Youtube censors Edinburgh tram options !

Under a video by CityMoose channel on the tram expansion, that supports the Roseburn path option, including without local knowledge the total path option at Telford Road, Youtube is utterly banning the following comment. Not even the first sentence on its own, or using 1s and 0s, any comment referring to station siting in any way will not post -

《 You are wrong about Telford Road. Station's site on the path route will be in a park and behind some flats, hence lonely, won't feel safe after dark. I heard that raised in the public drop-in. Its distance from the hospital too, across a housing estate, is not good for infirm or ageing patients who can't walk well. It will be a white elephant.

The road is wide, has a hospital gate straight onto it, has not got homes straight onto it. North side of the road, in Drylaw park's corner, there is a strip of ground behind a substation, gentle gradient, where you can bring the line up from path to road, so no need to build an intrusive ramp. 》

What world geopolitics or radicalism is there in words about a bloody tram line ? Made this point in favour of the Telford Road option in my trams consultation submission. Also

• instead of writing about cross-city services from Balgreen, could reopen as tram the old Corstorphine rail branch, there have often been views on local social media for that, folks who remember it say it has always been slower getting into town by bus without it. Most of the branch route still exists as a park path. Last 1/3 mile does not, so it would take an on-road bit to reach Corstorphine village. That is short enough, and not in town, that it would not slow up the buses like they are saying the Orchard Brae route will do.
• Cockburn Association, that cares about old buildings, has blogged warning of structural doubts in building the southward line over South Bridge. Modern big train-weight trams will stress the structure far more than the bus-sized ones in the historic tram era, and is a load the bridge was not built for. Same concern as for Dean Bridge, but while the Orchard Brae route is one of 3 options, South Bridge is a less known issue because the south line's route straight down the A7 is just getting taken for granted. Clearly there is a responsibility not to take it so.

If the line was diverted down Holyrood Road and near parliament, it would be a bit longer and have more corners, but it offsetting so, it would have an off-road section and avoid trying implausibly to run through the overcrowdedness of South Bridge and Nicolson St. Street widths would allow it to turn from North Bridge eastward into High St, with the northbound track off-road there to avoid the notorious tailbacks into that crossroads. Blackfriars St, Cowgate, Holyrood Road, then it could go off-road on the waste ground that is Holyrood Park's edge behind Dumbiedykes, and rise from the ground at gentle gradient by a ramp to beat the sharp rise in ground level it will eventually meet. Though the same rise prevents the line going up Pleasance because of steep gradient, that is on-road surrounded by streets with no space to beat it by a ramp, while in Holyrood there is that space. The least bumpy course over that hill, just behind the end of Dumbiedykes Road, already has an old wall along it, that obviously was easiest to build there, so the line would go through that, use its ramp to take the hill at gentler gradient than steep Braidwood Gate path up to behind Crags sport centre, Bowmont Place where it will not affect home entrances, St Leonard's St, then for local opinion to choose which street to cross back onto Clerk St via.

Neither Trump nor economic separation may happen

2 consultations. We have already had one in 2010, as the ending of the National Conversation, and this blog exists because of Salmond choosing to keep unpublicised some submissions to that consultation, including mine. Does anyone still remember the National Conversation?

Another consultation fills more time while the SNP continue to consent voluntarily to keep us in the Union for 2 years as their best shot of obtaining the national mood they want, and it generates some legitimacy for Salmond's particular plan for the vote in the form it has reached now, with the Devo Max question included. But will this consultation be any more opne than the last one? Will there still be any selective and unexplained non-publicisings of any of the responses to it?

Even while Salmond launches it showily in Edinburgh Castle's Great Hall on Burns Night, the Tripping Up Trump campaign has celebrated the same Burns night with this news of the project, destroying a piece of Scottish coastal environment, that Salmond took powers over Aberdeenshire council to allow to go ahead:

Dear Friend,

Trump's future is blowing in the wind.

Trump's already told us the world's gone bust, so plans for his housing development, hotel and crazy golf courses have been shelved.

And now Trump's back to being described as a millionaire, not a billionaire. Maybe he'll sue the Guardian for writing that, like he did to another writer.

So as a potential escape route, Trump's escalated his fight with a wind farm* that might spoil his view.

If the wind farm goes ahead, Trump will pull out altogether. And this time it's reported that Trump's favourite First Minister - Alex Salmond - is refusing to intervene. We shall see.

Unlike Trump's plan, the wind farm promises skilled and well paid jobs, in an industry where the Scottish Government is committed to be a world leader, estimated to be worth up to £100 billion by 2020.

Let's help get this wind farm approved.

ACTION

Please take a minute to send an email to - iain.todd@aberdeenrenewables.com - with your comments in support of the wind farm.
You could even copy Alex Salmond's Special Advisor - geoff.aberdein@scottish.gsi.gov.uk
You can also send your message of support to the development partner, here.
And if you're on Twitter, you can tweet Alex Salmond, here.

Meanwhile, the film - You've Been Trumped - continues its travels, most recently appearing on The Rosie Show, part of the Oprah Winfrey network. Please watch this clip.

A lot of natural sand dunes have already been dug up and ruined pointlessly, as anyone who has seen the film saw, and this will be the permanent scar of Salmond's judgment on Scottish soil.

Same day, Salmond says we will still be in a currency union with England and admits the Bank of England would decide our monetary policy. Yet he calls that independence. it's not separation, anyway. It must get a few heads scratching.

if Labour says the Union is an election issue, feedback on SNP policy must matter

The Labour campaign has now declared the Union potentially at stake in this election. Hence they too should agree that it matters that public consultations on the independence policy should not be censored, and responses withheld from public access, by the SNP.

Granted Labour says nobody cares about the constitutional issue, but if the SNP wins the election it is certain Labour will care in opposition to the issue.

Meanwhile the Greens don't sound anything like as total on independence, in their manifesto, than the SNP. Though they support it, they support a multi-option referendum that might just bring stronger autonomous powers.

I have been quite against the Greens for years, for telling us to use public transport but refusing to take positions on specific injustices to passengers and bad operating done by particular transport services. That line was exploiting us. You don't tell the public to do something potentially inconvenient and kick away all question of doing anything to ameliorate the inconveniences. During the election last year I had a letter published in the Metro making this point. But in the present Green manifesto I acknowledge progress and movement on this issue. Perhaps it is because Scottish level is the level where they feel most empowered to actually do anything with their electoral successes, hence more ambitious? Or have they actually responded to concerns like mine?

This time they are not just giving us their old waffle. Most importantly for my previous discontent, they are calling for "greater regulation of bus services". This will make some difference to all the aggro and shoving around that the giant private sector bus companies now give passengers with impunity, and even the consulting on that policy will be an opening to press those issues in detail and how the public have been left in the lurch by the Greens not getting drawn on this issue before. They also want to subsidise reductions in transport fares, and we know how those have rocketed and are some of the most extortionate in Europe. They propose specific railway reopenings, they will keep the bus pass system which the Tories and Lib Dems both want to cut back which would make some folks' lives significantly less free, and to budget for facilities for physically "active travel" which is some shift away from their former line that it rigidly always must be public transport. Come to think of it, maybe those extortionate fares are what have forced the Greens to shift their demands on us?

They have shifted. They are also taking the strongest anti-cuts agenda, universal right to a bank account, and good left wing taxing of big business, also motivated by trying scale business away from bigness again in the face of the the peak oil problem. So I'm voting Green this time.

This means voting for the other pro-independence party besides the SNP, which according to Labour's warning, might swing the difference for the SNP to get the referendum through this time round. Presumably, the Greens too won't want to have the referendum if they think they will lose it, and that might remain the case for the whole of the next parliament as it did the last. Or it might not.

I have no grounds to believe the Greens will necessarily be any fairer than the SNP towards consultation feedback. But knowing how the SNP has handled it already, it will be better to have 2 parties than 1 behind the process, just to spread our bets and try to give voters more leverage on both for how they treat us in all further consultation process. This thought, realistically sceptical about the Greens and not putting faith in them, is further good reason to vote for them.

the National Conversation suppressed some responses

When the National Conversation did a consultation about holding the independence referendum, the website announced that some of the submissions received were being withheld from the public. Their own discretion was in control of making that choice. Here:

http://www.blogger.com/www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/05/24131023/0

This blog is for publishing what was censored, and opening to scrutiny the merits of why the SNP government should wish to suppress it. So where is the "harmful to others" content? and where is there any offensive content, apart from views they disagree with? If you spot any, come and comment here and point it out.

Perhaps other writers of the blocked submissions would like them put online here too? I expose here that they have just chosen to suppress views they disagree with and find embarrassing to their own views' merits. Including on issuesd to with racism and with the status of nuclear weapons, both would be important issues in the referendum. That filtering makes for a fiddled secretive and partial consultation process.