indy is not giving Montenegro's folks fair local running of land

Montenegro. Small country in the Balkans, that after a century in bigger unions since WW1, became independent in 2006. Sometimes argued as a precedent for Scotland.

So has indy given its ordinary folks a fair life empowered over what happens to them, keeping it locally suitable? Not judging by this story of a rural community's seasonal grazing pasture nicked for international military use. www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/saving-a-critical-pastureland-in-montenegro/

Decided from the top "with no publicly available environmental, health, or economic impact evaluations, and without any substantial negotiations with the affected pastoral communities, or any apparent respect for their legal rights."

Because power corrupts the same in a union or in a separation.

One hand and the other?

So now this same Alyn Smith will be remembered for his impassioned beg to the European parlt.

It was a good speech, and cautiously all our Remain voters can endorse it. But his case to the EU sits side by side with petition 1448/2014, and it's down to the nats whether they will bring the both into conflict.

To back up Smith's plea, they simply need to make the right choice not again to offer us evil racism against the Scottish diaspora, in their citizenship rules for independence. If they do, it will be a hypocritical contradiction of the anti-racist and inclusive argunent for keeping ties with the EU and will blow that apart. The EU stands cited under ECHR article 8 on family life, to disown a Scottish state as a pariah racist state engaged in ethnic persecution, if it makes citizenship by parental descent refusable.

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.

Divided world shut doors

As anyone on Facebook or following the proliferation of new Yes sites will know well, the loud mass of Yes supporters, their movement, are neither healing the divide nor accepting the outcome as holding for the longer term, at all. All the correct noises that they should do that, made by SNP leaders in the days after the result, have become a lot of hot air. They intend to pester and peer pressure the country non-stop, blame everything that happens on the No vote, and invent accusations of betrayal of the Vow no matter how much new devo we get, and starting before there has been time to do anything.

So we don't have to take any notice? Maybe, but there is a sinister detail their messages are now becoming tauntingly open about. If they can keep pestering the political culture to treat elections every couple of years as votes on indy, and/or if the SNP government continues and finds excuses to hold further referendums within a short time, even illicitly without British agreement, then they are looking for only one win. They intend to get their state by non-stop cultural persistence effecting a culture shift by the immoral means of peer pressure until they can cow the culture into considering the Vow broken even if it has not been, and win a vote that the system will accept. They are totally open - that after this they can take for granted that nobody will listen to any campaign to restore the Union. Indy once done will be perpetual.

This does not make sense, from the unionist point of view. To accept that the union could never be restored puts its defenders at a disadvantage which they don't need to volunteer to accept. It comes from the present post-Imperial world culture, the fragmentation of countries, and from ruthless neocon capitalism's culture that we all leave each other to sink or swim alone and don't help each other. Applying that to countries, it means that in the modern world there is no culture, as there was in 1707, for states to unite.

We have the EU, but it is a sharing, rather than a merging, of aspects of statehood by what remain independent countries. Its biggest problem is the conspiracy theory of a long term plan to be a single state. Hence even its measures towards a citizenship union are now suffering a disastrously inhumane racist reaction against them, that is so distressing to watch.

A nationalist movement which has turned out contemptuous of democracy and based on emotion, mob culture, intolerance, conformism, and able to produce threat feeling, must not have historical odds of winning handed to it on a plate by its opponents. If the world culture of the time has that effect, it must be changed.

Nats are keen on repeating that no country nowadays seeks to give up its independence. The world culture at present does not offer that option. When Bob Geldof backed the Union and the nats cried hypocrite because he is a citizen of independent Ireland, they complained he had not asked for it to rejoin Britain - but has anyone suggested the option exists? He could still historically wish it had not seceded, but see more nationalist trouble in trying to make it culturally possible to reverse that. As part of countries'selfish nastiness and excludingness towards each other's citizens, what the racists want to restore in Europe, states don't want to grow and take on other citizens.

The nats are wrong, in Lesotho landed by the postcolonial world with its awkward statehood inside South Africa, there is the People’s Charter Movement seeking annexation. They see Lesotho's statehood as just making it an economically disadvantaged ghetto, a reserve of vulnerable workers, excluded from citizenship equality in South Africa, who by fair common sense should be the same as all the surrounding peoples and have what they have. So to get it by union, by joining South Africa. But South Africa does not want to take them, cynically they would be an extra load of citizens to have to treat more fairly than now.

The nats are wrong to claim that no ex-British country has ever wanted to give up its independence - Newfoundland 1933, also for economic reasons. But see how long ago that was, it was before the present postcolonial culture. The concept was still allowed then. Zanzibar, in a not quite democratic way but that's the same as 1707, was able within the postcolonial culture to opt out of statehood and form a union with Tanganyika in 1964, Tan-zan-ia.

Contrary to the barriers between states that the nats are relying on, in my submissions at both Brit and Scot level to the devolution consultations I am proposing again what I did in the endgame, of the referendum - a full CITIZENSHIP UNION of as much of the free world as will join it. At minimum including the 3 countries that asked us to vote no but are ex-British themselves, they need to do it to make their position to us sensible and not contradictory. A citizenship union does not take away any participating country's independence, it does not require a union of government, it is simply a step in recognition of the humanitarian common sense of global culture and dispersed families and friends. It is simply an agreement between countries that all of each other's citizens are their own citizens too, and to no longer have citizenship exist of any one of them singly but only of their whole union.

within 3 days of losing they rewrite the rules

Referendums are part of our constitution for any change in the governing system big enough to be a constitutional change. That has been well established since the 90s, since the present post-Thatcher wave of constitutional reform got going - but the precedent's establishing can be traced back to the first EU referendum in 1975. For which Tony Benn, though his side lost that vote, was credited with adding referendums to our constitution.

3 days after losing this referendum, Salmond and Sillars are talking of dropping the need to have one, and considering an election win for pro-indy parties in 2016 to establish secession on its own. No longer want to have to hold a referendum after the experience of losing this one.

It is neither legal to declare UDI, nor constitutional to do it only 20 months after losing a referendum. If they actually do this, the population of Scotland will be put in a civil war type dilemma between which state to hold is legit here and to affiliate to. Will we end up like Cyprus with populations fleeing to either side of a green wall or getting trapped in a rogue state against their will with loss of international rights?

To suddenly write of such prospects evokes disbelief in peaceful familiar Britain - so remember nobody imagined the Northern Ireland troubles before they slipped into them very quickly. We have lived through exceptional days of constitutional instability recently and now we have 20 months' notice to take a position on the rights and wrongs of ref losers announcing a unilateral constitutional change abolishing what they lost only 3 days after they lost it. This is getting mad. This is not a democratic movement this is getting ever more fanatical on the tide of mob emotion they stirred up. As the dream falls from their hands, they clutch out after it.

www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/salmond-we-don-t-need-referendum-for-independence-1-3548270
www.express.co.uk/news/uk/513637/Salmond-s-plan-for-indy-coup-as-he-claims-independence-possible-without-new-poll?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daily-express-uk-news+(Daily+Express+%3A%3A+UK+Feed)

Trust it to be Sillars, the most extreme and racist of the leading nat voices, the same one as made that threat against No-voting businessfolks before the poll. That they lost, by a bigger margin than the polls had said, indicating there was a shy No's effect or a drawing back from the brink like in Quebec, was a morally great statement for democracy against intimidation and peer pressure. Long to be commemorated.

Never again, "for at least a generation", will voting SNP feel like a normal party choice. From now on it will be a vote for the intimidatory movement who frightened the country out of putting "No" posters in their windows then who began hunting for ways round democracy within 3 days after they lost.

Britain has clear notice of the nats' ravings, anyway. 20 months to prevent an illegal civil rebellion and a drift into violent troubles.

"Alex Salmond lost. It is not for him to try to overthrow the will of the Scottish people in some sort of coup." - Johann Lamont

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

oh but how negative.

Interesting discovery from Tariq Ali's meeting in Kirkcaldy yesterday. In 1995 Bermuda voted No to independence.

It still has a colonial status, not a full inclusion in Britain including voting for its government as Scotland has. Indy is still unpopular there. The reason why - is visa rights into the EU.

Creating new barriers would mean new barriers to their own movement in this racially carved up divided world. It would put a barrier between them and a freedom it strongly matters to them to have, of access to other places. Much the same reason, borders and barriers, as for voting No here.

Yet the cybernats often say no other country has ever voted no and oh it would be pathetic and negative. No! it would be caring about inclusion and access across open borders, sensible and progressive.

I hope this answers your query

Never stronger time to feel furious as a voter than when pointedly told that the MSP hopes a quite long full reply answers you, and of course it does not. Because amid the effusion of other details making the reply look fulsome and worked on, your actual question has not been answered. That is spivvy. It must never slip past your notice.

Nowhere does the following reply from Colin Keir, SNP, say that qualifying applications for citizenship by descent WILL NOT BE REFUSABLE. NOWHERE. So you would have to be easily led to be shifted from voting No by this reply:

" You ask specifically about the matter of citizenship and seem to be, rightly in my view, concerned about the impact on immigration and citizenship of the UKIP agenda being followed by the Westminster focussed parties. As an SNP MSP I support an inclusive Scotland that as an independent nation will seek to welcome those who want to come to Scotland to contribute and be part of our society. As a country with an aging population Scotland needs to attract working age people to become citizens and contribute to the national economy. Therefore the Scottish Government proposes the following should the electorate vote for Independence in September,

An inclusive model of citizenship – current British Citizens habitually resident in Scotland will be considered Scottish citizens; others, following independence, can apply on grounds of descent if they have a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship; those with a demonstrable connection to Scotland through living here for at least 10 years; migrants on qualifying visas will have the option of applying for naturalisation as a Scottish citizen. The Scottish Government will accept dual citizenship; indeed this is common in the current situation with many people throughout Scotland and the rest of the UK holding dual citizenship. There will still be the situation where nationals of other countries come to Scotland and do not take out citizenship here as is the case at present they will be covered by visas and treaties allowing them to live and work here.

I hope that this reply answers your query. "

As regards my effort to extract an answer about unrefusable citizenship through the campaign registering system, he has defined the system to avoid that. Though the question was about campaigning for a No vote unless a change on the citizenship position happens:

"Campaign groups will define where they sit in the debate (Yes or No) based on their desired referendum outcome. While there may be policy differences within the various groups that make up either side they will have chosen to support Yes or No as their preferred future for Scotland. If an organisation is not campaigning straightforwardly for a Yes or No vote I would not expect them to have to register with the Electoral Commission. For instance there will be a number of organisations that have views on the matters raised and will take part in discussions and debates but will not campaign for one side or the other."

CONFIRMED, OUR NATS ARE BETRAYING OUR DIASPORA.

RECEIVED THIS MORNING FROM NICKOLA PAUL, POLICY OFFICER FOR MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP:

Dear Mr Frank,

Thank you for your response of 9 May.

As you reiterate, citizenship by descent would also be available to those with a parent or grandparent who qualifies for Scottish citizenship. This will require the individual to supply evidence to substantiate their relation. Legislation would be made to establish detailed rules for Scottish citizenship in time for independence including both the evidence required and any discretionary elements. 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.

Kind regards,
Nickola Paul

OBVIOUSLY THIS MEANS VOTE NO. That could only change if the position got overturned as a result of being exposed, and it has taken this long since the White Paper even to extract it so clearly.

It took 2 mailings to them, linked to an enquiry to the electoral commission about registering rules, to get this, on a question I have pursued ever since the White Paper came out and never yet extracted this clear admission of what evasive answers had always indicated. They are refusing to make any commitment before the vote, that the Scottish offspring who were born in rUK to parents who moved there, and who are still there after independence day, can be sure of their citizenship. Hence, if common travel areas break down, sure of being allowed their natural right to live in their own country, as they are now under the union, which is not romanticism it is a humanitarian life practicality about dividing families.

A Labour broadcast in the 1999 election warned of this and was very effective. To choose not to learn from that, the nats must have some very sick forces they want to keep happy. has not learned from and happening again. This confirms our nats are xenophobically betraying the diaspora and prospectively dividing many families. This is an anti-outsider community hate politics worse than UKIP, it would be a new Clearances. Its timing is an ideal unionist answer to, and totally trumps, any scares about UKIP that the SNP still try on despite the election result's humiliation of their claim that we were immune to UKIP and splendidly different to England.

Why are journalists Lesley Riddoch and Iain Macwhirter still both Yes supporters, when they were both born in England so it is the Scots exactly like themselves whose racist betrayal they are now confirmed to be supporting?

Only a week ago, at Tom Devine's lecture at Glasgow university, I got in my question about betrayal of the diaspora and put it into the awareness of a big thinking audience many of whose own families stand to be divided by hate. Yet in the informal time after it, an inane smarmily smiling Yes supporter who works for Academics for Yes was introduced to me by one of those academics, who I know - and out of the blue he started banging on at me about the voting franchise, an issue I had never mentioned, and all about how "very progressive" the Yes side is to base that on residence. This was a severe example of a brainwashed fixed mind not listening. There was some time ago a diaspora-related controversy around the franchise, so just on hearing the word diaspora he had jumped top assuming that my question, which he had clearly not listened to, was about that, the question he was familiar with, instead of the very different question it actually was !!! What a dismal prospect of human stupidity at a time of humanitarian crisis against hate and division, in Scotland's life as much as in Europe's.

Yeah - and?

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

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

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

twin dilemma

A Better Together paper just came through my door, a lot of its content over several pages focused on British overlapping feelings of nationhood. It's good that after the White Paper they are seeing a chance to force the campaign's emotive level to start focusing more on that question. Among all the to and fro claims about economics there had seemed a risk of both sides slipping past us the due focus on this basic fairness question of making sure you get to belong to your own home. With the Yes side being slippery and spivvy on the issue, will it take the No side's pressure to make them address it more properly?

But will voters notice how selective the No side is being? They mention a lot about how many folks in the British countries are from each other's country. They select to mention nothing at all of the same about EU countries - when exactly the same arguments apply to them.

They feature a Scottish father who was born in exile with a family with a multiplicity of births, and they quote figures for how many folks in Scotland were born in the rest of Britain and vice versa. But this statistic is misleading, if you are a Scot who was born in the rest of Britain there is every good chance you disliked your exile and are pleased to be home, it does not make you necessarily want to keep the Union at all. Only if there is a weakness on the Yes side here, only if there are enough holes in their citizenship policy to cause there to be any exiles whose return to Scotland independence could make harder and any less of an automatic right, should this No argument have any effect. At present, after the shambles of the White Paper contradicting itself on citzenship and being full of gobbledygook about forbears and where they lived on independence day and its unclairty on where to deem thast they would have resided if they had not died, the Yes side is choosing unecessarily to be weak enough on this issue to constitute a betrayal of Scottish history, and deserves to have the No side attack on this. But our EU citizen residents don't deserve to be put in more danger, by it, of right wing British nationalism turning on them after Scotland fails to vote itself out of that process.

They feature a family with twins born on each side of the border because of the circumstances when the mother's labour began during as journey. It's an excellent case study against birthplace racism, the evil of all bigots who would deem these twins to belong to different countries if they don't personally identify so. It's morally right that it should turn anyone against loopholes in the citizenship policies, on both sides. But what is the No side's answer to the case, you could have just as easily, of twins born one in Britain one across the Channel? Do they agree with their own argument's implication that we should not vote to belong to a country that leaves the EU in an ugly mood of nationalist racism?

A Scot trapped in exile by a hideous citizenship injustice.

The following page citsee.eu/citsee-story/scottish-citizenship-now-time-start-discussing-it is a link to said professor Jo Shaw's academic questions and thoughts on citizenship, as mentioned last post. But what matters far more than that inconclusive article, is to be found in the comments posted below it.

A commenter named "WithoutHeritage" has posted -

THAT DESPITE BEING FROM GLASGOW THEY ARE EXCLUDED FROM BRITISH CITIZENSHIP AND HENCE FROM LIVING IN SCOTLAND, BY REASON OF A CHANGE TO CITIZENSHIP RULES THE YEAR BEFORE THEY WERE BORN.

"I can not explain to you how saddening this is. I have struggled with this issue all my life. I loved the land deeply and felt it is where I came to be." "I tried every legal way possible to claim citizenship. I tried using my parents old passports and entry dates( they are not citizens). "

This is an ethnic atrocity. IT IS HORRIBLE.

WHAT ARE BOTH SIDES OFFERING TO DO ABOUT IT? This person, stuck living in the US, supports independence in expectation that it's the Yes side who will take any interest in this. The question is there for both sides.

one of the heard

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

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

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

Be part of silly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallout of fall

Look to the autumn for the ref's biggest question. We know that now from the Scotland On Sunday. It has told us that is when a white paper is coming on the post-independence policy for citizenship. Whether a Scottish state will be there for our people's diaspora, the descendants of a deportation atrocity whose presence out in diaspora is a past wrong's present result.

This has not yet featured enough in the campaign, because they say, rightly it feels, the Yes side's reading of public mood on it it uncertain. But there is ethnic justice in this, for a wronged dispersed people. Scots living at home are a minority of under 20% of our whole people, so their public mood is not entitled to reject most of their own kin from their own land. Which way our state's founders want to be remembered in history on this, particularly in every place where the diaspora still suffer in present pain from a past wrong, swings more strongly than any other item whether it is right to vote for our state at all.

There remains plenty of time and prospect for campaign scrutiny to turn onto this.

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.

Explain why don't we have to get out to stay in?

Tony Blair today says independence is bad for the same reasons as leaving the EU is bad. Cutting ourselves off into a small bubble instead of being cushioned by belonging to a bigger whole in an era when economics works on the big scale. Okay, follow his own reasoning?

What happens in the event that Britain chooses not to listen to him and continues its anti-EU drift that has so swiftly accelerated to such a serious scale that nobody expected. We will see Britain heading for the separatist choice, and largely for racist reasons that will make it a very ugly scenario for many of our continental friends who live here and have important places in our lives. Already it includes right wing moves against the principle of human rights. Then exactly in order to choose against separation we would have to choose to separate from Britain. In order to follow Blair's advice on the EU and stay in that European bigger whole, we would have to leave the British bigger whole, so as not to be included in its leaving of the EU?

With the 2 decisions forced on us in the wrong order, the Scottish decisison happening before the British EU decisison and not informed by its result but forced to gamble on what it will be, won't it be a safer way of following Blair's own reasoning that we separate from Britain for fear of it separating from Europe, and we seize on the support of figures like Blair for the desirability of not shrinking the EU, to use in fighting our way back into it if we get the accession problems the unionists are having us threatened with? Blair obviously would not say it was bad that smaller countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, separated out from the former bigger unions of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, and have joined the bigger EU instead contributing to its expansion, before it was possible for them to bring the whole of the unions they left into the EU. Scotland will be in exactly the same moral position if we buck a very nastily anti-democratic swing to Euro-hate by Britain.

This surely is the only really strong argument the Yes side can use to climb out of the hole the SNP's secret economic nerves have put them in, also today! It means being strong on human rights to differentiate from, and to raise clear alarm against, the way England is turning. But that will only work if it overturns the SNP's own eagerness to attack human rights arm in arm with the Tories, if the Yes side disown and cease to be burdened by Macaskill making you pay for a court defence when charged with a crime. Otherwise, being part of big or small wholes ain't what it's about at all. Survival of free society and getting out of the hole that both sides at once have thrown our civil liberties into, will be the primary item to vote on.

Safe in whose hands?

We may be driven to independence no matter how badly the SNP treats us in the process and hushes up ordinary people's unrecognised needs from getting heard in the Yes campaign or in the published contributions to its consultations. As Sturgeon is now well saying, and she is onto something, we may need to escape from belonging to Britain and become a place of refuge for the fair minded English too, as English politics swings further to the right than has been possible in the human rights era.

Today the Mail On Sunday claims an anti-European campaign success as it reports an apparent Tory policy pledge by Theresa May to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

An illegal obstruction of justice will be committed, and widely witnessed, BY HUMAN RIGHTS' SUPPORTERS AND DEFENDERS !!! - mark that !!! - if they let a leaving of the convention happen without exposing and publicising the court change.

Thanks to the court change, there is open ended non-final court case content in both Scottish and English law. As that open ended case content will always be there, it is irreversible. So the court change itself is an irreversible progressive advance in liberty. Britain was one of the Convention member countries brought under the court change when European Court of Human Rights case 41597/98 brought the court change into existence, in 1999. So originally it was because we belong to the Convention that we got the court change. But BECAUSE THE COURT CHANGE IS IRREVERSIBLE, BECAUSE OPEN ENDED NON-FINAL CASE CONTENT STAYS IN OUR LEGAL SYSTEMS NOW IT IS THERE, WE WILL NOT LOSE THE COURT CHANGE IF WE LEAVE ECHR.

The court change will still exist and it may be our only barrier to the social repressions and danger to democracy that would follow leaving the Convention and would ride on any political current capable of leaving the Convention.

All progressives now contemplate the blood you can anticipate will be on your hands unless you now get off the fence and directly committally acknowledge on open record that the court change is there and needs to be used.

die of debate

According to the Sunday Herald's last front page, reckless new workfare rules for disability/sickness benefits are going to cause a lot of health damage from pushing folks into unsuitable placements they can't cope with. This comes from the British end, under whose powers the welfare system still rests. The Yes campaign will say this is a good humanitarian reason to leave Britain. Become a state where both major parties are progressive, "no more Tory governments" as had been on the SSP's Yes voting posters in Edinburgh.

But look at the independence timetable. It is actually longer than the British government's term, Salmond the reluctant seceder will take until 2016!! to actually do it. Clinging to every crumb he can on Britain's table. All this suffering will still happen while we are still waiting.

Oh but me must have a good long debate. So if folks die under pushing around by the benefits system and Atos, under 3 1/2 years of us still subject to this new system, they die to give us something to debate, do they?

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.