This blog is a response to the SNP not making public all of the submissions it received to its (FIRST! in 2010) consultation on an independence referendum. The second earliest post here is a submission Salmond dug in not to make public. Why? Hiding which of its contents? Is it because they want to run away from acknowledging the court change? Is it because they want to avoid taking account of the issue of return of the diaspora and how some returners to Scotland have been treated by the state?
Wednesday, 4 January 2023
lying about rape definitively provenly exists
Thursday, 18 March 2021
way to go abolishing juries, for observing ECHR and qualifying for EU
The last possible way for the SNP govt to convimce anyone they want Scotland to be a progressive EU member complying with human rights, ECHR being part of EU law, is to abolish juries. Let alone, to do it exactly when it looks like done in reaction to not liking what a jury did, not getting it to do the dirty against Salmond.
"PLANS FOR RAPE SUSPECTS IN SCOTLAND TO FACE TRIAL WITHOUT JURY" - Times headline, Mar 18. (Times links are paywalled but the headline suffices,) Plans to put half the population under politically abusable arbitrary authority including in deciding serious crime guilt on one word against another. That is exactly the type of arbitrary authority culture that Salmond said in the recent scandal hearings, makes Scotland's polity not ready for independence.
In reaction to him saying that: instead of moving to fix it they are escalating, militantly making it much worse. Abolishing the safeguard that cleared Salmond's name, and straight after it did. Openly going for the arbitrary judicial authority that could have been used to jail him at plotters' convenience and for a discriminatory reign of terror against men with guilt in accusation, and decided on by one person who will be part of the state's political elite.
Too many keen to buy indy as the new standard lefties' dream, have chosen to forget how the SNP govt attempted, at the pandemic's start a year ago, to abolish jury trials for its duration. Now it clearly hopes for the PC gender prejudice around this area of crime to override the concern that reasoning voters should have: for jury trials and presumption of innocence, and for how it is never safe to take just conflicting words, one or several against another, as evidence of guilt. Evidence is measurable verifiable facts. Competing words never are that.
Thursday, 2 April 2020
the jury is in
The SNP govt wanted, during the present state of emergency, to abolish juries. No attempt to do that has happened in Englandandwales, where jury trials are simply postponed for the duration. Mercifully, within a day they were stopped by all the Unionist parties: and okay, as the Unionists are not in a majority, also by the opposition of law professionals from their own ranks.
Human rights here have just passed through a breathtaking moment of emergency, and who from? From the reputed progressives who have told us for years they want to give us a nice more progressive state of our own, and campaigned against Brexit's likely rollback of ECHR-associated human rights safeguards. The independence movement's entire claim that Scottish governments and state would be innately more progressive and fairer, now stands smashed by this. This will always be there as a fact of history in the debate.
Notice it follows within days the MeToo extreme feminists' oopenly disliking that a woman-majority jury found Alex Salmond innocent. This has rightly split the nats into a bad fight on Facebook and in the National, where both the loyalists who saw politicality in the whole trial, and the scrupulous over the vital human right to presumption of innocence, have seen through the evil raving believe-what-we-want injustice of the radical feminists and their witch-hunt of men.
The Crossgate Centre on Mar 24 displayed on Facebook a reply to that character of radical feminists, that they well deserved, and deserve everyone to contemplate:
《 This tweet from Rhiannon Spear, the SNP National Women's Convener, in response to the Alex Salmond verdict yesterday is absolutely appalling, and has drawn a well-deserved backlash from SNP members and the wider Yes movement on Twitter. Her contempt for the principle of presumption of innocence, juducial due process, and not least the jury, 9 of whom, the majority, were women - makes her unfit for office.
Never mind respecting entitlement to presumption of innocence, clowns like you can't even respect a verdict from a female-majority jury if it goes in the accused's favour. You epitomise the entryism piggy-backing on & destroying an SNP where it is because of indy supporters. The tweet itself, Mar 23, and its reactions, are here.