No new case for nowt

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

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

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

The very bad economics of independence.

mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/opinion/paul-krugman-scots-what-the-heck.html?smid=tw-share&_r=2&referrer

"I find it mind-boggling that Scotland would consider going down this path after all that has happened in the last few years. If Scottish voters really believe that it’s safe to become a country without a currency, they have been badly misled."


This is terrific too, comprehensively demolishes everything about Yes: Duncan Stephen, why i will be voting No Thanks

What to party for?

The partiers in Glasgow are right emotionally but they miss the point. We all pop our clogs, and unlike many folks, including for reasons of avoidable economic hardship under all governments in the neocon era she started, Thatcher lived to a full age anyone would be well satisfied with. That was a win for her. It is hardly a circumstance of death that there is anything in to celebrate. What's more, she took her leave of us with the huge satisfaction of being surrounded by disability welfare cuts and the media tough-talking us through a major depression, pushing the line that austerity is necessary and still on her side over economics even after the crash of 2008.

They are not pushing the voices who remind us that this is contrary to history and has a history of not working, which we are repeating. They only occasionally get heard buried long into the most serious radio current affairs slots when only the most intelligent and politically caring listeners are still istening, when the audience is lowest. Her death with neocon ideas still ruling and still pushed with a heavy hand by the tabloids, takes away the possibility that she would ever have to answer to the neocon system's end and a full properly complete exposing of all its human costs. That is a loss, not a gain. There would have been value against her ideas in her continued life until the neocon consensus ever ends.

The clear rebuttal to all the hard left voices whose regrets for her survival have gone as far as to sound sympathetic to terrorism, is that if she had been assassinated her ghost and supporters could always claim she would have gone on successfully for as long as she wished and never have fallen. Far better was scored against her ideas by her living to fall as she did at her own party's hands in 1990. Further to which, we all have our safety very ill served by those morally unscrupulous leading media voices who wrongly give the murder of Ian Gow any credit towards Thatcher's fall because they don't want ordinary people in the form of the anti-poll tax campaign to be seen to have achieved anything. Those media voices should be pursued criminally by the powers against encouraging terrorism.

We must not be conned by Salmond to read voting Yes as a vote against the neocon path originating from Thatcher. Without anywhere near enough public attention on it, he is sneaking in a measure against civil liberties that she never did, a charge for criminal defence even when you come out innocent. From his side too comes the tragedy of Thatcher's send off being the whole political class hammering us with money injustices. This measure of justice regression by Macaskill totally takes away the prospect that independence would end that.

At a time of austerity and with new measures against disability benefit starting from the same day as Thatcher died, there will be a public spending of £5 million on her funeral. Some very sensible folks have already pointed out that her biggest fans could afford to pay for this privately and her funeral should be privatised. If it angers you, contrast it not only with the British economic policy but with Macaskill undermining your democratic liberties and securities in pursuit of saving less than the political class routinely accept should be spent on Thatcher's funeral.

decide your statehood from an unpredictable economic forecast

Opinion poll says the country's vote could be swayed entirely by whether folks believe that on average they will be just £500 per year better or worse off in income?

How can such figures possibly be calculated? We live in an era when everyone should have seen that economic forecasts are no more convincing than astrology. Fractional income advantage whould be a shockingly momentary item to decide a country's future on: this vote won't be just like an election that will come round again shortly. But it is natural, and quite Yes Minister, when an opinion pollster asks you in the light of those income figures which way you would vote, that you say the way that sounds better. 61% vote Yes if told the figures are better with independence, but only 21% if told the figures are better off with the union.

It shows the decision is not deeply rooted in national sentiment, either way, and at least the people have got that right. In a time of distrust for political systems, national feeling about homeland should not be converted into feeling for a political state. This should worry the SNP though, there is not much around of the type of deep rooted naive patriotism they want and would make their task easiest. If they respond to that fact by just more of the same message, patriotically trust us, then they deserve the defeat they will risk. If they respond in the way they never yet have, by actually taking on issues about ordinary returners to Scotland from the diaspora, and exposing state dirty tricks like the police lying to returners that their newly bought houses are in a rough area, only then will they show that voters should take any interest in more than just speculative unprovable economic figures.