For 10 million global citizens

UNCHR launches campaign to end statelessness. The UN says a third of about 10 million stateless people are children, who can pass statelessness to future generations.

This comprehensive write-up is by Al-jazeera: www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/11/unchr-launches-campaign-end-statelessness-201411451131537335.html

My immediate response to UNHCR, pushing the idea of citizenship union:

" On statelessness and your campaign. The Scottish crisis has already led me to propose a new constitutional idea which fits perfectly with shifting the global culture away from the fragmentation of citizenship which causes much of statelessness. You might like to back it: a multi-country CITIZENSHIP UNION.

It seems very significant, that Al-jazeera comes from the non-Western postcolonial world, yet in its report on your campaign it has explained that "Statelessness results from people falling through the cracks when new countries are created". So that this a deliberate avoidable racist crime has accompanied the world's postcolonial shift to a large number of smaller states. Indeed that it seems to be a deliberate device to create enslavable populations.

The Scottish nationalists too were planning to betray the common sense principle of automatically inheriting citizenship. Their plans were going to make it refusable. But in Europe's present racist mood, the media and No side would not do anything to focus on and expose it. I lodged a petition to the EU, number 1448/2014, against accepting a Scottish state's valid mandate to exist if voters had been unaware of this. It has not been made redundant by our No vote, it still holds for all the other secession movements in the EU.

The interventions from 3 ex-British countries appealing to us to vote No in contradiction of their own seceded position, were what enabled me to propose citizenship union. I first proposed it in advance of our vote, to 6 countries. I have resubmitted it in the public submissions, at both British and Scottish levels, on where Britain's new settlement should go now.

It would close some of the holes of statelessness. It will not immediately close them all though by choice it could. It will be an enormous culture shift in the whole global nature of citizenship, away from it working in the single country ways that cause statelessness, and to a global community which the peoples of lots of countries will be attracted to seeing their country included in.

I have posted here before on the geopolitics of citizenship union: Divided world shut doors, on the geopolitics of citizenship unions. As Salmond pointed out instantly, for the 3 countries the contradiction is that they all became independent from us historically themselves, and now they have the accompanying divisions of citizenship. To make their appeal to us make any sense, to back up in practice their geopolitical concern to keep the British state and make its new settlement succeed, they need to be willing to go for this. To form a citizenship union, as many democratic countries as can be brought in would all simply agree, in one sentence, that all of each other's citizens are now their own citizens too. Any catching up by their own citizenship laws would be done after the treaty is made, to be bound by it instead of miring it.

There would only be one citizenship of the entire scheme, unlike in the EU's modest moves to citizenship union folks would not remain identified as just one member state's citizen. That way, racist reactions like UKIP's to undo the whole thing would be made totally impractical. But this would be between totally independent states still free not to join in each other's wars: and obviously folks can not have obligations for any type of compulsory service put on them by any one of the other states which they are not resident in nor have asked to have any connection with, so this structure will also be a good safeguard against such forms of service being able to exist in any of its members. The only margin of independence the members would lose, would be to act on enough of a scale at odds with the others geopolitically as hit ordinary citizens' lives adversely.

Divided world shut doors

As anyone on Facebook or following the proliferation of new Yes sites will know well, the loud mass of Yes supporters, their movement, are neither healing the divide nor accepting the outcome as holding for the longer term, at all. All the correct noises that they should do that, made by SNP leaders in the days after the result, have become a lot of hot air. They intend to pester and peer pressure the country non-stop, blame everything that happens on the No vote, and invent accusations of betrayal of the Vow no matter how much new devo we get, and starting before there has been time to do anything.

So we don't have to take any notice? Maybe, but there is a sinister detail their messages are now becoming tauntingly open about. If they can keep pestering the political culture to treat elections every couple of years as votes on indy, and/or if the SNP government continues and finds excuses to hold further referendums within a short time, even illicitly without British agreement, then they are looking for only one win. They intend to get their state by non-stop cultural persistence effecting a culture shift by the immoral means of peer pressure until they can cow the culture into considering the Vow broken even if it has not been, and win a vote that the system will accept. They are totally open - that after this they can take for granted that nobody will listen to any campaign to restore the Union. Indy once done will be perpetual.

This does not make sense, from the unionist point of view. To accept that the union could never be restored puts its defenders at a disadvantage which they don't need to volunteer to accept. It comes from the present post-Imperial world culture, the fragmentation of countries, and from ruthless neocon capitalism's culture that we all leave each other to sink or swim alone and don't help each other. Applying that to countries, it means that in the modern world there is no culture, as there was in 1707, for states to unite.

We have the EU, but it is a sharing, rather than a merging, of aspects of statehood by what remain independent countries. Its biggest problem is the conspiracy theory of a long term plan to be a single state. Hence even its measures towards a citizenship union are now suffering a disastrously inhumane racist reaction against them, that is so distressing to watch.

A nationalist movement which has turned out contemptuous of democracy and based on emotion, mob culture, intolerance, conformism, and able to produce threat feeling, must not have historical odds of winning handed to it on a plate by its opponents. If the world culture of the time has that effect, it must be changed.

Nats are keen on repeating that no country nowadays seeks to give up its independence. The world culture at present does not offer that option. When Bob Geldof backed the Union and the nats cried hypocrite because he is a citizen of independent Ireland, they complained he had not asked for it to rejoin Britain - but has anyone suggested the option exists? He could still historically wish it had not seceded, but see more nationalist trouble in trying to make it culturally possible to reverse that. As part of countries'selfish nastiness and excludingness towards each other's citizens, what the racists want to restore in Europe, states don't want to grow and take on other citizens.

The nats are wrong, in Lesotho landed by the postcolonial world with its awkward statehood inside South Africa, there is the People’s Charter Movement seeking annexation. They see Lesotho's statehood as just making it an economically disadvantaged ghetto, a reserve of vulnerable workers, excluded from citizenship equality in South Africa, who by fair common sense should be the same as all the surrounding peoples and have what they have. So to get it by union, by joining South Africa. But South Africa does not want to take them, cynically they would be an extra load of citizens to have to treat more fairly than now.

The nats are wrong to claim that no ex-British country has ever wanted to give up its independence - Newfoundland 1933, also for economic reasons. But see how long ago that was, it was before the present postcolonial culture. The concept was still allowed then. Zanzibar, in a not quite democratic way but that's the same as 1707, was able within the postcolonial culture to opt out of statehood and form a union with Tanganyika in 1964, Tan-zan-ia.

Contrary to the barriers between states that the nats are relying on, in my submissions at both Brit and Scot level to the devolution consultations I am proposing again what I did in the endgame, of the referendum - a full CITIZENSHIP UNION of as much of the free world as will join it. At minimum including the 3 countries that asked us to vote no but are ex-British themselves, they need to do it to make their position to us sensible and not contradictory. A citizenship union does not take away any participating country's independence, it does not require a union of government, it is simply a step in recognition of the humanitarian common sense of global culture and dispersed families and friends. It is simply an agreement between countries that all of each other's citizens are their own citizens too, and to no longer have citizenship exist of any one of them singly but only of their whole union.