to revoke article 50 is the least gamble

British govt is at crisis point of having its hands tied by parliament against the exact thing it most wants to do. But will there turn out to be any point to it? For yet another EU extension is refusable, a danger that the Benn law does not deal with, + France's President Macron is already talking of refusing it. It was he who made the present extension shorter than the rest of the EU intended to make it. IT WOULD BE LESS OF A GAMBLE TO REVOKE ARTICLE 50, AND WE HAVE REACHED A POINT WHERE IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY DEMOCRATIC TOO.

We have never yet had a 3-way referendum, + our first will inevitably be beset by claims not to understand the process, encouraged by those who don't think it will go their way. It would have to be by the AV system itself defeated in a now-forgotten ref in 2011, the Tories won't agree to that, or else it could fail to produce a majority, fatal if its purpose is to resolve a deadlock !

To have a 2-way ref, you need to have a Leave option to offer in it, that the Leavers agree represents them, is not a robbery of their true position, + is fit for them to enact if it wins. There is none !

The Leavers were robbed by their own side, the ambiguity it pulled to hold itself together. For some Leavers only leaving with a deal was acceptable and they promised so in their campaign. For others only leaving with no deal was acceptable, now the Brexit Party's position: they avoided that in the campaign but have taken the Leave win as grounds to change the goalposts to that harder position. Both those camps within the Brexit movement hoped + gambled that winning a vote just for the principle called Leave should then let their camp prevail as the true form of Leave supported by reason.

That has not happened, the 2 camps are strong enough on their view of true Leave to fight each other + show that there is are actually majority feelings, national and parliamentary, against each camp. The majority consists of: the other Leave camp's purists + the Remainers. No dtheorists + debaters of referendums ever guessed such a Gordian knot. That a ref would be won for the principle of a step, offered in a papered-over alliance of 2 versions mutually unacceptable to enough of each other's supporters to make majorities against enacting either of them !

Hence it is perfectly democratic to revoke A50 until the Leavers sort that out or holdability of a 3-way ref gets sorted out. It's also less of a gamble to do this than go for either a ref or an extension request which Macron is already talking of refusing. Remainers, handed the chance of a legitimate default victory by the Leavers' divided positions, could still blow it + lose by similar division on the rightness + electoral daringness of revoking A50.

Once in a generation

Eck: Nah nah nah, it's only once in a generation, guv, innit? That's how historic the decision is, folks. Just once, like. There won't be another.

He no longer has any credence to accuse Britain of breaking the vow, as the nats are wilfully contriving to accuse over hastily when there hasn't yet been time to take extra powers through parliament since the election. Everyone knows, and will know, that he and the SNP have broken their word, clear and stark, and have always planned to.

Who is signing up?

20% of us are called "the persuadables". Because we have not said firmly yes or no, it is open to the SNP to convert us if they say the right things.

Consider what your own self regard as a thinking voter means. It must not take just a hip sounding campaign to win you over, where what is said remains within the crappy bounds of what campaigns always say. To win you over must take committal definite answers to every issue you want to raise. It must take a participative enough form of campaign to show you you have the means to actually extract those answers. It must be the opposite of a controlled filtered respectable message. It must be the opposite of what the SNP did when they said they would not put all the responses to their first consultation onto public record. They showed then a closed up filtering of their message. To watch and point out its continuation was the point of starting this blog.

• Until that filtering has stopped,
• until they do take a definite absolute position in favour of an immigration right to the Scottish diaspora descended from any number of generations returning here from anywhere in the world,
• until they do take a definite absolute position on the specific story of police lying to newly returned diaspora that their newly bought home is in a rough area,

I shall not be attracted from the ranks of the persuadables to sign Salmond's gimmicky people's declaration "saying Yes to an independent Scotland".

Among the signatories you can see today in the Sunday Herald is John McAllion, SSP and formerly Labour when he chaired the petitions committee in the 1999 parliament. As chair of the petitions committee he openly broke parliament's rules at the time by excluding a petition from the agenda and the record, for calling for a restriction on the committee's powers. "I have discussed this with the committee chairman, who is not inclined to include the petition on the agenda for a committee meeting." This was an act of corrupting the rules and dishonest record within parliament's first few months of existence. By the ever so neat rule that such breaches have to be challenged through an MSP and no MSP would pursue it, this dishonest act of class power was allowed to happen within parliament's first few months of existence. Unless Salmond answers this, how well does that bode for the new state whose creation McAllion now signs for? Also there is Margo Macdonald, who has a public writing platform herself as a newspaper columnist yet who was one of the MSPs who declined to act against McAllion on grounds that she agreed with the committee's view against petitioning for things to be published. Against public platform for any facts and info that are outside the already existing class filtered approved view of reality.

Then in 2004 on an SSP platform for their now forgotten declaration of Calton Hill", McAllion called the world's longest running one party state, Castro's Cuba, "a worker's democracy". You notice how it was a hard lefty, an apologist for communism, who committed an act of class power for MSPs to control and filter what content is heard in politics and what issues popularly recognised to exist?