwe world community of Scots.

leaving the gatekeeper.

An "Edinburgh Research Council", first time I've heard of them, and a professor Jo Shaw, have produced some research on the issues around citizenship for a new Scottish state. They want to make a ripple by suggesting it would effectively be the UK instead of Scotland that got to decide who would be a Scottish citizen.

So isn't that an obvious danger from the policy of remaining in the British Isles Common Travel Area? A position the Yes side has too recklessly bound to because Alex fears the unpopularity of having a border control?

But the wider position with the rest of the world makes this counterintuitive. It's right not to want a border control, a barrier between people, a part of the nastiness of global apartheid. Certainly we should say we won't put a border control on by our choice. But how do we minimise border controls and maximise our access links with our diaspora, unless our actions are independentof being dictated by the UK? and by the chilling mounting racism of 2 of its leading parties, and real threat of it leaving the EU? In order not to have border controls dictated to us by them, and barriers put on our diaspora - and by it, exactly as the prof says, treated as not independent! - we need to be willing to pursue a separate line from the UK's even when we know it will result in them slapping a border control onto us.

If we can't get a common travel area with anyone because our own needs, with our own diaspora to retrieve from the oppression of exile, are more open door and liberal than any other country will agree to, then that is what we should do. Better to be an ingathered and enriched pro-migrant people than to be casually able to pop next door. But if we can get compatibility with this openness from the European travel area Schengen, then we will obviously be better off in Schengen than in the British Isles Common Travel Area. Even if England and Ireland slapped border controls onto us, that's 2 countries doing that, in exchange for the gain of having no barriers with 26 countries.

Schengen first, EU afterwards

Now the big row on EU membership. How disgusting of the Lib Dem leader, Willie Rennie, to say in parliament at PMQs, oh dear if we need to renegotiate our EU membership upon independence we will have to join the Schengen area .

I WANT TO JOIN THE SCHENGEN AREA. So should any humanitarian. So should the Lib Dems.

They are supposed to be the party of the European ideal. That includes common united travel among all these countries, moving away from apartheid passbook barriers betwen them - NB think about it, border controls and passports are a global apartheid structure, keeping the whole world living in separate racial boxes.

All we look likely to get in this campaign, on all sides, is them all bowing to the tabloid race hate vote. Lib Dems doing it, SNP certainly doing it by saying no no we won't join Schengen we will stary in the British Isles common travel area. The British Isles common travel area means the nasty chilling unfriendly "UK Border" corridor at the airport, the walls lined with intmidating threats, including the humanly unreasonable atrocity of being threatenable with prosecution if you have lost your passport during your flight. Then what if a criminal assault you and steals it, that is your fault and makes you criminalisable? It is against the facts of human fallibility, hence against human rights, for travel to depend on carrying any losable document at all. The medical conditions of dyspraxia and attention deficit affecting dexterity and fine motor skill, help to force this issue under discrimination.

The SNP has at least been good enough to say before that it wants us to have a more welcoming culture than the morally foul British immigration regime, that is the single item with most potential to attract my vote to Yes if the SNP stops blowing it by censoring its consultation responses from publication. So why the hell contradict it by pledging not to join Schengen? Probably because the threat that England would then slap border controls on us is unpopular. of course while it lasted it would be bad for that to happen, a new barrier, but it would be less bad than the good done by reducing the territorial size of the nasty racist UK Border regime and giving us the whole Schengen area without a barrier. We should be willing to squeeze England in that way for having the tabloid racism in its political culture, and to take some affordable trips to the continent instead of to England.

Though it was the EU that created the Schengen area and it is betteer to help to hold it in place by belonging to the EU, you can even belong to the Schengen area without being in the EU. Norway, which I visited recently, does that and certaibnly feels just like its EU neighbours as a result. For this reason, to be keener on Schengen would get the SNP off the hook of the difficulties over whether our EU membership would be continuous. We could stand eager to sign up to the Schengen area even for the duration of an interruption to EU membership. That will make the interruption less serious, hardly noticeable at the level of real people's travel.

amendment backed by its own victim

Though it made some money from the stunt of the Year of Homecoming, the SNP has always lacked interest in the diaspora and their opportunities to return here, both economic and by British immigration rules for those who have been away for several generations in the Commonwealth, as a social justice cause. Now, there has come from the unionist side a racist move, whether intentionally or by very sloppy blunder, that hands the SNP an opportunity to score some good for itself by taking the moral ground on the diaspora's side. But it will lever them to show some committal interest in the diaspora's problems, so will they do it or will they show uncaringness by dodging the issue?

Baroness Taylor of Bolton, who is an expat Scot by choice, and is Labour, has moved a Lords amendment to the Scotland bill, to give a referendum vote to everyone who lives in the UK and was born in Scotland. the UK, by the way, will not include the Isle of Man and Channel islands, so how are folks there racistly different? The proposal's purpose is being billed as to give the diaspora their say. But the diaspora is not just the folks who chanced to be born at home, nor are they even the majority. For a lot of the diaspora it was their parents or earlier ancestors who did the moving away, not always willingly, so they were born in exile. On a world scale at least 80% of all Scots were born in exile, for our diaspora numbers 20 million, the home population is 5 million.

Taylor's proposal involves a viciously arbitrary type of racism characteristic of school bullies and football crowd bigots: birthplace racism. The practice of believing that birthplace has any shred whatever to do with country belonging and identity. Birthplace is the location of one arbitrary event at one moment beyond the person's memory. Many folks have no further connection with their birthplace in their lives, e.g. the Silent Twins were Barbadian, and they were born in Aden because their father was in the RAF there at the time, they left there at age 8 months and never returned to Asia at all. They are obviously not Yemeni nor have Yemeni or Arab lives in any way, their birthplace is no guide to who they are. Nor to who famous Scots who were born in exile were: Tilda Swinton, Alexander McCall Smith, Eric Liddell, John Prebble, Lord Kelvin, Alec Home, the Queen Mother, and Labour's Edinburgh leader Andrew Burns.

Anyone who says being Scottish is determined by birthplace defines the vast majority of the Scottish people out of existence, which means, commits genocide. The Jews and the Palestinians are dispersed peoples too. A birthplace based franchise does this genocide, and discrminates even between siblings in the same family who were born on each side of the border. Another side of the same racist anomaly is that folks who were born in Scotland but do not identify as Scots and have left, folks for whom Scotland was their place of exile and another country is home, would have votes.

So why is the proposal actually being backed by someone who falls on its unjust side? Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, also Labour, tells us on his own website that he was born in Oswestry, a particularly tricky place for birthplace racists as it is officially England but to historical reason Wales. It is Wales's Berwick. Disputed lands wreck birthplace racism, once the bigots start on the complex border history of Eastern Europe they are mired in a web. Yet Foulkes is quoted "Ann [Lady Taylor] wants to open this up for debate. She was born in Motherwell and has a strong connection to Scotland. She still supports Motherwell. She is as interested in Scotland as some people are who are still living here. She wants the Scottish diaspora in the UK to be included." Yes George, the diaspora exactly like like you were, who racistly won't be included, with violent bullies getting ego gratification from seeing so.