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.

Yes to save the Union

Vote Yes to be sure we will stay in the EU. So the Sunday Herald and Nicola Sturgeon portrayed it.

That is how it may well turn out, but they are being too sure too hastily. Spain's capacity for wrecking vetoes in the EU remains. Reasonability is never to be relied on. Nor is "oh but you want all our luvly oil."

If England drifts as clearly anti-EU as the tabloids there are now trying to take it, which will be a sinisterly deliberate drift to racism in our politics like we are supposed to believe can only happen in Germany or South Africa, then even with the concerns of wrecking by Spain it will still be a better choice to take the pro-EU path of voting Yes. The referendum would then be a choice between 2 ways of having our EU membership interrupted, and Yes would be the choice that says we want it back. But it won't wash without specific answers from the Yes side explaining how we could trust our new state, explaining how they can bind it ahead now, to keep upholding the EU citizenship we already have and the secure place here of all our European friends who have come to live here. e.g. I have been greatly helped in some medical work by a Polish friend who came here without the type of already lined up employment that racists would demand, and who now has employment doing key good in the field concerned. Whether we end up back in the EU or in a Norway position in both EFTA and Schengen, just as good because it keeps the European open borders, we need to know what safeguards that no racism will be pandered to during the long haul.

It is being talked up that the British major parties will all come behind a EU referendum for 2015/6. That deprives Scotland of a properly informed decision in its own vote. It is happening the wrong way round, and no journalists yet are challenging that. But by becoming better at dialogue with voters than they have been, the Yes side have an opportunity to show they will be the safest choice. Only if they take said opportunity will they be the safest choice.

the nat clearances?

The long term Nat maverick Jim Sillars who finds the SNP totalitarian, and their former leader Anti-Gay Gordon, now want us to leave the EU. In the wake of Salmond's mess up of the Scottish EU membership issue and doubt, they have jumped on the same Euro-angry bandwagon as the British right wing and tabloids.

This when the sudden mushrooming to seriousness of a chance of Britain leaving the EU had become the strongest looking reason for voting for independence. Instead the contagion has spread to both sides. That is bandwagons among the political class for you.

How do they expect our European friends and guests, living here and playing a welcome and often major role in many of our lives, to feel safe? Anti-EU voices on both sides need to be challenged to clarify what they intend for the future of EU citizens living here. The obvious fear is of a new clearance, a mass expulsion from the country of people who are friends or workers with real lives intertwined with ours. Thanks to Sillars and Wilson the question now exists against both sides. Before, it was a question for the No side. Salmond too, who you have noticed never clashes with the tabloid racist vote, should have made clear that our friends can stay here if our EU membership is interrupted. Pandering to the British tabloid consensus against Schengen in a way that is absurd for a movement to separate from the country where that nasty consensus is strongly rooted, neither has he ever touched the option of joining Schengen even from outside the EU, like Norway and Iceland and Switzerland. That would secure our friends here. Would Spain veto that too? Even if it would, it is right to propose the option and put Spain under an isolated pressure on the issue.

Both sides, tell us our friends are safe. Otherwise, the referendum will be like poker! We are not informed enough on both futures if we don't know what the EU membership outcome will be with either of them. That is why we fairly need any voting on the EU to be done before on independence. But it won't be, neither side is offering to do it that way round. What a spiral. Sillars and Gordon have said vote on the EU after a win for independence. No, we need to already know what our own decision is on whether we would be in the EU before we can vote for our own state in the first place.