Will the same people power be done against deportation of Scots?

《 It is increasingly apparent that the UK government is incapable of delivering an immigration system that reflects Scotland's values of compassion and dignity, the Justice Secretary has said.

Humza Yousaf ... 》 So reported the National, on the Glasgow People Power victory that stopped the immigration raid and 2 cruel deportations. All fair credit to the National, it has 3 times published letters from me on the citizenship concern, (11-7-16, 3-12-16, 6-11-20) it is open to it.

There is no compassion and dignity in having, under the name "civic nationalism", a theory of nasty insular disapproval of close diaspora and nationhood by family ties. Not including parental descent in the automatic conferrers of citizenship. Scotland may have values of compassion and dignity, but its indy movement has not towards a whole population group of its own nation.

To them, the Yes movement has made another hostile environment! Throughout the years of pursuing it I have found a shocking quite widespread adherence to theory that there is a moral virtue of rejecting "blood + soil" or "ethnic nationalism" by rejecting descent Scots and diaspora, and saying a nation is only its resident population. So that cruel bigoted exclusion breaking up families in breach of ECHR article 8, is getting defined as anti-racist, and nice inclusion defined as racist! Logically inverting that the whole point of being against racism is to protect inclusion.

All immigration control is global apartheid and will be remembered so in images of evil vans and raids, and in this inspirational people action. So - will the same people action be forthcoming to stop deportations of Scots, from their own country, under the indy citizenship rules that ever since the White Paper, the Yes movenent abd SNP have never budged from planning to have? Do they want to stop that hostile environment too? Will enough media ask the good folks of Glasgow that, to generate an answer?

response open letter to Lisa Nandy, to Mark Frankland's

Response by Maurice Frank to Mark Frankland. He is a Yes supporter, English and liking Scotland's political life better - though his argument from no visible homelessness in his home Dumfries does not ring true at all to the Central Belt cities. On Jan 18 Frankland wrote and blogged an open letter to Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy, in an angered response to her Andrew Neil interview. It s going viral akonv nats on social media. This response is to Lisa Nandy too, + is confirmed emailed on 20 Jan 2020 -

In urgent factual correction of MARK FRANKLAND's open letter to you on SCOTLAND, here is a too underreported fact about our situation. There is in fact a shocking family-wrecking racist prejudice that the Yes movement and SNP have, to date, still never removed from their policy. It is just as bad as anti-Semitism or Windrush. It has been there ever since their White Paper in 2013, it also surfaced as far back as our 1999 election, when a Labour broadcast warned: "If you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a Scottish citizen? No! They will have to apply."

It is a prejudice against nationhood through family ties, against being Scottish and entitled to citizenship by the practical connections that routinely go with having a parent who is. Copied from Quebec, they proposed in the referendum that automatic citizenship should only be by birth or residence at the instant of statehood.

Now, calling any category of citizenship automatic can be problematic, as a person with several possible citizenships may not want the one that some official wants to deem automatic: so I have no problem with asking claimants to descent citizenship to take an active step of choice for it. But obviously what must be automatic is that they get it. That is, it must be unrefusable.

Faced with inability to get any Yes source to say this, during the campaign, I lodged EU petition 1448/2014. This was not the naive humble type of petition making a request, it was a citation of ECHR article 8 on family life: so it remains a legal resource for anyone to cite and use. It cites, that article 8 obliges the EU to disown shun and sanction as an international pariah racist state, and not build any relationship with, a Scottish state where citizenship by parental descent is refusable.

Since then there are 3 limited successes to record fairly:

• In the National of 9 Jul 2016, Paul Kavanagh's column included parental descent in a list of European norms of citizenship.
• only verbally on a stall, a self-declared international law expert in the Yes Marchmont and Morningside group in Edinburgh concurred that ECHR will require us to honour this citizenship entitlement.
• at Perth's hustings last May 16, which was recorded, the Greens' Maggie Chapman gave the right answer on this.

There are good "Yessers" who persist in an unsecured faith that this will not be a problem. Some are my friends. But there are frequently encountered Yessers with the prejudice, to show it is a serious problem. Many of them hold that their theory "civic nationalism" defines a country as its presently in situ population, and makes it virtuous to reject anything to do with "blood and soil" - and they will class family ties as implying blood and race. They faithfully think it is a progressive line against genetic views of race, to reject our emigrants' offspring from being Scottish, hypocritically at the same time as claiming emigration as a Yes issue! As well as simply being xenophobic excluding and hateful, this line breaks apart families. Nationhood by parentage has always come from the life practicality of folks’ ties to their families, to the places where their families’ lives are rooted, and to family’s mutual support and sharing of resources. All nothing to do with genetics and long predating all knowledge of its existence.

They won't budge when you explain that. They cling to a seeming fear that to admit any practical humane argument for families will be a blunder into a naughty endorsement of blood-related thoughts. So they put themselves in an absurd mirror-image position, of calling inclusion racist and calling vile family-breaking exclusion anti-racist and progressive. During the campaign I had a bonechilling conversation of this nature with a Radical Independence stall, arguing that line in all theoretical earnestness, opposing and calling racist any parental descent citizenship at all, constantly asking "how far back do you go?" to everything I said for nuclear families whose practical position is obviously not the same as the distant past's generations. MP Angus Macneil denied to the Sunday Post 23 Feb 2014 that anyone who has never lived here is Scottish.

The position of an emigrant's child, born in diaspora and growing up in the wrong country, has a parallel with the transgender position in the wrong gender: it too can be an emotional dysphoria with a practical basis. Not to uphold it is a social inconsistency. Their identities collide with the horrible school bully attitude I propose to name "birthplace racism", even dividing siblings: the bigotry of regarding country as dictated by birthplace. Then should the racists could get to see their victim rejected by the country they identify with?? Birthplace has visibly not correlated with country ever since the ancient Jews' Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, many folks are born in places they have no further connection with, Labour's morally outstanding recent election policy of right of return for the Chagossians recognised descent nationhood, it features on both sides in the Israel/Palestine problem. But given that common sense life practicality makes citizenship by birth also a natural right, notice a cruel exclusion by the Yessers here too. Against an older SNP pledge, they wanted to make citizenship by birth only apply to preexisting British citizens, thus continuing to cruelly exclude folks born to visiting parents who the British rules have excluded since Thatcher's changes in 1983. I met such a person online and failed to get Yes to solve his position either!

Just as Tory ministers with immigrant backgrounds have been happy to do anti-immigrant things, existence of some diaspora-born Scots in the independence movement's lead names does not disprove this descent citizenship scandal. The onus can only be on Angus Robertson, Lesley Riddoch, Mike Russell, Iain Macwhirter to explain why they support a movement containing prejudice against themselves. Meanwhile, by human rights there is never in the world a duty, there was not in 2014 either, to allow independence votes for any nation unless it is known that its citizenship rules will always comply with all family and personal practicalities without any cruel gaps.

Maurice Frank

search yourself Lesley Riddoch

Riddoch has written a National column seizing on the opinion poll of Brexit-raving Tory menbers, that found a majority polling as preferring to lose Scotland than drop Brexit. Symptomatic of what Brexit has done to the Tories, and some commenters have suggested it comes from the weight of Brexiters who have joined the Tories to influence the leadership election. But the nats are all falling over it with glee.

They and Riddoch are making a logical fallacy typical of them, in declaring this the end of unionism. They are assuming that all u ionists are Tories. A piece of mud they would sneakily love to stick, and which makes no sense alongside what they often say on low Tory support here. i.e. the majority of Unionists are not Tories, and their Unionism is completely logically unaffected by the Tories' collective crack-up.

Here are Riddoch's words asked back to her. As I asked them back to her in a National site comment.

SHE WROTE

>
• As Stuart Campbell [Wings over Bath] pointed out: “Tories in Scotland and Northern Ireland are clinging to a nation from which their own Conservative colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb ... at the first inconvenience.”
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst Union-supporting Scots ? ... So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that “fellow” arch Unionists would throw you and your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cutting ties with the European Union – how do you feel about the Union now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• What on earth are we waiting for? Even Scotland’s No voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

ASKED BACK TO HER

Lesley: you are a diaspora-born Scot who belongs to your nation by family. The White Paper does not give, and ever since it SNP and Yes have refused to give, unrefusable citizenship by the family connection route, parental descent. For 6 years you have faced the question, and you evaded it when asked by me at a meeting you did in Edinburgh Friends' Meeting House during the indyref:

• Why are you an eager leading voice of a movement that is racist against yourself ?
• Yessers who either are, or care about family/friends who are, parental descent Scots, are clinging to a nation from which their own Yes colleagues would drop them like a ticking time-bomb, by dogma without even waiting for an inconvenience.
• Who knows if that revelation prompted any heart-searching amongst indy-supporting Scots? So the question is worth asking again.
• Knowing that "fellow" arch Nats would throw you and your subset of your nation to the wolves rather than miss the chance to trash their own economy by cruelly dividing families in breach of ECHR article 8 - how do you feel about indy now? Indeed, how do you rate the thought processes of your erstwhile colleagues?
• As of Perth's recent hustings, Green leader Maggie Chapman has come round on parental descent citizenship. What are you waiting for? Even Scotland's SNP voters must be asking themselves the very same question.

a story of Britnat racism?

WAY-HAY, Jim Sillars has stopped being a Yes!! If the fevered-up indyref2 is tied to backing our continued EU membership and held for the purpose of achieving that, he won't vote for that. He will abstain the news suggests, but it places him choosing the British union he has opposed for 40 years over the EU. The British union where his Brexit sympathies won the vote, unlike in his ain nation. It has taken him until the crunch point of indyref2 fever to express this, we can imagine he put it off for as long as possible.

The unionists jumping to call this a terrible enbarrassment for Sturgeon are quite wrong. It's a great opportunity. An opportunity to how an indy movement cleaned of its past racist wing and making citizenship by parental descent unrefusable, fixed as a constitutional red line of human rights before we vote not after.

Sillars, always a Brexiter, personified the bigoted strand of nationalism that was anti-outsider even to our ain folk's next of kin diaspora, andwanted it to be a project for the resident population. He was the prominent Yes figure whose words were cited in EU petition 1448/2014 to make the Scottish state a pariah racist state if it betrayed patental descent Scots wuthout citizenship of their own country. He was the monster who hatefully told a big Yes audience at Liberton school, Edinburgh, on 7-5-14 "We must not he afraid of this" that he wanted the parental descent diaspora treated the same as migrants with no background here and filtered for desirable skills, and said "We can't have an open door" exactly as Brexiters are now made fun of for. Sillars was the outstanding example of why Sadiq Khan was right, and anyone who was at that Yes meeting and in recent days has angrily denied a nationalism-racism link has been lying. Sillars's line was a humanitarian evil, it would break up families, against European human rights article 8, would stop them living together in the same country to pool their resources and helping each other, economically against Toryudm and in giving medical care.

Yes is far better off without him, yes.

submission on indyref2

The original point of starting this blog was when they would not publish a submission on their original bill consultation on an indyref, in 2010 when it never went ahead. To publish the searching issues that they were preferring not to.

So it matters to present my submission this time too:

Q1: the proposed arrangements for managing the referendum?

* on policing and supervision -
Commissions generally speaking are undemocratic, because they define their own remits and in such a way as to exclude accountability to enquiries from the public. Typically whenever we contact a commission we get back a reason why our enquiry is not in their remit. That is not a structure to earn confidence "beyond reproach" (1.5) internationally.

Just if the Electoral Commission has that power, no matter how it acts in practice, to deem its judgment as the entire arbiter of the referendum's fairness of conduct would usurp that place from the people. There points against doing that, a concern of fair campaign policing, which needs raising and preventing from recurring in this campaign, following an experience in the EU referendum.

The commission then chose not to consider it its business to take up the issue of how policing affected campaign fairness on the ground. Hence it chose not to take up the inconsistent treatment of Remain campaigners at Edinburgh Haymarket station on polling day itself as well as the days before it.

After railway staff had first indicated an objection to campaigning on the paved space in front of the station and had claimed a land boundary which our organisers were sceptical of, I emailed to British Transport Police asking for They never replied, and on polling day itself they allowed campaigning to take place for some 2 hours of the morning travel peak until our numbers were tailing off and only then intervened against those of us who remained, and refused to tell me the land boundary they claimed jurisdiction up to. This was after our organisers had promised me from their information on the land that this could not happen, and when it did happen no land information was forthcoming from them or from the Lib Dem office at Haymarket which some of the campaigners (not all of that party) were operating from. After which, in the evening travel peak I observed campaigning taking place unstopped on exactly the same land at a time when 2 publicly prominent Lib Dems were also campaigning near the same spot.

It will be an irregularity upon your referendum, as it also was upon the EU one, if the campaigns are subject to inconsistent policing, and policing carried out with refusals to evidence its jurisdictional boundaries. Even more so if carried out after campaigners anticipating a possible problem have fairly requested in advance from the police force concerned a clarification of boundaries and assurance that police will keep to them. The campaign will not then be "beyond reproach"(1.5) It is an intimidatory experience, affecting campaigns selectively and without parity.

This evidences a need to organise availability on demand of exact boundary information, to all persons desirous to campaign as well as to the 2 national campaigns. For the national campaigns it evidences a duty to the care of their participants, to obtain this land information and not to fail to back up their campaigners with it when any challenge arises. It is not acceptable to civil liberties or electoral fairness to be expected to take police officers' word on a contested jurisdictional boundary, as at a rail station, without them having to evidence it. For railway staff and authorities too, the campaign will be irregular intimidated and interfered with unless they always have to show evidence of land jurisdiction boundaries and they are absolutely never backed up in saying "You don't need evidence" and just making police threats instead. The referendum will in fact be irregular unless this possibility automatically has been excluded preemptively from happening, police pinned down to a committal line of consistency on it, an automatic right enacted for every campaigner with such an experience to have a place to put it on parliamentary record, have the action on it formally obliged to be committal not noncommittal, and this be mentioned in media and scrutinised by any visiting observers of the electoral process.

There is a duty to factuality that their campaign references to the EU referendum result include reflecting on how legitimate it is in light of the unresolved experience of inconsistency in policing of campaigners. Your referendum will automatically have no uncorrupt status if this is quietly not acted on, and will only have any uncorrupt status if this automatically is acted on.

* On section 30 and status -
Sanguine expectation to obtain a Section 30 order (1.4) is startling. At time of writing, UK government appears to disagree that this referendum is justifiable or defensible to hold at this short interval after its predecessor, and to hold to the principle of "once in a generation" without circumstantial conditions. You need to prevail by the force of your contrary argument's content, instead of by any formal powers, in order to obtain a Section 30. It can only be supposed that you are asking for it in order to have followed the proper course until you encounter a refusal, to bolster your challenge then on international grounds for entitlement to call your referendum, at worst getting into a Catalonia position over it. The context of your claim of changed circumstance, relations with the EU, by definition has to be a context of anti-racism and progressive open attitude to borders, not faulted in any way as conflicting with this. I created an item that affects whether it will be so faulted, or successfully establish legitimacy at all, as well as affects the case for a Section 30.

During the campaign of 2014 I lodged European parliament petition 1448/2014, of course benefitting from British EU membership enabling it. It was not the naive type of petition asking a favour that can be refused, it was a citation of the EU's duty to ECHR article 8, family life, and it always exists on record for anyone to cite and make use of at any time. It cited: that the EU will have an international duty to treat Scotland as a pariah state and not embrace deals with it or accept its legitimacy, if citizenship by parental descent is refusable.

Can I yet hope that this situation, which made me a No voter last time, will not be repeated, since the National's columnist Paul Kavanagh on Jul 9 included parental descent in a list of European norms for citizenship? That admission will conflict with the closed community racism of making it refusable. But sadly, your campaign during 2013 conflicted with it too but for all the 9 months from White Paper to poll I could not commit any Yes source to pledge unrefusability for this citizenship, and several answers heard at Yes meetings confirmed refusability. Resulting division of families is only part of its injustice: it meant Scots being rejected from their own country. An answer I received right at the campaign's end seemed to shift sentiment but kept noncommittal by deferring all actual decision of citizenship rules until after a Yes vote.

The UK never had any duty to host a Scottish referendum offering that moral wrong akin to the Clearances, I raised that point in post-poll submission to the Constitutional Affairs Committee's review. Last time the UK continued to hold itself bound by the Edinburgh Agreement which it had made before the White Paper, but it can have no duty either morally or internationally to grant a Section 30 for a repeat offering of the same. Most simply, and it should have acted on this thought last time too: national self-determination is for the whole community of a people, it is never for part of it to reject another part, and that whole community includes family next of kin, and that always includes first generations of diaspora. In a mobile world it is commonplace to be caused by parental movements to be born in diaspora from the country where all your belonging and practical roots are: from your country.

This is directly against the horrible school bully bigotry of birthplace racism: the idea that country is dictated by place of birth. Birthplace racism has been visibly factually wrong ever since the Babylonian exile of the ancient Jews 6 centuries BC, it would do catastrophic offence for anyone to apply it to the modern Palestine/Israel situation. It divides and allocates to different countries siblings who have identical backgrounds. Irish and Welsh nationalisms both had diaspora born leaders prominently in their twentieth century histories. Experience from the previous referendum bill indicates that if I give any named examples of diaspora born people you will refuse to publish the submission. So I refer you to the list of 55 famous examples I submitted to Common Weal on Sep 26. But this is not against having birthplace as one of the routes to citizenship. That practice rightly caters for a status quo population's continuity and that everyone has the possibility of needing a practical connection with the place where practical circumstances placed their birth even if it is not their country. To refuse this also divides families. It just needs to be clear that no state can claim anyone as a citizen against their own will by any route including this one - so for example, English Welsh Manx or Irish people who were born in Scotland and do not personally wish to become its citizens upon independence, no party can impose that they do. That would need clarifying for any set of birth citizenship rules, for because birth does not dictate country there will always be false positives - and with that clarifier, the false positives do no harm.

Instead, to illustrate by imagining our relations with an independent Wales: presumably expected to be friendly. To have Welsh born in Scotland be trapped here unwillingly and Scots born in Wales be trapped there unwillingly, would harm both countries, and blight their lives with tensions around unnecessary ethnic oppression and state responsibilities to unwilling citizens made more practically needy by cruel division from their families. Hence, both states will owe to each other as well as to their own nations, to have human rights compliant unrefusable citizenship by descent. As many members of those 2 diaspora-born groups as take this up, opt to reside in their own country unrefusably, and do not opt for residence in the other country and maybe not to keep birth citizenship of it either, the other country suffers no harm from the false positive that they could have opted to keep it.

So it was also shocking last time to see birth based citizenship tied to preexisting British citizenship, contrary to an older SNP pledge of citizenship for everyone born in Scotland. I took up the case of a person I had met in the internet comment system Disqus, resident in the US, who was born here just after a rule change in 1983 to parents who were only here on temporary student permissions: he was in the heartbreaking outrageous ethnic injustice of being excluded from British residence when his felt affinity is here. He had hoped that independence would be his opportunity, until I could get no commitment for him following the White Paper. I am still racked with anger on his behalf.

If you hold that decision of the proposed Scottish state's citizenship rules should be left until after a Yes vote has happened, it will be fatal to this referendum's legitimacy to mandate for the Scottish people, and legitimacy of claim to be held and making the case to hold it prevail. Instead, the bottom lines of compatibility of those rules with human rights must be already set and constitutionally binding before the poll, where we know for certain that that is what we are voting on, not after. This needs to be built in to your case for having grounds and entitlement to hold this referendum at all, and thence into the Scottish state's entitlement to be created at all. When your case for holding it, your case for claiming "material change" has happened, is a crisis to the survival of our open border relations in Europe, your case innately has to be an anti-racist outward looking welcoming open border stance. Hence you would blow that stance, and your claim to legitimacy of action, by having any closed border stance to elements of our own community as the Scottish people. Hence the organisability of this referendum requires this standard written in as a constitutional fundamental, a condition of the future state's status, which a post-independence parliament will not have power to undo. My Euro petition helps to bind this further.

Meeting this standard means, writing into the case and claim to hold the referendum, that the ECHR compatibility and the European citizenship norms that Mr Kavanagh listed are constitutionally binding on a Scottish state for its legitimate existence, and re fixed before the poll not after: including the following 2 specifics, committal not noncommittal:
~ citizenship by descent shall be unrefusable: every person with the descent concerned, at minimum as last time's White Paper detailed it, who applies for this citizenship automatically gets it. They are Scots of this people equally as much as the resident Scots are. There shall be no discretion to refuse it.
~ citizenship also shall be unrefusable for everyone born in Scotland, without being subject to any other condition such as preexisting British citizenship.

While 2014 was a taint on our history, a referendum held on the above basis would be a proud achievement: helping to entrench red lines of citizenship justice internationally, as standard to bind all countries, in a racism blighted era desperately needing red lines. These red lines would become a stronger leverage upon the UK too, and all that is wrong and distressing in its border practices at present, even if No wins again. Last time, despite your favouring of skilled migrants, your proposed citizenship rules appeared to me to be aimed at a certain quantity of nationalist voter with inward looking insular feelings of the nation as a clammed up community, and a perception of even diaspora Scots as disdained outsiders. An MSP disgracefully denied that anyone is Scottish who has never lived here. I found it ethnically vicious experiences, exactly what civic nationalism claimed to avoid, to encounter both a Radical Independence stall and a Green who were convinced that it was progressive to be harshly against any descent citizenship at all. Some definitions of civic nationalism I encountered seemed to make a virtue of only caring about the resident population and of labelling as ethnic any feeling for anyone else. Thus both sides chasing the anti-outsider vote.

The entire situation now claimed for entitlement to hold another referendum conflicts with and does not legitimise any repeat of that, and points against a mandate for it. Cleaning up the Yes offer into compatibility with standing for a welcoming Europe of open borders, will take renouncing all past errors of insularity and disowning the attitudes I have just itemised: not denying they exist but actively breaking with and repudiating them. As well as a great moral move, this is part of your organising to have any justification to act at all.

* on media coverage of the status -
With a background now explicitly in issues of anti-racism and citizenship rules, unlike last time, it is obvious but should be stated explicitly to avoid doubt, that the media's job in fairly covering such a campaign includes covering every citizenship issue raised. This to be a standard of whether the campaign is being fairly covered. Another issue which this includes is something which the protagonists can not make happen by themselves, can not offer to deliver as their own policy, but can support the claim for, or can say how it potentially affects them. This is the claim that the interventions in the 2014 campaign by the US, Canada, and Australia oblige them to form a pan-Western citizenship union with us. The National Jul 11 is the only instance yet of this being recorded in traditional media. These 3 countries urged a No vote on grounds that it was bad to create a border and a citizenship division within present Britain, yet this was a double standard because they all became independent from the British Empire and subsequently created hard border divisions with us. These run through many extended families thanks to the historical pattern of emigration.

The logic of their campaign intervention was that they should remove those barriers again, forming a citizenship union with us. Because they argued against us losing united British citizenship, this union would equivalently be a total joint citizenship abolishing the distinction of its holders as any particular one member country's citizen at all: that more total than the EU has ever done, and nicely harder ever to dissolve. They intervened in our constitutional future, made themselves parties in it deploying a concern against citizenship division, hence they owe us consistency with their intervention, and it means taking this seminally progressive step which is wonderfully opposite to the present momentum for increasing barriers. This scenario, if it happened, would totally alter citizenship issues' place and impact in the campaign. So the existence of a claim that it should happen is of public campaign interest.

It makes necessary also to cover proposed diplomatic policies toward the US if this great advance does not happen and present divisions continue. This includes an issue which is at the core of our state's morality to its own people in how it chooses to engage with the US, which the news media injustice of our time has included never discussing or mentioning, and which the posited citizenship union would end for us. US border control's long standing practice, in breach of the oldest human right of all, innocent until proved guilty, of judging foreign visitors who have no criminal convictions from arrest histories, and asking "Have you ever been arrested or convicted... " as one question. So much for the special relationship: close allies of the US do not get their citizens The absence of this last time from media scrutiny of the ethicality of both campaigns' intentions for our international relations, including the ethicality of police cooperation with any state willing to do this to our citizens, was another of last time's media deficiencies. It also has core relevance to the morality of supporting US wars in Asia argued as being for human rights, opposition to which we know always features in Yes campaigns.

* on balance of the campaign's scrutiny of Scottish v British political standards -
An item which featured in Yes campaigning last time, which could not be forseen, can be forseen now from that memory. This was the implication from all the child safety scandals following Savile, that British media institutions found involved in those scandals were less to be trusted as a result in their campaign analysis and portrayal of reality. At grassroots level this continued into an argument against the UK political institutions, from these scandals having a reach into the political culture. But because this was left to grassroots voters' perception, no balance was ensured. It was only applied against a No vote's merits. The balancer needed for equity between the campaigns, was for the Scottish devolved body politic to be scrutinised for for its standards historically towards the same issues.

This equity needs to be seen to happen this time, to get you an international status of fairly conducted campaign, "beyond reproach". It needs to include a scrutiny of both bodies politic for whether they function uncorruptly towards child protection. Such a scrutiny itself is only uncorrupt if the bodies politic have no veto or selective power over the content contributed for scrutiny. By definition and unavoidably, this gives an automatic right, for any person who claims to have evidence on any child safety issue of failures to prevent specific dangers to children, to have it published. Their evidence need not come from Scotland as clearly the issue is about the impact of standards shared across Britain which can have impact on society here.

Because child maltreatment can destroy life prospects unjustly, it can affect life achievements and skill levels. This gives it a link to the citizenship issues, because skill levels feature in selective immigration policies. So the racist wrong done to any section of the Scottish people rejected from citizenship entitlement includes that child maltreatment, which they may have suffered in another country in an already unhappily exiled childhood, could then unfairly cost them the skilled migrant route home.In the past campaign I heard a prominent Yes voice with anti-diaspora views suggest the skilled migrant route, to a large Yes meeting and in answer to my question. Hence, it is submitted here another consequence, of his referendum's entire legitimate basis having to be an unfaultably inclusive welcoming stance on all migration issues, bolstered by my Euro petition on that, that it has to include this entitlement to publishing of evidence on child safety issues.

Q2: the proposed technical changes to polling and count arrangements?

* on eligibility -
Agree that it is historically well established that votes on territorial status and self-determination are done by the resident population. Unavoidably the referendum's primary result should be counted from them. But there is a lot of excluded feeling around, often being expressed, by Scots who find themselves living away temporarily, e.g, for work reasons, at the time of a poll, this one or the previous. Its expression needs providing for, and there is a way.

Separately from the official ballot of the resident population, you could conduct postal ballots for the expat community to express their view: 2 separate such ballots, for those residing in the rest of Britain and the rest of the world, because these have different significances. These ballots would not be part of the official result, they would simply be counted as a point of fullness of information, so that all observers can analyse what extra meaning this casts upon the result. It might add to the decisiveness of the official ballot's result. Or, if the official ballot has a controversially close result, these extra ballots will add to the picture of the nation's opinion in debating what to do with the result.

There is no fair way to define exactly who the expat community are, and most importantly it can not be by birthplace racism as some have proposed, which wrongs the expats who are diaspora-born Scots: and no practical way to organise a register where they can all prove themselves. This is another reason why they can only be given a side ballot of opinion not part of the official ballot. The participants would have to each define and show their own connection to Scotland of any nature within the human rights basics for citizenship that ECHR article 8 establishes, and their ballots counted along with statistics as to the connections asserted.

Berwick on Tweed, of course is outside your enacted authority: but you could still give it its own extra referendum, again counted separately, with 2 questions: on its feeling on inclusion in a Scottish state as well as whether there should be one. How to do this when you have no power to organise polling stations there? You can provide postal voting perfectly easily, and provide polling stations at points just on our side of the border, on the bus routes out of Berwick: at Clappers and Foulden and Paxton.

* on transparency -
Keep a tally of how many observers from each side attend counts: not just who are registered to attend, but who actually do. For precautionary purposes of evidence and showing you had that care, in case there are any conspiracy theories about the count.

Again thank you for not choosing the corruptibility of an all postal ballot. Personal voting is more transparent. Quite right for uncorruptibility's sake, and for precaution against conspiracy theories, that you change to checking 100% of postal vote identifiers.

However what of the weakness that our polling in person system is vulnerable to personation of voters? Any voter who can demonstrate their identity with a reasonable sureness and whose vote has been stolen is entitled to still be given their vote, and the stolen vote annulled by ballot number in the course of the count. A stronger approach of care for the voter's rights than has been UK practice to date.

Q3: the proposed changes to rules on permissible participants?

* on para 3.7: national campaigns' entitlement to an all-voters mailshot -
This should not be just an entitlement, it should be compulsory for them to use it and do a mailshot. This is because each national campaign is a coalition, and has been subject to an official body's decision in getting recognised as a national campaign. Hence, if chooses not to do a mailshot, there can be recriminations where some parts of the coalition feel wronged by that choice and consequently by the campaign's selection and approval by the Electoral Commission to be the campaign. Perception of a fully conducted and fair campaign then suffers. This is a lesson from history: this actually happened to the Yes campaign for voting reform in 2011, which chose not to use its mailshot entitlement. Local Yes campaigns, including the one I belonged to, were very discontented with this decision and felt wronged that we had had no say in it, and that our consent had not been required to put that remotely led top-down national campaign at our head. That was experienced as a bad campaign practice.

Q4: the proposed campaign rules and rules on spending?

* on campaigning safety -
Any process can only ever be "beyond reproach" if all public concerns can be heard automatically not selectively. That is instead of the unaccountability of leaving it to the Electoral Commission to select which to listen to.

e.g. Legitimacy suffered last time from the perception and claim that voters felt intimidated against displaying No posters on their homes or land, and the visible fact in most places that Yes posters were overwhelmingly more common, not correlating at all with the result. It will only be clear that intimidation claims on either side are being responded to on their merits, if they are registered, accessible and checkable by the public, in a register of public concerns and it is seen by international observers that it is enforceably in practice that they have to be answered, whether by the Commission or otherwise. The sought international status of "beyond reproach" depends on it being seen in practice, not on an evadable notionality.

The policing issue I described in Q1 is another example.

* on spending -
Last time, the Electoral Commission was unable to advise how anyone should register spending if they wished to campaign for a policy point that might mean voting either way: e.g, before the point when Yes had cast the same doubt on EU citizens' continuity here as it now critiques UK policy for, what if you wanted to say vote for the most pro-immigration position subject to a moral priority of not betraying descent citizenship? That meant voting Yes only if Yes would bind itself foolproofly to descent citizenship unrefusable, and voting No otherwise or if there was any doubt. A definite unevaded answer from Yes would establish which side such a campaigner should register as: but the Commission denied being able to extract such an answer, and said it is just up to campaigners to choose which side they are on from what the campaigns have chosen to say. My enquiry showed this did not cover all campaigning positions, and it helped the fair clear informing of campaigners and voters to be avoided and muddied. This should be changed. Voters need to be able to ascertain, policy by policy, whether the vista of European border openness, cited to justify holding the vote, really is being offered to them. This is one extra route to do that wherever policies get left in doubt.

Say it with me

"Say it with me: immigration has been great for Scotland and the UK, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise."
- So wrote MEP Alyn Smith in the National. He has been an SNP figure with an impressively liberal and positive sounding angle on borders and openness, going back as far as the 2003 election when I got a decent reply from him on "an open and welcoming Scotland", as their candidate for Edinburgh West, and voted for him.

How then can he possibly explain, excuse, or square his own words with, the indy White Paper's hate atrocity against our diaspora and the citizenship by descent of our emigrants' offspring???

When eager Yessers at South Queensferry's indyref local debate argued in classic racist words that there was not enough space not to limit immigration numbers ACTUALLY OF DIASPORA-BORN SCOTS TO LIVE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, were they saying "immigration has been great for Scotland and the UK ?"

Ah, but there was, visible in hindsight, a catch in what he wrote to me even back then. "Our definition of Scots is anyone who lives in Scotland". That left it open for the SNP to keep in its unity racist nats who did not want to include in our nation's definition its children of exile not yet living here. What was left open was exactly the hate crime that ended up proposed in Yes citizenship policy in the indyref.

You will have to fix this before you can make any bid for the open borders vote, and any campaign based on pro-immigration morality, in an indyref2.

We will woo you with rudely blatant brush-offs

Sunday Herald: Sturgeon, ‘We will woo No voters to support the ‘beautiful dream’ of independence’
Me to Sturgeon's public message system: "We will woo Yes campaigners to the beautiful human rights duty, that the diaspora born offspring of Scotland's emigrants and travellers shall have unrefusable citizenship of their own country."
Reply: "Thank you for your letter of 15 March 2016. I have been asked to reply as our team is responsible for responding to enquiries to the Scottish Government about immigration. It may be helpful to know that immigration and citizenship are matters reserved to the UK Government and Scottish Government has no devolved powers on these matters.

I hope this information is helpful.
Yours sincerely Laura MacCallum."

They know perfectly well that a declaration to Yes campaigners is about conditions under independencem, and they answer with deliberate obtuseness about not having the powers now, saying nothing about independence at all. This is a STARK AND ARROGANT FAIL in Sturgeon's promised dialogue with No voters, right from its start. A contempt of the public in its blatantness of not answering. On the key item to whether a Scottish state will be human rights compliant to its own nation's families or a pariah racist state internationally.

This is a totally failed start for Sturgeon's wooing initiative.

CIVIC NATIONALISM CITED IN RACISM

Every gradually building concern of the alert questioning voter, during the ref, against the term "civic nationalism", that it was serving as a device for racism against the diaspora, is proved accurate and terrifyingly vital.

From exactly the same Guardian story on Irish Republic citizenship as in the previous post. See the comment under it posted by "Ricayboy" at 6 Mar 2016 00:10. It explicitly cites civic nationalism in support of the emotionally savage bully hate crime of birthplace racism - the bigotry of saying that folks' country is dictated by birthplace. It contends that birthplace racism follows from civic nationalism and is the modern PC position. He says nationhood by family and descent "goes against the 'civic nationalism' that we are all supposed to believe in and has more in common with the ethnic nationalism that has supposed to have been consigned to the past."

THERE IT IS IN THE OPEN. EVERY NAT MUST DISOWN IT OR ELSE STANDS PROVED TO BE BACKING RACE HATE AND CLEARANCES.

In the hate writing of a racist who wants the Irish diaspora not to have citizenship of their country, who actually regards them as not Irish when he is writing about a state they created, "Surely nationality in the modern world has to do with where you are born and grew up, not to do with blood and ancestry?" THIS IN A MODERN WORLD WHERE FOLKS OFTEN DON'T GROW UP WHERE THEY WERE BORN! They may have no further connection with their birthplace in their lives, e.g. th Silent Twins, Barbadian, born in Yemen and left it at 8 months old. According to him, the modern hip racially fair PC of civic nationalism makes fair and logical that siblings, growing up in fhe same place, whose parents moved between their births, should be forced to belong to different countries. Birth should force a country on you in an era that says it's wrong for birth to force a gender on you! Have you thought of how a diaspora born child of exile growing up in the wrong country parallels transgender griwing up in the wrong body?

According to his PC civic nationalism, the exiled Palestinians are not Palestinians and the Jews globally are not Jews, both people were successfully abolished when they were cleared out of the land - that line of hate would start a Middle East war!

That is what birthplace racism says, so according to this guy that is what civic nationalism says. Nats?

in a little box with nasty barricades

For the anti-outsider racism against Scotland's diaspora which made it morally necessary to vote No, the worst of the leading nats was Jim Sillars. He it was who actually proposed that the Scots born in diaspora as the offspring of our emigrants - whose emigration itself was supposed to be a nat issue - should be filtered for desirable skills the same as migrants with no roots here, before they can live in their own country. He took this line of xenophobic hate speech towards a section of his own nation, in his campaign dialogue with George Galloway and to the Yes meeting on 7 May 2014 at Liberton school, Edinburgh. SSP leader Colin Fox was sitting beside him and continued to do a campaigning tour with him calling him a friend.

I saw it because it was my question on citizenship by descent that he was answering. He told the same meeting that he was a Eurosceptic who would rather Scotland be like Norway and join EFTA, he retains from 70s nationalism its anti-EU strain, the idea of sacrosanct national sovereignty not getting pooled and united with anyone. Anti-Europeanism is now another racist anti-immigration position, because it means, and at British level much of it is motivated by, ending the union of free movement and travel. Going back to having nasty barricades up to the rest of the world outside your little box of global apartheid.

It fits him perfectly that he has now announced he's campaigning for an Out vote in the referendum, and splitting with the SNP mainstream by it, as he has ranted against the party control created by Salmond. The nats are better off without him, but will they realise it and break with his sick level of anti-diaspora bigotry?

Sillars will have no claim to moan or to claim any crisis if Scotland votes In and Britain votes Out. It is a matter of record that he wants the opposite.

no caviar thanks to Sturgeon

On Ed Miliband's Facebook page, a nat has written, about this devastating election:

- "You sealed your fate when you joined forces with Cameron and sent an army of MPs up to Scotland to bully,coerce and scare the Scots into voting no in the Indy Ref, that fate was further sealed when you treated the SNP as the enemy in the election. You are an idiot that has let the whole nation down."

My reply does not come from a voice who was always unionist, it comes from a voice who went into the ref open minded to see which side would be more liberal on keeping Scotland open to its diaspora, and suspected the nats might pander to racist voters by not being generous towards the broader diaspora gut never imagined they would actually taint our history with the fascism of betraying citizenship of their own country for the first generation diaspora. here is what I said on the economic issue, to the Tory near future we have all been slammed with, and remembering that the propsect of "no more Tory gvoernments we didn't vote fro" was the best sounding line in Yes's campaign:

- "The SNP made themselves an enemy and forced Ed's hand to do that, because they bragged so hubristically that they were going to dictate all his govt's actions. It's their fault. They cheated Ed of the win he was heading for, destroyed the govt they wanted to get, took away from us at the brink of reality the most progressive govt since before Thatcher and gave us another 80s-like trauma. They knew they were frightening voters in England and that the Tories were seizing on it.

Sturgeon said they were going to force CND disarmament. Any surprise at an 80s-like result to saying that? They were going to force a highly austere and absurd fiscal independence for Scotland, and force what Labour's economic policy would be - and talking so dictatorially made it credible for the Tories also to stick on them that they would force another referendum. In fact they were on a carried away ego trip, campaign publicity was their only means of leverage on Ed's govt towards even the more meritorious of their ideas - their anti-austerity line which only stood up if they did not get fiscal indy! - the SNP would not have had any means to force Ed's govt to do fiscal indy or CND, for their only threat was to put him out and Tories back in, electorally impossible for them to do hence already pledged not to. But only the minority of voters who take enough serious interest in politics to understand the system's workings realised this. The tragedy of this election is it has been swung on irrational feeling, that could not have happened if more humans were disposed to think.

We would still be worse off if Yes had won the ref, and if this election still had the same outcome in rUK despite no nationalist scare to cause it. As a so-called independent state avoiding the austerity burden of creating currency reserves by instead choosing to keep our spending and economic policy dictated to us by the Bank of England, we would now be under this Tory govt which would have a stable big majority instead of a precariously tiny one. We would have no future prospect either of voting it out or of having a leftward leverage in parlt if they lose their majority mid term. That's the difference if you take Scotland out of the election, last time we made the difference of the Tories not getting a majority, this time we made the difference of keeping it tiny enough to be unstable. "

Common travel binned already: try visiting Ireland.

Britain has been breaking the British Isles common travel area with Ireland, affecting both parts of it, without admitting so in any prominent political outlet.

Since 2010, shows this paper from when they started it, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/257182/cta.pdf, they have done immigration checks on the crossings from Northern Ireland to the mainland. It is shocking to see it, as I did on the Belfast to Cairnryan crossing, with "immigration enforcement" on their uniforms, checking identity and asking exactly immigration type questions about where you were travelling to - on a domestic travel route that is wholly inside the UK. It is not caused by NI's history, any extra security because of that would be security rather than open explicit immigration checking. Dangerously it does not make NI feel treated like part of the union, does it? The idea behind it is supposed to be, that the Republic is more liberal on immigration, and the Irish peace requires there to be easy crossing into NI by road an appearance of open border between the 2 parts of Ireland, so Britain will let the Republic's policy govern who can reach NI but it will still put a trap in an unexpected place to catch folks trying to reach the British mainland. This is why it is only being done in one direction, coming from Ireland, not going to it.

A friend who has visited family in the Republic reported that he was asked for his passport when crossing into NI on public transport! This is exactly what is not supposed to happen under the common travel area, and all our media debate on the EU and during the referendum took as common knowledge that it does not happen, that we have a happy little passport-free travel area with the Irish Republic. Googling, you can find stories since 2011 of this happening. It's not being publicised in media and politics, it's only folks who travle to Ireland and experience it who are getting to know this is happening.

As a No voter who is migration liberal and has no love at all for Britain's present border culture, I'm writing against Britain's practices here and accusing that they weaken the union. But this revelation is more of a problem for nats than unionists, because during the referendum the Yessers relied heavily on claiming they could predict that rUK would keep the common travel area with us because it would be rational. They insisted cavalierly that we could dismiss as bluff all contrary talk. Some Yessers actually relied on this, to argue that my anger at Yes's citizenship plan betraying the Scottish diaspora was unnecessary, because the common travel area resolved it. Predicting common travel's certainty to remain in place would mean, all the Scots born in the rest of Britain to emigrant parents and still living there at the date of indy, who Yes intended to betray without unrefusable citizenship of their own country, would still always be free to move home as part of common travel. So it would not matter how deficient and full of loopholes Yes's rules for Scottish citizenship were. This is clearly disproved by what is happening to Ireland. If intrusive migration checks are now capable of being intruded sinisterly upon civil liberties even inside the UK, between its nations, and if we are illicitly and dishonestly breaking the travel area with the Irish Republic too, both of these shocks show how easy and casual it would have been for rUK to put them onto a new Scottish state's border.

It's obviously another reason not to vote Conservative if you care for the union.

how it trumps the nat line on Tory governments, economy, Trident, and everything

THE SCOTTISH REFERENDUM IS A HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCY.

THE YES SIDE IS SNEAKING PAST VOTERS UNAWARES A HORRIBLE RACIST PLAN TO DIVIDE FAMILIES, RUINING THEIR PRATCIAL ABILITY TO HELP EACH OTHER AGAINST POVERTY OR IN TIME OF MEDICAL NEED. A POWER FOR OUR NEW STATE TO TURN SCOTS AGAINST SCOTS BY REJECTING WHOLE GROUPS OF SCOTS FROM THEIR COUNTRY.

THEY WANT TO GET RID OF THE COMMON SENSE OF INHERITING CITIZENSHIP AUTOMATICALLY, AND TO MAKE IT REFUSABLE BY THE STATE FOR THOSE SCOTS WHO CAN'T ARRANGE TO LIVE HERE ON ONE PARTICULAR DAY, AND WHO WERE BORN OUTSIDE SCOTLAND TO EXPAT PARENTS, TO GET CITIZENSHIP. THAT WILL AFFECT THEIR ENTITLEMENT TO LIVE HERE, IF COMMON TRAVEL BREAKS DOWN. THEY WANT TO PUT EVERY POSSIBLE PREJUDICE IN THE WAY OF SCOTS' ENTITLEMENT TO LIVE HERE, AND TO MAKE CITIZENSHIP SO RESTRICTED IT AMOUNTS TO A PURGE OF THE NATION. IT IS A TOTAL BETRAYAL OF SCOTS WORLDWIDE.

I wrote this for those friends who tend to follow the organised lefty scene and are voting Yes on its tide of optimistic dreams, and kept sending me Facebook invites to Yes meetings. Always trusting that scene and anywhere its group, psychology leads, they simply have not noticed or thought to check up on Yes's plans for citizenship. They have trusted that all is bound to be well and non-racist with anything the lefty parties support. With good welcoming pro-immigration consciences, just like mine, they have only heard Yes's progressive sounding spin during 2013 on encouraging a certain number of new entry.

In Britain's present racist mood, neither side nor the media have seen fit to draw your attention to a betrayal of Scottish families against ECHR article 8 on family life, an anti-immigration hate crime on the Yes side. Do you have a real enough conscience to take pause and look into that when you hear of it, now? Not like the fanatical nationalists you know your conscience does not sit easily with, willing to vote for this betrayal just out of abstract national pride, like the 2 I got when leafletting in Dumfries who just shouted out "this is a disgrace, it's all lies" and probably will be too scared to check up and discover it's not.

Yes will make inheritance of Scottish citizenship from a parent refusable by the state. It will take away the common sense principle of family life of automatically inheriting the background citizenship from a parent's origins, of the country your family life might want to resume in. Folks who move away often intend to return, the prompters to move away economically reluctantly have even been cited as a Yes argument. So it makes no practical sense, it is spiteful racial hatred as bad as any other you have ever encountered in citizenship rules, to put a question mark over such returners bringing their offspring with them. No Scots who have moved away, mostly to rUK, in recent times and who have families there to be caught by present events, had any expectation that it would result in a threat to their offspring's entitlement to live here, this is the last thing they imagined possible to come actually from the nats who are supposed to care about us as a people.

But you will notice in hindsight that return of the diaspora, undoing the Clearances, is not a principle you have ever heard about from nats. It shows the betrayal has been long prepared, it is an electoral choice to appeal to a bigoted version of nationalism that is anti-outsider, motivated by fear of the world beyond our closed little huddle, that only likes or cares for the population already here. Hence, in a racist period, to jettison being associated with immigrant unpopularity for returners. This is hidden deceitfully in the concept "civic nationalism", a term that has been claimed to be ever so enlightened and avoidant of racial attitudes, but no attitude can be more racist and hating than the "civic nationalist" line that the whole project is only concerned with the folks who already live here. This is how Pat Kane, after a lecture he gave, came to tell me that he would be first to speak up and say "this is wrong" to making any further provision for the diaspora.

Is that what organised left optimism made you think you were voting for? I discovered the betrayal, and that No is the less racist vote, from enquiring into the White Paper plan that citizenship by descent can be registered for, giving evidence of the descent. From as soon as this came out, I went through all possible routes, the government, Yes campaign national and local, and the Yes supporting parties, asking to know simply that this registering would not be refusable. The registering provision covers grandchildren too, so simply by saying it was not refusable they could have put themselves in the position of offering a better deal for the diaspora than the status quo, and then, if the continuity of the principle of unrefusable inheritance was firmly built into the new state and under no threat, that would have made me vote Yes. I am a supporter of global free movement, I hate the global apartheid of any borders, and that points in favour of No that you have to think thrice before creating any new border, throwing away a well-integrated union of nations that already exists with a long history of free movement. But it can be right to do that if you are going to resist a racist move in the state you are dividing and make borders more open overall. What I most want from either side is the most humanitarianly generous borders we can get but specifically starting from the moral priority of our country's openness to its own diaspora. I have no innate loyalty to a state, on either side, so they were not wasting their breath on an already unbudgeable voter. Instead, they are the ones who showed they won't budge.

The answer, which you can check on by your own enquiries, is IT WILL BE REFUSABLE. It will affect who can live here if the common travel area breaks down as it easily can. Of people already living at the time of independence, only the ones who are preexisting British citizens, on top of chancing either to be resident here on one particular day or born here, get unrefusable citizenship. The system is not even tied to one form of prejudice, it mixes every form of prejudice you can think of to be as restrictive and anti-outsider as possible. Though it discriminates against exile-born Scots, it is not exactly what I call "birthplace racist" -the horrible school bully bigotry of regarding everyone's country as dictated by birthplace, which everyone exile-born has encountered as a form of racist bullying and which has been visibly wrong ever since the Babylonian exile of the ancient Jews. The system actually also rats on an old SNP pledge of citizenship for everyone born in Scotland, it requires inheritance of British citizenship too, some nationalism and an obvious appeal to racist voters. As a result they never gave any answer for a real cruelly treated person in America, who I have met online, who can't get British citizenship or live here because he was born in Glasgow just after a rule change in 1983 to parents who were only here on temporary student permissions - he was hoping for better from the indy movement, instead his case does not create the moral dilemma of owing to him to vote Yes because they have given him absolutely nowt. None of you however wishfully optimistic can look away from that revelation of Yes's real character.

So the system is residency-racist - designed to be only for the narrowest conservative view of the folks who are already here and who do not fall under any of several prejudices against belonging, and to make the rest of the world rejectable including the rest of Scots. That means to vote Yes is to vote for A NEW CLEARANCES, the massive hate crime of a rejection of Scots by a Scottish state, a hating xenophobic purge of the nation that will scar our history. It is more than just emotional, important though that always is against racism's impact, it goes directly to the practical economic survival of families. Families divided into different countries against their will are prevented from coming together to support each other against poverty, including by taking each other in, and in time of medical need.

The Yes argument of no more Tory governments, even if it was right, is totally answered and thrown away by this. Yes means creating a power to reject Scots in rUK, to abandon them to stay there, under governments made more often Tory by our departure, to suffer every hardship thrown at them cut off from any family support available to them. This of course impacts on the lives of families they have here, e.g. parents who left temporarily and have returned. In having a conscience against racism you have already swallowed that it's wrong to vote for hateful purges against parts of society even if the folks offering them also offer good economic promises for the other parts of society they favour, as the Nazis did. You have felt horror at that how that wins anti-immigrant parties votes. If you are a left winger and vote Yes because you want no more Tory governments, knowing what Yes intends for citizenship, you will do exactly the same thing, purge a country of a population group, as well as you will vote upon our own families and next of kin an actively increased vulnerability to Tory governments.

Besides, I actually heard at Common Weal's big day, which was Yes-supporting, a panel of lefties including SSP discuss post-Yes prospects and they expect indy to be such a shift in both SNP's and Labour's definition of themselves that both are bound to go through an uncertain period of redefining who they are and what they are for, which will be an electoral weakness for them at a time when the Tories, renamed, will be released from their unpopular association with distant-feeling British governments and will be well placed for a serious electoral challenge. So lefty Yessers themselves are not expecting no more Tory governments, it's just another of the SNP's many wishful myths, and in 2010 the SNP vote was 491386 and Tory vote was 412855, not that much different! And where is no more Tory governments in the nats wanting a gradual several years transition away from using the British benefits system, totally exploding every unevidenced claim that voting Yes might be an escape from austerity? As also do the impacts on trade and world ratings of us using another country's currency without permission or any role in running it or of a collapsed currency union. I learned only from a public debate, not from any media why? that you can't even join the EU without a central bank.

The other Yes argument usually popular with left wingers, and not half as popular with the whole country as nats used to keep saying, is Trident. Tommy Sheridan called Trident "scrap metal", on the reasoning that it will never be used. Look what moral perspective that puts the racism issue into - there would be nothing moral whatever in taking scrap metal as a morally driving reason for voting for the persecution and cruelties described above. This would be so even if CND's persistent wishful claim that us getting rid of Trident would result in it going completely, was right. You would never consider voting for far right types of racist persecution to get rid of Trident, so don't vote for this one either. But adding to that, you know anyway it's a clutching at straws dream whose high chance of not happening could leave you having voted for racial hatred for no gain at all. rUK has it planned out to build a new base and keep Trident temporarily in America until it's ready, and you have heard many nat voices wanting to trade keeping Trident for the currency union in which we also absurdly would not be fiscally independent and would still have our spending controlled by British Tory governments we could no longer vote against and will be more frequent as a result, again so much for no more Tory governments or for escaping from austerity.

That inherited citizenship will be refusable I first got admitted by SNP minister Alex Neil, at the first Yes meeting I went to - where there was no comeback to answers. He said it's because of keeping out undesirables. If you have any critical thinking capacity, your alarm bells would go off instantly, to ask exactly who the undesirables are and does it mean the poor or the unemployed? Absolutely key Yes figure Jim Sillars, who is doing loads of touring meetings for them, confirmed it probably does, he would would want it to, and he claims to be a socialist. To an audience to whom my question had already raised the thought of dividing families, he opened with the instantly familiar racist sentiment "We can't have an open door", where within the Union we already do have an open door, and he said he wants the exile-born to be subject to filtering for desirable skills exactly the same as is planned for migrants without any connections here at all. He openly told them "WE MUST NOT BE AFRAID OF THIS".

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD ANYTHING SO INHUMANLY RUTHLESS RACIST FROM ANY FIGURE OUTSIDE THE FAR RIGHT PARTIES? Yet SSP leader Colin Fox sitting beside him said not a word to disown it and has continued to do touring meetings with Sillars and call him a friend at them. This remains unknown to the Yes faithful who are not following this question, so it is hidden from them in plain sight. Sillars is anti-EU too and to have Yes making so much use of him as a speaker, to trade unions too and incredibly the exile-born Yes supporter Lesley Riddoch is doing a meeting with him in Livingston, points further against Yes's reliability towards the EU. Think of that as you remember Sturgeon's recent threat to throw out all the EU residents already here, they will "lose their residency rights", if we get any trouble rejoining. That was a scale of slipping of the mask on nat racism that if you ignore it to cling to a dream you are part of something worse then UKIP. When I first became No I was worried about Britain leaving the EU and had to check my conscience with a Polish friend, who to my interest turned out already to be a No voter. Now the duty to vote No to protect Polish friends from the racially ugliest agenda you have heard from a major party, is clear and uncontestable.

That the Yes we are faced with is as vicious as this is a humanitarian emergency in our history. Sillars's tooth and claw capitalist plan to divide families takes no account of bad education systems, troubled families and interventions/social work situations, unrecognised conditions like autism or dyslexia, or Savile-type hidden abuses in institutions, all as causes of not having high value skills. This in a political culture that is still utterly closed to allowing evidence on these things, like mine against damaging education methods, to be heard. So it is a plan to further punish for being victims, all abuse survivors and all folks who had their childhoods damaged by unscrupulous adults, by having their country reject them for it. To vote Yes knowing this, is to vote to add to the longer life toll of crimes upon children and to punish their victims.

Yet get this, I have even found a Radical Independence stallholder willing to defend Sillars and call this unprecedented racism good socialism. He argued it is racist to give anyone an advantage from their background connections and fair to treat everyone outside the country the same. So the Marxists of Radical Indy want to select workers like so much meat for their profit value to the rich, to abuse abuse survivors, and to hammer ordinary families' liberty to come together to protect each other from poverty. He knew this practical point was unanswerable for he kept avoiding it by diverting onto repeating, several times after I had already answered it, the racist question "How far back would you go?"

Friends in Fife invited me to a Yes meeting in Kirkcaldy with Tariq Ali. Is all of the above any background to accept the pathetic "I would hope so" that was all he was left able to say on trusting Yes's intentions on citizenship? Where was the trustworthiness in the written answers my early enquiries got if answered at all, the obvious evasion of just saying read the White Paper - to a question on clarifying it? Not until it became possible to use enquiries on the campaigning rules as a lever for clearer policy answers did I get any, and they totally leave it open for these horrors to happen:

Policy officer Nickola Paul who wrote the policy: "Legislation will be made to establish detailed rules for Scottish citizenship in time for independence. Therefore further details of the procedural requirements and administration of the relevant rules in relation to Scottish citizenship applications will be available when the legislation is drafted." So vote not knowing what they are going to do. Yessers often fall back on this: oh the White Paper is only proposals and we will we will only decide all this after winning the ref and you can help us write our constitution. Spiv trickery, selling you a product with no guaranteed content, saying gamble on the outcome to a process that will be full of folks who were willing to follow such evil lead plans. Compare it to No's deal where the Union includes the status quo certainty already existing of a united citizenship. I met some decent-seeming Yessers from their strong Helensburgh group who were concerned to get their lead answerer to take it to their lawyer and see what solution she could get me, she ceased to answer any more after only coming up with this: "Apart from birth, parental birth and residence on Indy day there is no automatic right to a Scottish Passport. Our law incorporates the ECHR as will our constitution. Our political and social culture is to bring families together and not divide them. Our political class reflects our society which is compassionate. However we have a duty to our nation and the wider world to police our borders and be measured and responsible in our security and international affairs. There can be no carte blanche on this matter.."

Which is just proof of everything I have written. The "parental birth" reference is to the White Paper's provision for future born children, which is tied up in spiteful complex strings: it also requires that if they are born in Scotland their parent must already be a permanently permitted resident at the moment of birth, and if they are born outside, requires that their parents chose to register the birth in the correct way, though it's not the baby's fault if they don't. More nasty tricks designed to pile up the maximum of range excuses for power to reject folks, totally in the character of the worst racist-influenced citizenship provisions in other countries that have justice campaigns going on against them, and not at all in the spirit of Yes's propaganda claiming to be liberal, rendering it lies.

If you are going to trust a political class at its word on being compassionate where it promises nothing at all except to breach the citizenship inheritance principle and refuse any shred of safeguards, you are hooked to a cult. Indy has become like the new communism the way folks' desperate dreams are vested in it. The way Yessers will go on about economic sufferings and poverty, it's the first thing they do in all their meetings, to create a peer pressure, without giving any evidence that they will disappear under indy with our 2 neocon major parties and the Tories easily strong enough to come back. They just take it for granted and go for peer pressure to mask the lack of evidence.

This fits with the well known pattern cited by J K Rowling, that every doubtful questioning of any Yes prediction gets called scaremongering. It's a cult selling unevidenced dreams and shouting down questions. All its policies and prosperity predictions based on predicting that other parties will do everything Eck hopes they will do, when they can easily choose not to. The cybernats, I have had 3 encounters with their sham debate groups on FB matching the experiences of many who have been turned on personally for having any other view than faithfully uncritically following Yes. The national feeling of intimidation that is preventing folks from displaying No posters. The dishonest cult-like in-group intolerant character, of the form of nationalist culture that has prevailed, bears out the character of movement that would betray the diaspora.

So I included Helensburgh in my "no to a new clearances" campaign, which mostly has been Borders targetted. For the British-wide racist crisis certainly worsens the Scottish emergency, I have had 4 newspaper letters on it published but largely the media and indeed the No campaign have not chosen to focus on it, because they know it could raise a good pressure upon the British parties too to become nicer about immigration than they want to be. So I lodged a European parlt petition, 1448, against accepting the ref process as fair or a new state as validly mandated in all the EU's dealings with it, if the mass of voters were unaware of Yes's citizenship plans. A duty to voter awareness. Not naive enough to depend on the petition getting formally upheld in order to succeed. This petition makes the challenge that not to do these things would be a bad precedent for the EU against what it is, so just by being lodged it has already succeeded, putting this challenge in the record always there to refer back to.

fax democracy

This is really good:www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/22/scotland-vote-no-fax-democracy-alex-salmond-independence-westminster Norway is a "fax democracy" because it has to keep sending faxes to the EU asking to have the say it does not formally have because it is not as an EU member. Thus we would be in the same position under indy, in relation to all the aspects of the union Salmond wants to keep. We would be a fax democracy, a state opted out of any leverage towards the things we would ask other countries for.

Like the now exploded assumption that rUK would keep investing in renewable energy here to buy from us, just to make the nats' sums add up - the European Court of Justice has made a ruling that there is no such obligation between EU states and rUK would have no duty to invest in Scottish renewable energy. As Brian Wilson explains here in the ScotsmanSkittles of assertion falling down": "As I have repeatedly pointed out, it is completely irrational to assume that the UK Continuing would subsidise expensive Scottish renewables if we were a separate state, leaving Scottish consumers alone to pick up a tab which is currently spread across the whole UK."

It is in this nat culture of mirage, reckless claim, shouting down opponents, and as JK Rowling said, calling all contrary arguments scaremongering without actually answering their content, that the nats have not put right their citizenship policy either. They won't budge, they are sticking to their line of betraying the diaspora, even our closest next of kin diaspora, by making inheritance of citizenship from parents refusable and discretionary for the state to allow. A new clearances that would scar our history - by our own nationalists!!.

So it looks inescapable and now beyond any serious chance of changing, that the moral right has turned out to be with No. I started this blog without any such conclusion drawn in advance. During the period in 2012-3 when they were talking a lot of open borders rhetoric and before they had issued any policies, I was cautiously sympathetic towards Yes. That rhetoric was smoke and mirrors they have not honoured it, they have gone totally the other way. Their concept of "civic nationalism" has turned out to be a cover for an anti-outsider form of xenophobia even against our own close diaspora, a tribal cult-like intolerance, No supporters intimidated from putting up posters, and an unscrutinised emotionalised faith that every dreamy claim the Yes side makes must be right and all contrary information is scaremonering. A totally dismal picture. As these articles show, they have blown it big time.

All who care about their own and their friends' families, for all with a social conscience against hateful xenophobia, vote No.

A PETITION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

Submitted Jun 23. Accompanied by letters to 2 offices of the European Commission because they are responsible to have a position too.

TO WITHHOLD ACCEPTANCE OF LEGITIMACY FROM AN INDEPENDENT SCOTLAND UNLESS THE REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN MADE MOST VOTERS AWARE OF A CITIZENSHIP QUESTION AFFECTING FREE MOVEMENT: AND TO PUBLICISE THIS BEFORE THE POLL.

A petition on the EU's dealings with an independent Scotland if one results from the present referendum.

To urge that the EU and its institutions should not recognise the referendum as legitimately mandating and fairly conducted, and should deal with a new Scottish state on that basis in all its relations with it, if a question on citizenship does not receive a scale of media coverage in the referendum campaign so as to make overwhelmingly most voters aware that the question exists. This question is: whether applications for Scottish citizenship by descent, through a parent or grandparent, with the descent evidenced in any way at all, will or will not be refusable.

This has a bearing on the principle of free movement which is a defining concern of the EU. It could affect who is allowed to live here if united travel areas break down, and entitlement to public services. To make citizenship through a parent refusable appears inhumanely to breach ECHR article 8 on family life, by its potential to divide close family members in these ways.

Persons who have moved from Scotland within either the EU or UK did not anticipate such a threat to their offspring's citizenship position. It would be a bad precedent for the EU, conflicting with its nature as a union, to accept silently this occurring in any country.

It is an unfair distortion of national self-determination for voters to be unaware and uninformed that they are voting to remove the absolute unrefusable entitlement to residence here and citizenship, from their own or other families and a part of their society. Voters led to assume that no such prospect can exist, because their media select to be oblivious to it and the campaigns on both sides select not to address it, have not mandated it. They have not mandated the whole choice on statehood that includes it.

To date, this is the situation. The following supporting information evidences so, and that a position from the EU on its dealings and relations with Scotland, taken before the poll, could compel there to be sufficient scale publicising of the question to avert an illegitimately uninformed vote and the EU's difficulty of relating to a state created by that.

the popular will

news.stv.tv/scotland-decides/news/279363-survey-finds-more-scots-want-trident-to-stay-than-go-after-yes-vote/ Opinion Poll More want to keep Trident!! So much for Eck telling the pulse of public opinion.

There is something very unclear, very smoke and mirrors, about the new draft constitution they are consulting on. Because the consultation actually ends after the vote, so that it will presumably just have to be abandoned if No wins, none of the draft's contents are commitments or policies when we vote. this is particularly agonising to remember in relation to citizenship, where perhaps prodded by voter concerns about the diaspora, they have now used the word "entitlement" in relation to citizenship by descent, and having a "claim" to citizenship. Trouble is, this only refers to forms of descent which are not specified, in this draft they don't specify any details of how citizenship by descent would work, so it does not attach these words to the White Paper policy on parental and grandparental descent. "if either of their parents meets requirements set out in law" and "another connection with Scotland as set out further in law". Also left open for the constitution writers is what the "prescribed procedures" for applying will be. So it still remains that they need to say, and until they say it they have not said it, that applications on parental and grandparental descent evidenced in any way at all will not be refusable.

grim purist racism becoming clearer step by step.

Very unpleasant racially excluding themes are now emerging consistently, if you look out for them, in the Yes campaign and case. It is a particularly tragic turn in the history of a dispersed people historically subjected to worldwide clearances. despite the plan to have a Homecoming Festival this summer, present day nationalism is showing selfish forms only caring about the home population and betraying the diaspora. If it stays this way, everyone with family links to the rest of Britain, or with friends who have family links to the rest of Britain, will have strong humanitarian need to vote No.

I have mentioned before getting ignored by every part of the Yes campaign enquired to to establish that our new state will not have a power to say no to any of the applications to "register" for citizenship by descent, as the White Paper describes. To this you can now include Labour For Independence. The position is no longer left to assuming the worst from silence and from Yes newspaper number 2. On Mar 11 there was a Yes public meeting in Gorgie, Edinburgh. there, to my question on this, Alex Neil confirmed the worst, the answer not wanted. That yes the new state would hold onto a choice how to respond to the citizenship by descent applications. He offered as an excuse for this that it screens out undesirables like serious criminals. He made the usual noises about the Yes side wanting to encourage new population, but that can not take away that when pinned down in front of a public audience as to their position he has gave a position that would take away the automatic unobstructable access to their own country, that exists now under the Union, for Scots who were born in exile because their parents/grandparents moved away, and who already have the pain of not having been able to rush back to live here on independence day and qualify for automatic citizenship that way. To vote for that is to commit a new clearances, to divide families and effect a division of hate between Scots potentially closing our country to some of our own offspring. That is not national renewal or liberation, that is national betrayal and severely serious purist racism.

In that meeting there was no comeback to the answers given, so that the speakers could get away with evasions. So there was no comeback to ask him: how do we know you won't discriminate against the unemployed and the poor. Any time politicians are not tied down against doing that, you know as surely as clockwork it is what they will do. These are the same folks as inflicted Trump on Aberdeenshire against the locals' will and who are abolishing corroboration and tampering with free criminal defence, always remember that.

A letter in the Sunday Times, responding to the birthplace racism in the legal challenge for expats to have the vote, pinpointed exactly what is involved in these attitudes. Written from England by Andrew Lockhart, it said "There are many people born in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or abroad who, for ancestral reasons, have emotional ties with Scotland and deem themselves Scots. That does not mean they would wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state..." and "Alex Salmond should not assume that even those born in Scotland and who live elsewhere would wish to accept what he so condescendingly offers." It now seems to be the No supporters who are conscious of these ties. Alternatively they might well wish to be citizens of a separate Scottish state if one is created, and stronger practical factors than just ancestry and emotion are at stake, family ties and background, when your status is made different even than your siblings' and the rest of your family are all in the homeland whose government, claiming to be progressive, asks to be allowed to exclude its own.

You might say that no excluding will happen because we will all still be in a common travel area. Even if that was true it would only hold for those of the offspring born in exile who live in the rest of Britain or the EU. But as we rationally know, there are considerably big chances that common travel areas will break down, through either country ending up outside the EU or through England fulfilling its threat to put a border onto us. If those situations happen, citizenship does translate into being allowed to live here at all.

Then yesterday I attended a lecture in Glasgow by a Yes campaign leading name, supposed to be a lefty one into popular participation. In the informal time after the lecture I asked him what ordinary people should do to make the Yes campaign take a position guaranteeing the children of exile their safe belonging here and citizenship. What I got back was a volley of disgustingly hard man conservative attitudes about folks who live here and pay their taxes here, something about a standard process for citizenship taking 3 years! that is not even in the White Paper, and no promises or straight answer at all for anyone not already living here to live here if free movement breaks down. He actively said he would speak up and say this is wrong, if citizenship was being opened up any further to diaspora who do not already live here. By this he showed a very dark racism, only further confirming the seriousness of these concerns against voting Yes on present terms. He seriously imagined himself in the lecture a progressive calling for our news state to do lots of left wing things, and disturbingly undemocratically he called for it to be governed by a left wing consensual partnership between the major parties instead of a proper party contest, that was sinister too. yet he has no feeling or consciousness for the diaspora at all, all his imagined empowerment of the nation applies only to the folks who already live here, that is all he sees the nation as. Narrow minded, sweepingly excluding and with mental walls up against the rest of the world and everyone in it including exiled Scots, this nastiness follows naturally on from, continues, the recent hating action of Angus Macneil MP who denied that the childen of exile are Scots if they have not yet lived here. This is very ugly, very bigoted, very divisive and a threat to families, a far worse line on citizenship than Britain's, this is not liberation or progression at all, this is an inward turned grim racist horror prospect. Step by step this dystopian appeal to narky inward focussed outsider fearing bigots is becoming too stark not to see.

Listen to your expat families. They are real people.

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.

Yes for who?

On the same day as the news of their sudden narrowing of the polls gap, the Yes side may have blown any deserving to win. Unless they put something right, they have let it slip through their fingers just when your spirits were highest, tragically by a thoughtless piece of racist sloppiness from the ideas-conservative heart of the SNP.

The latest Yes paper, which came through my door today, states "all British citizens who were born here or live here on day one of independence will have a right to a Scottish passport." It said nothing at all about the diaspora born's position, it was written in a way that the public can read as meaning the diaspora born who can't move back here before independence day are not necessarily entitled at all. It presents the exile born as not counting if they are not already here, it does not present the diaspora as equal.

They may be kids who will only be adult after the date, or young adults stuck in the family economic dependence that is deliberate Tory policy,

I know the White Paper clarifies that the exile born for 2 generations can also register for a passport by right - btw a betrayal of Salmond's plan of only a few months previously, to make it 3 generations. But this point is about the public message, rather than the less known detailed facts. The presentation has suddenly sloppily slid back to the 1999 election, when the SNP made that crucial policy foul-up and was open to attack by Labour as dividing families. This may cause racist bullying, among the thick laddish type of adult, and among schoolkids some of whom are in the 16 franchise where already before this Yes was said to be trailing unexpectedly.

An interesting site linked to by Yes supporters on Facebook is "100 Artists and Creatives who support Scottish independence." The list includes diaspora born Lesley Riddoch. Were the folks in the campaign she supports remembering all their supporters when they wrote the paper?