No new case for nowt

Right - now that we've seen it online, we know it contains nothing but economics. Economics shown to be opinion, as it is argued over by columnists from both sides. The more militantly optimistic nats feeling let down by its recommendation that we go for a fiscally powerless unauthorised use of the pound, which they had not thought good to argue for in indyref1! Clearly the hired opinion makers for a new case for optimism have run scared of optimism in the fiscal cost + potential austerity of committing to try to create a currency.

Anyway - "Scotland:a New Case For Optimism" IS NOT A SECOND WHITE PAPER. The Herald had tried to bill it as one, ahead of it coming out. It contains no plans for a Scottish state outside its economic strategy. Mpst importantly it contains nothing on rules for citizenship. While it has a pro-immigration sentiment, it says nothing about remofing the bigoted racist atrocity against a section of Scots, that was in Yes's offer last time round, + making citizenship by parental descent unrefusable.

So it has changed nothing, as yet, around that moral reason to vote No. That supervenes over all the document's economic thoughts regardless of their merits.

it was bluff and bluster by the Scottish govt too

Especially in arguments on the web, folks on the Yes side always claim to be the underdog with the media unionist and loaded against them.

The coverage this morning of the so-called exposee about currency union, coming from an unnamed minister who we as yet only have the journalist's word for exists, is a quite contrary example. It has been covered in a totally Yes biased way. Any media unionism, even by the BBC, has been totally swamped by the priority of getting the government. Why don't they want to get the Scottish government too? Is it taking so long for the penny to drop about what Sturgeon's rush to welcome the unnamed minister's comments, which were in fact an offer of a deal involving a significant climbdown for her side too, has indicated?

I have made the following bias complaint to the BBC:

Coverage of the Guardian's expose on an unnamed British minister's comments on a currency union. It was treated as only emabrrassing the No side and the British parties, and being an admission that the refusals of a currency union have been just a bluff. Yet if, as is not yet proven, this minister actually exists, his/her quoted comments are actually just an offer of a deal, a currency union in exchange for nuclear bases. That is not a one-sided granting of a currency union so it was misleading to treat it as if it was.

For parity of coverage between both campaigns, the following should have been noticed and analysed. As named minister Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the comments, that implies a Scottish government openness to making the proposed deal, and that indicates their position of refusing to keep Trident and the Clyde nuclear bases has also just been "bluff and bluster". So logically the story is equally as much an embarrassment for them and the Yes side as for the other side.

bouncing on a poll

It is the perception of several of the papers, that that after the British parties vetoed a currency union the polls showed an initial bounce towards Yes, out of anger against having a British decision impose a situation on us, but that this has now converted into an eventual clearer swing to No as the outcome. Probably so, but why?

It is the perception of seemingly all the papers, that it is because the merits of what Osborne says has got through to us, or that we are accepting there won't be a currency union and being daft enough to think it matters. That does not sound right: all indications until now have been that nobody much among voters, only Salmond himself, ever cared about the currency union issue or was ever keen on the idea. so it can't be that, can it?

So here is a different idea. Isn't it more likely that folks' initial reaction to the currency union announcement, the Yes bounce, reflected and still reflects what we think of it. We did not all change our minds about it after a bit of thought, how likely is that? So something else, not the original announcement, has caused the swing to no that has followed. So what else has happened affecting perception of the issue? -Salmond's absurd response to it. Treating us as stupid, saying don't believe what they say, believe what I want to believe. Showing in the Yes campaign a character of unconvincingness and no regard for factual verification. not being offered any factual answer on the issue, any dealing with the position as it is. That's what is widely recgonised as the nonsense in the line the SNP has taken on this. So that's what has turned the polls back to No. Not the demerits of currency union itself or of the British announcement - but the demerits of responding to any issue with gameplaying frivolity and selective blotting out of facts. Some place to have in history.

Yeah - and?

www.facebook.com/VoteNo2014/photos/a.177722718953393.48305.174186732640325/658717074187286/?type=1&theater

Summed up perfectly by the SNP's incredible non-reply, on TV last night, just of "Yeah - and?" to the point that their policy is to surrender sovereignty into a union! and by these Facebook comments on it:

• When Annabel Goldie asked Fiona Hyslop about the ceding of sovereignty a currency union would create, she had a very simple response "Yeah....and?", It now seems like SNP ministers don't have much to say on some of the most important issues in this debate!
• So, having won your Independence, you're going to give some/all of it back to the people you've just won it from, except WITHOUT any input into ANY decisions that will be taken on your behalf by those very same people. Is it just me or is this a totally bonkers suggestion!
• At last an honest response from an Independence supporter. It's a shame it's a mere foot-stamping, petulant response worthy of a teenager who has just been found when she lied.
• Wanting both to use the pound and have the Bank of England setting your fiscal policies for you. That is Independence so light it is verging on Featherweight.

What a way to run a railroad to London

Oh no they don't mean anything they say, they mean what I want them to say. Whatever I want it to be that they said, of course really they said it, just TRUUUST me and take it from me, you don't need to actually listen to their words saying the opposite.

You can't go through life communicating like that. It's unconvincing and silly. it's wishful thinking. I don't like what someone said so really they meant the opposite, really they meant what I wanted them to say - consider how that works out - no more toys means more toys, no consent to sex means consent to sex, we voted Yes but it means No. IT DOESN'T WORK. Would you buy a used car on that basis?

The referendum has become a shambles and tragedy. Alex Salmond, who called it, has determined on the following tragicomic place in history. He will go right up to poll asking you to vote for a statement of faith that his silly unionist idea that contradicts independence, currency union with the country you are leaving, you can ignore the No clearly given to by the entire political class of Britain and believe what the cheery salesman wants them to say. He's not going to railroad them.

This is the Yes campaign that is so caring about our ordinary lives it has not answered about the issue in the last post, the citizenship of Scottish exiles who can't return before indy day. On the Facebook Yes pages you can read yeards and yards of emotionalism about a great natiomnal moment to seize.

To continue the Clearances' logic by the moral obscenity of taking automatic citizenship away from some Scots, to make indy a way of shutting our door in some of our own people's faces, to want to tie us to the austerity programme through servitude to the Bank of England without a say over it, to call for an extra year of Tory government instead of the next British election on time during the indy process, to shut his eyes and make this ridiculous spivvy assertion that we can take his word that 3 parties don't really mean they won't do what he wants, and what he wants is unionist anyway.... WHAT WAY IS THIS TO RUN A YES CAMPAIGN?? A unionist, implausible, ludicrous, people betraying, spivvy way. AAAAAAAAAAH. If there was any national opportunity moment it's this SNP leadership who threw it away.

The sensible non-SNP wings of the Yes campaign who never wanted a currency union now need to split with Salmond and his train crash of nonsense.

demanding

See again? We are not gonna get a currency union. The UK has told us that again.

Quite apart from how silly it is to want one, how it's unionist and not real self-government. The Czech Republic and Slovakia tried to have one following their separation in 1993, and it lasted 33 days.

one of the heard

Alex, if you want this to be the independence generation, you need to make us the HEARD GENERATION. None of whose responses to the consultation stage of your bill get excluded from the record. It's simple. Otherwise, you are telling us you want to go down in history for throwing away the independence generation by not listening to them.

Blair Jenkins leader of the Yes campaign says "If you are sick and fed up of the corrosive and cynical world of Westminster, then next year we can be rid of that." But not of its currency. Rid of the entire way British politics works while still using a currency issued as part of British politics and controlled by it. Everyone can see this is contradictory and a mess up.

When you meet Yes supporters informally, they find Alex's currency union sellout an embarrassment and millstone to them. All the other Yes supporting parties besides the SNP would go for issuing our own Groats. They don't want our spending and budgeting to lie held to ransom by another state that we will have no vote in or influence over. Because they know that is actually less independence not more!! and will find us betrayed and still under the cuts regime they told us we were voting to get rid of.

Be part of silly

Gordon Bennett. Just blimey and gasps. When is SNP unionism ever going to stop?

The lagging polls show folks already need more imaginative inspiring motivating to vote Yes than they are getting. The campaign has already made itself sound silly with the whole palaver of we are going to keep a currency union with the country seceded from, on demand and even though they say they won't agree to it. The strongest reason the Yes folks have held onto, have not toed the British line on, have kept rightly telling us is where there could be a big difference to be gained from going our own way, has been on social conscience standards of welfare and escape from the British austerity agenda.

The reason why real folks in Scotland have to continue to suffer trashed disability benefits, unemployment sanctions lasting 3 years, the bedroom tax, and pension worries, for over a year to come, has always been so that we will be convinced to vote against continuing to suffer them. (Hasn't it?)

And now, when we are already in the middle of a mood of hollow scepticism that independence is really intended to mean it at all - Sturgeon turns round and accepts a naff proposal, FROM HER GOVERNMENT'S OWN ADVISORY GROUP EVEN, that we should stay in a union of welfare systems with Tory Britain for a so-called "transitional period" whose length is not even defined, that is open ended. A Guardian story places it at at least to 2019 !!! where it far exceeds the Cameron government's full term so still inflicts its whole austerity programme on us. Through it, we would still get the social wrongs that most practically of all we are being asked to vote against still getting.

Silly silly silly. Who conceivably has been increased in belief in the whole Yes offer by this? In the Scottish National Party having the confidence to separate our state from the British state, which is supposed to be the whole point innit? "Be part of better", they told us. The Silly No Party, who just want to throw every last strand of our statehood away!!

See, folks might conclude this is a handy way for the SNP to make sure they can keep us neocon, the same as every major party wants to do. Just the same as Labour about this. So what do the other Yes supporting parties have to say? Are they going to be part of silly?

Brand new idea: to do without the union ;)

If the UK is not going to enter a currency union at the demand of and convenience of a country seceding from it, and for purposes of controlling that country's budgetary policy more closely than before it seceded and with less accountability -

[1]Who is surprised? The same folks as as are not making constructive wise decisions to pay folks their benefits are hardly going to make a constructive wise decision take on currency support for a foreign country.

[2] Now, reasonably, we can have a nice enlightened pro-immigration policy free from the constraints of being in a travel area union with the UK either. So Scottish National Party will you now give your nation's diaspora that? You have made a moral campaign argument out of our needs differing with the UK's ugly right wing agenda towards its borders and barriers. Do you want history to remember you keeping them up against our own diaspora of our history of an ethnic injustice of their clearances and dispersal?

Spot on question

Well done Johann Lamont, getting Salmond with the right question at PMQs yesterday.

Yes I will call it PMQs, the contrivance of "first minister" was never used for colonial Prime Ministers or the Canadian provinces or for Northern Ireland's in 1921-72, and a Prime Minster is a first minister.

Salmond needs to be more factual, in his position, than to make up speculations and claim they will happen because they sound sensible to him. Otherwise voters will start to feel he is selling them a dud. Saying that after independence, outside and separated from the UK, we could make the UK give us a seat in the bank of England's structure for issuing the UK's currency. Totally silly. Exactly as Lamont said, he was just crossing his fingers and hoping for the best: and trying to bounce it, too. Most voters, without needing to follow politics, know you can't take for granted without asking, a foreign country will provide you with a facility on demand just because you say it would be sensible. No wonder the Bank of England has said no.

Campaign questions intimately related to the question of honesty over the SNP filtering the public availability of consultation responses. Does Salmond listen to any items voters raise on the position around independence? Will voters get any position out of him on other issues than just those he has chosen for a fudged feelgood campaign for a statehood not fully explained in many of his aspects? So does he actually care where ordinary folks' state of life will be?

bank manager

Salmond's latest wheeze today: we are going to be independent but demand a seat at the central bank of the state we have split from.

Huh? Constitutionally emeshed in the workings of Britain, in deciding on a British economic policy and interest rates. Rates that can't be called anything else than UNITED. Scotland having a seat in deciding the rates for England. While calling itself a separate sovereign country, a foreign state, yet taking part in deciding the rates for England and the remaining UK. Get this - THAT IS A UNION !!

That is not independence. That is Britain still functioning as one entity. Just with Scotland's place in it made less of an obvious entitlement so less to be relied on. That is a con. It's silly.