Who is signing up?

20% of us are called "the persuadables". Because we have not said firmly yes or no, it is open to the SNP to convert us if they say the right things.

Consider what your own self regard as a thinking voter means. It must not take just a hip sounding campaign to win you over, where what is said remains within the crappy bounds of what campaigns always say. To win you over must take committal definite answers to every issue you want to raise. It must take a participative enough form of campaign to show you you have the means to actually extract those answers. It must be the opposite of a controlled filtered respectable message. It must be the opposite of what the SNP did when they said they would not put all the responses to their first consultation onto public record. They showed then a closed up filtering of their message. To watch and point out its continuation was the point of starting this blog.

• Until that filtering has stopped,
• until they do take a definite absolute position in favour of an immigration right to the Scottish diaspora descended from any number of generations returning here from anywhere in the world,
• until they do take a definite absolute position on the specific story of police lying to newly returned diaspora that their newly bought home is in a rough area,

I shall not be attracted from the ranks of the persuadables to sign Salmond's gimmicky people's declaration "saying Yes to an independent Scotland".

Among the signatories you can see today in the Sunday Herald is John McAllion, SSP and formerly Labour when he chaired the petitions committee in the 1999 parliament. As chair of the petitions committee he openly broke parliament's rules at the time by excluding a petition from the agenda and the record, for calling for a restriction on the committee's powers. "I have discussed this with the committee chairman, who is not inclined to include the petition on the agenda for a committee meeting." This was an act of corrupting the rules and dishonest record within parliament's first few months of existence. By the ever so neat rule that such breaches have to be challenged through an MSP and no MSP would pursue it, this dishonest act of class power was allowed to happen within parliament's first few months of existence. Unless Salmond answers this, how well does that bode for the new state whose creation McAllion now signs for? Also there is Margo Macdonald, who has a public writing platform herself as a newspaper columnist yet who was one of the MSPs who declined to act against McAllion on grounds that she agreed with the committee's view against petitioning for things to be published. Against public platform for any facts and info that are outside the already existing class filtered approved view of reality.

Then in 2004 on an SSP platform for their now forgotten declaration of Calton Hill", McAllion called the world's longest running one party state, Castro's Cuba, "a worker's democracy". You notice how it was a hard lefty, an apologist for communism, who committed an act of class power for MSPs to control and filter what content is heard in politics and what issues popularly recognised to exist?

Ever so reluctant

How the hell is it a "very reasonable timescale" that independence would not actually happen until 2016? and be gently phased in at the time of a Scottish election that has already been postponed for a year by Britain to fit a British coalition's timetable? The same coalition as Salmond is always slagging, and telling us not to choose to remain ruled by, yet he wants to put off breaking away from their rule until a year after their present term has expired anyway! So that they still get to do all their stuff to us.

Is it something psychological about independence seeming less real when you vote for it if it is not going to take effect next day? But what about those of its keen supporters who have waited all their lives and who die while Salmond's snail timetable keeps them waiting more? Waiting for a year and a half even after voting for it, if we do, in 2014?

No it is not the same pace as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, at all! An absurd claim. They decided in 1992 they wanted to split, and split by end of year. It was still only 3 years since the fall of communism, while Salmond's timetable will have taken 5 years from him winning a majority. The Ukraine split from Russia in 1991 with a vote within 4 months of the fall of communism making it possible.

What a cumbersome fantastically cautious bureaucrat Salmond is being. Noticeable that he is keeping hold of every inch of the 5 year term of office that the British coalition's manoeuvrings with election dates gave him, and seems to be putting that ahead of actually reaching the statehood he syas he wants, rather than risk the independence election's outcome at a date any earlier than completion of the term Britain has given him? Really believes in his cause, then?