It's your future innit? Is it?

As was bound to happpen with any voting date announced far in advance with any fixed age limit on the vote, the young, the future, whose mood the Yes campaign want to lift and appeal to, find themselves or their friends excluded from a historic event, life scarringly narrowly, by chance of birth. Even with votes at 16 that is still the case. A case of turning 16 2 days after the now announced polling day of 18 Sep 2014 featured on Radio Scotland's current affairs phone-in this morning.

If you decide fear of ribaldry is what matters most to you, if you decide the knee jerk prejudice of adults with secure lives actually carries the day against including the whole country in this event, then the trauma for the rest of their lives for young Scots who lived through this referendum very narrowly too young to vote in it will also for the rest of history be what you did to the generation whose futures this vote swung. The only way not to do that it to follow the education reformer John Holt's model that each young person taking up voting and joins the register when they personally feel so ready and inclined.

scarred by 10 months and a random bit

An awful lot of 16 year olds are going to feel damagingly betrayed, from the British end not Salmond's, and alienated from politics yet again, as the media now will spend 2 years keeping telling us they have been given the vote. When the great day comes they will find they have still not been after all. For Cameron has forced the trick device only allowing Salmond to use the electoral register complied with the 18 age limit, so that 16 and 10 months and a random bit is the actual age the referendum franchise will be given at.

Unless of course, unless the agreement now gets the fight for a lower voting age won within the next 2 years. We must all try for that.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/votes-at-16-a-seminal-moment-for-scottish-democracy.1350307449

Wallace and foul-it

Jim Wallace says today 2 thoughts rather at odds.

He says, the referendum needs to be decisive, hence fair enough that the losing side can't cry foul. Said he remembers 1979 when the 40% rule was a foul and left the position unsettled. Good, he is right.

Then he says, for clarity we will have the same electorate as for the last Scottish election. Which means, not giving votes at 16. Excluding a population group who have more future life ahead of them to vote on than any of the present voters have. A group whose franchise is supported supposedly by his own party the Lib Dems as well as by the government calling the vote.

That will be a foul and will guarantee that foul is cried whatever the result! We know it's cynical bowing to the Tories. It is also a contradiction, and self defeating for him with his own admission on future record that any foul on fair play means an indecisive unsettled outcome.

tied to one time to win now

So the jostling for position between the 2 governments has forced Salmond now to pin down a date, autumn 2014 with the Commonwealth Games as a springboard, exactly as guessed by the conspiracy theorists. Who are not always wrong, you see.

It may be right, as the more sympathetic radio voices say, that by it he has stolen a headline for a day. So what? One done, he can't steal the headline on any more days with it. Now he is more boxed in than before. He has to make support go his way at one particular time, no longer any time in a 2 1/2 year range. With the polls presently showing a wobble away from Yes, he must spend the next 2 1/2 years trapped worrying about that gamble. It can't be fun. Some prize for his election landslide.

During their nerve wracking wait, the SNP critically should not want to alienate any population group. The way they have pushed around and picked on the young for the last few years, and socially oppressed them by making their access to pubs harder, is noticeable to the youngest voters ongoingly every day of their lives.

That is a potential nemesis for the SNP now. Deservedly so for the SNP, but not for the smaller pro-independence parties to have the SNP blow it for them.

It sits there conflicting with the new position on the young's side that the SNP is now in over the franchise. As a party that supports votes at 16, it is at least doing good now by holding out for that franchise for a vote that will affect even more of that age groups' future lives than for the older voters. But their recent years of youth bashing over pubs and in tabloid law and order rhetoric has a potential to work against them and undermine them over the youth franchise.