Showing posts with label petitions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label petitions. Show all posts

Wednesday, 9 July 2014

yes there will be Tory governments under indy!

I went to Common Weal's big day in Glasgow. I was interested to observe where it is heading as a prospect for growing participative democracy, which will be good after a No vote too, but Common Weal is so selective about its content, to fit it to its predecided left wing vision, that it's doubtful it will contribute meaningfully to making democracy more participative, it will just be a lobby for its own point of view. Indeed, another reason for going was, in their too short discussion sessions from which no notes were taken so what will they achieve? to challenge Common Weal's non-use of an item I contributed about our parliament closing ranks to silence an item about pressure in education that I petitioned about, PE5.

As non-SNP lefties they are naturally conscious that the SNP is clearly neocon on corporation tax and selling out Menie to Trump. In the end session on post-Yes prospects, they predicted the SNP will be keen to swing rightwards quickly under international pressure, that the change will be a crisis for both our major parties to adapt to, and that already planned by Murdo Fraser, with a change of name a centre-right party will revive and find a space for its ideas.

This means something big and revealing. It means - lefty Yessers themselves don't think there will be no more Tory governments. The argument of no more Tory governments can have a bit of a moral pull, it can be a wrench to drop that prospect as you see how spivvily unpromissory the SNP's plans are and just as neocon as the British consensus they knock. It is a great relief, and further step in clinching the case for voting No, that the audience at Common Weal heard lefty Yessers themselves totally bury that argument of no more Tory governments. They are totally alert to and expecting every likelihood of an early Tory challenge.

No supporters both left and right retell this story when talking to anyone who has been tempted towards Yes by that argument. It is now demolished! Gone!! Another No supporter has shared with me the telling point that in the 2010 election the Tories got 416 000 votes in Scotland and the SNP got circa 480 000, similar figures!

Friday, 27 June 2014

A PETITION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

Submitted Jun 23. Accompanied by letters to 2 offices of the European Commission because they are responsible to have a position too.

TO WITHHOLD ACCEPTANCE OF LEGITIMACY FROM AN INDEPENDENT SCOTLAND UNLESS THE REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN MADE MOST VOTERS AWARE OF A CITIZENSHIP QUESTION AFFECTING FREE MOVEMENT: AND TO PUBLICISE THIS BEFORE THE POLL.

A petition on the EU's dealings with an independent Scotland if one results from the present referendum.

To urge that the EU and its institutions should not recognise the referendum as legitimately mandating and fairly conducted, and should deal with a new Scottish state on that basis in all its relations with it, if a question on citizenship does not receive a scale of media coverage in the referendum campaign so as to make overwhelmingly most voters aware that the question exists. This question is: whether applications for Scottish citizenship by descent, through a parent or grandparent, with the descent evidenced in any way at all, will or will not be refusable.

This has a bearing on the principle of free movement which is a defining concern of the EU. It could affect who is allowed to live here if united travel areas break down, and entitlement to public services. To make citizenship through a parent refusable appears inhumanely to breach ECHR article 8 on family life, by its potential to divide close family members in these ways.

Persons who have moved from Scotland within either the EU or UK did not anticipate such a threat to their offspring's citizenship position. It would be a bad precedent for the EU, conflicting with its nature as a union, to accept silently this occurring in any country.

It is an unfair distortion of national self-determination for voters to be unaware and uninformed that they are voting to remove the absolute unrefusable entitlement to residence here and citizenship, from their own or other families and a part of their society. Voters led to assume that no such prospect can exist, because their media select to be oblivious to it and the campaigns on both sides select not to address it, have not mandated it. They have not mandated the whole choice on statehood that includes it.

To date, this is the situation. The following supporting information evidences so, and that a position from the EU on its dealings and relations with Scotland, taken before the poll, could compel there to be sufficient scale publicising of the question to avert an illegitimately uninformed vote and the EU's difficulty of relating to a state created by that.

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

18 = out of country, separation from family, suddenly sent alone to where you have no life basis.

PETITION:www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/the-rt-hon-theresa-may-mp-home-secretary-fightforyashika-stop-this-sixth-form-student-being-deported-alone-she-deserves-a-future#share

Due to be deported from Britain, arbitrarily, and alone without her family, just for turning 18. That is how civilised we aren't.


Yashika arrived in the UK along with her mother and brother in 2012 to escape abuse and danger. In that time, Yashika has proved herself a model student of Oasis Academy Hadley and valuable member of the Enfield community. Simply because she is now over 18 she is to be torn apart from her family in the UK and deported to Mauritius without even having the chance to finish an educational course.

Yashika Bageerathi is being held at Yarl’s Wood detention centre. She has been told she will be imminently deported alone to a country where she has neither friends nor family.

This is against Article 8 of the Human Rights Act (respect for private and family life). That she has technically become an adult does not mean there is anything fair or just about tearing her away from her mother and siblings.

When Britain is in this condition it is a particularly high level of betrayal for Scottish nationalism to be in the condition described in the previous post.

Wednesday, 12 March 2014

nails and moustaches go with kilts.

A petition is circulating, on the Change site, https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/david-dinsmore-take-the-bare-boobs-out-of-the-sun-nomorepage3?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=51216&alert_id=YYbkkucFse_FJINYhHrdP to get rid of Page 3 as degrading to women. Quite right but always right not to overlook any gender inequlity. So I signed it as follows:

As part of eradicating all gender specific costume. This goes with having gender equality about breasts' actual decency, banning skirts as indecent if society is not going to find them decent for men - but kilts would stay, their double layering gives an extra decency protection - and banning as a gender hate crime all ribaldry towards painted nails for men and moustaches for women. Hoping the petitioners agree, ask them.

Sunday, 27 May 2012

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?

Monday, 8 August 2011

media snobbery

The media should be treading warily of disgusting us, lately. How much deeper disgust can there be than when a columnist, with a public platform herself, uses it to write blatantly against public platforms for everyone, for you. Rarely as they as blatant as Joan Smith was in the Independent yesterday, in what is supposed to be a progressive paper, in directly arguing that free speech is bad for us and leaving all the thinking to a nasty elite is better.

The new e-petitions site at British government level catches up with a modernity we already have years of experience of at Scottish level as part of the reform push that came with devolution. Smith paints both the whole e-petition idea, and blogging and all political debate online, as actual perpetrations of bullying and prejudice. She openly blatantly suggests, using her own free speech and public platform, that it proves free speech in a public arena is not good for us and only our nobly responsible political class should be trusted with public voices. Knowing this gagging will not happen to herself, and knowing she already has more platform to attack our liberties than we have to defend them.

Her point comes from how much oppressive and far right sympathy there is among the e-petitions, reminding more intellectual readers of Independent columns miserably what the barbarians at the gate believe in and are petitioning for. Capital punishment, bread and water in prison, anti-immigration, repealing the Human Rights Act. Even leaving the EU is naughtily listed and made to sound as bad as those other items are. I'm pro-EU but that was a mischievous spin to constrict what her readers can feel allowed to think.

It should be agreed that it would be dangerous to have a system where just public support for a measure actually enforced its passing into law, the uncurbed form of "citizen's initiative and referendum", INIREF, as in Switzerland. The government should be entitled to give as human rights defence against enacting any measure that violates human rights, no matter how majority supported it is. But that is the safeguard needed, concerning what is actually enacted - not to suppress what is debated. INIREF should be used to guarantee the claims to enact any issue a hearing on their merits. so that things are aired and not hidden, but with a human rights safeguard to block the actual enactment of evil measures, alike whether it is people or government who want them.

What Miss Nursemaid here is not explaining, is how a petitioning system that gives ideas a hearing can result in having to implement them. There is a total difference between folks saying they want racist and far right measures, and having the means to make them happen. Also she is reading actual social persecution into the presence of any bad ideas among the petitions at all, despite the presence of at least as many and more petitions that are progressive. As other media have identified, a petition against capital punishment has more signatures than the for. She is reacting to the existence of any petitions like that at all, not to the absence of any more decent ones. She says not a word about where the folks behind the nicer petitions are supposed to get noticed instead.

So what is this threat Smith asks us to feel? She is just expressing snobbery that voice for real people is so uncouth don't you know, and so beneath our natural leaders' noses. Bloggers and online debaters are all knee-jerk anger, journalists reflect more on what they write than bloggers, she ludicrously writes right in the face of all the recent events. If any perspective is knee-jerk oppressive from lack of reflection, that is. Who is her own writing accountable to for its reflectiveness? Does this Edenic picture include the tabloids, Joan?

She gives us a lesson she did not intend, that to have politics's content kept limited and filtered by an elite is indeed a squashing of free speech, knowingly, calculately. She thinks that is good, despite all the history that unfree societies do exactly the things in the petitions she dislikes !! A clanging contradiction.

The same elite filtering of thought is what Salmond and the SNP have done by selective refusing to issue in public some of their national conversation's responses, hiding what they like from us. Hiding the court change which abolishes judges' power to take wilfully bent decisions and call them final, and hiding the issue of the state being racist to returners to Scotland from the diaspora. Hiding those makes us all safer, does it Joan?

Monday, 10 January 2011

the court change

To post here my simple standard summary of the court change and what it is. For the benefit of any supporters of the Tommy Sheridan juror who is now in trouble, or of Julian Assange, Shaker Aamer and Ahmed Belbacha still in Guantanamo, the Long Lartin detainees, or any of the targets of threatened asylum deportations, e.g. Gamu Nhengu, Precious and Florence Mhango, Ahmer Rana. [Jan 28: and Brenda Namigadde. ]

This massive advance in
democracy (Yes2AV) starts in Europe, but applies to most of the world if folks want to lay claim to it. Since 7 July 1999 all court or other legal decisions are open-endedly faultable on their logic, instead of final. "Open to open-ended fault finding by any party".

Its shifting of power in favour of ordinary people ensures this court change has been kept under a media silence. Still, it is on publicly traceable record through petitions 730/99 in the European, PE6 and PE360 in the Scottish, parliaments.

This follows from my European Court of Human Rights case 41597/98 on a scandal of insurance policies requiring evictions of unemployed people from hotels. This case referred to violation of civil status from 13 May 1997, yet the admissibility decision claimed the last stage of decision taken within Britain was on 4 Aug 1995. ECHR has made itself illegal, by issuing a syntactically contradictory nonsense decision that reverses the physics of time, and calling it final. This violates every precedent that ECHR member countries' laws recognise the chronology of cause and effect, in court evidence.

Hence, the original ECHR is now, and since then, an illegal entity, because it broke all preexisting precedent that courts recognise the correct order of time, and it claimed a power of finality to issue decisions whose content is a factual impossibility. But for the original ECHR to lapse in this way, also breaches the European Convention's section on requiring an ECHR to exist. Hence, this section requires the member countries to create a new ECHR that removes the original's illegality. The source of the illegality being left standing was in the claimed power of final decision. Hence, the only way the new court can remove the illegality is by being constituted such that its decisions are not final. If decisions are not final, the only other thing they can be is open-endedly faultable.
This requires the courts in the member countries to be compatible with open-ended decisions and with doing in-country work connected to them. Hence, legal decisions within the member countries' courts also cease to be final and become open-ended, in all the Council of Europe countries.

The concept of "leave to appeal" is abolished and judges no longer have to be crawled to as authority figures. Every party in a case is automatically entitled to lodge a fault finding against any decision, stating reasons. These are further faultable in return, including by the original fault finder, stating reasons. A case reaches its outcome when all fault findings have been answered or accepted.

The first fault finding to make, is that all unaffordable legal costs are abolished by how they conflict with the world human rights principle of access to justice. Folks have waited centuries for a chance to say this. See how far reaching is the reform the court change can do once it starts?

World trade irreversibly means jurisdictions are not cocooned but have overlapping cases. When a case overlaps an affected and unaffected country, the unaffected country becomes affected, through having to deal with open ended case content open-endedly, that can affect any number of other cases open-endedly. Open-endedness is created in its system.

So the court change is of far-reaching international interest. Anyone can add to the list of countries outside the Council of Europe whose people can lay claim to the court change if interested. Show autocracies, pending their freer futures, as well as democracies.

United States through many transatlantic cases, pick any, e.g. Natwest 3, Enron, Gary Mackinnon. Or, to get the United States and Canada into the court change right from the start date, I can offer my still stalled ethical dispute about brain research with Arizona university in that period, that was obstructed by a US government office.
Australia through the long running case about medical harm by British nuclear tests. This gets Australia the same 1999 start date for the court change as Europe, because land groups there and not only British military are parties in the case.
Also, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand all through their CJD ban on British blood donations in 2000.

Israel and Lebanon through the case in Belgium on the Sabra-Chatila massacres.
North Cyprus through Turkey's UN legal challenge against South Cyprus joining the EU.
Belarus through its election dispute with OSCE election monitoring.
Kosovo through war crimes cases overlapping Serbia.
Vatican City through Sinead O'Connor's ordination as a Catholic priest.
Cuba through Elian Gonzalez.
Haiti through objecting to receiving petty crime deportations from America.
Antigua through its constitutional crisis on capital punishment.
Trinidad through its Privy Council case on capital punishment.
Jamaica through claims on both sides of American linked arms trade background to its violence.
Mexico through the Benjamin Felix drug mafia extradition to America.
Belize through Michael Ashcroft.
Guatemala through the child stealing and adoption scandal overlapping America.
El Salvador through the trade union related factory closure there by Nestle that made Transfair, the Fair Trade organisation in Italy, reject the Fair Trade mark for Nestle coffee.
Honduras through the sex slave trafficking cases from Nicaragua.
Colombia through America's supposed human rights policy intervention in training Colombian police and military.
Venezuela through Luis Posada Carriles.
Guyana through the £12m debt claim dropped by Iceland (the shop).
Brazil through EU immigration unfairnesses to its football players, necessitating a mafia trade in false passports.
Argentina through its ECHR case on the General Belgrano.
Chile through General Pinochet.
Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay through Judge Garzon's citation of Henry Kissinger for the South American military conspiracy Operation Condor.
Chad and Senegal through a French action in Senegal obtaining Chad's former dictator Habre for trial under Pinochet's precedent.
Algeria through the Harkis' case from the Algerian war.
Tunisia through the Lord Shaftesbury murder trial.
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Morocco through the Insight News case.
Ivory Coast through the chocolate slavery scandal.
Ghana through the World Bank's Dora slave scandal.
Togo through the Lome peace accords for Sierra Leone, and their breaking as an issue in factional arms supply to there.
Burkina Faso through an arms trade case of smuggling through it from Ukraine to civil war factions in Sierra Leone and Angola.
Niger and Rwanda through Oxfam's case of buying an arms trade "end user certificate" for Rwanda in Niger.
Burundi through the war crimes trial of Rwanda's 1994 head of state.
Tanzania and Japan through the 2000 G8 summit, because Tanzania Social and Economic Trust broadcast a contradiction in implementing both its wishes for economic advance and its debt relief terms.
Mozambique through its cashew nuts dispute with the World Bank.
South Africa and Lesotho through a WHO case against American pharmaceutical ethics there.
Nigeria through reported Nigerian drug mafia crime in South Africa.
Cameroon through the Bakassi Peninsula issue with Nigeria.
Dahomey and Gabon through their slave trafficking scandals overlapping Nigeria and Togo.
Zimbabwe through its land finances dispute with Britain in 2000.
Equatorial Guinea through the charges in Zimbabwe of a coup conspiracy.
Malawi through its arrests of Zimbabwean refugees callously deported from Britain.
Zambia through Cafod's collection of objections to food supply and health violations in its IMF structural adjustment program.
Namibia through the Herero genocide case against Germany
Angola, Congo Kinshasa, Ecuador through arms trade smuggling to them from Bulgaria and Slovakia.
Congo Brazzaville through the Jean-Francois Ndenge case in France.
Sudan through Al Shafi pharmaceutical factory suing America for bombing it.
Madagascar, Mauritania, Nicaragua through the complaint by Jubilee USA and Africa Action that the IMF is breaking the agreed debt relief terms for them.
Ethiopia through the same, as well as earlier aid sector comment on its conditional debt relief.
Eritrea through its border dispute with Ethiopia.
Somaliland through its problem with Russian and South Korean coastal fishing.
Kenya through the Archer's Post munitions explosion case overlapping Britain.
Somalia through the UNHCR coordinator in Kenya protesting and exposing refugee deportations back to Somalia during the 2006-7 crisis there.
Uganda through the Acholiland child slave crisis and Sudan's agreement to return children.
Mauritius through the Ilois rights judgment on the Chagos clearances.
Yemen through its problem with Spain over the missile shipment.
United Arab Emirates through Mohammed Lodi.
Saudi Arabia through the lawsuit by families of 911 victims.
Qatar through its SS Dignity aid boat turned away from Gaza by Israeli authorities for having peace activists aboard.
Bahrain through the call for American witnesses in Richard Meakin's case.
Kuwait through the terrorism arrests in Saudi Arabia.
Iraq through the weapons inspection dispute before the invasion. NB this does not mean the dispute or invasion were right!
Jordan through its threat of "unspecified measures" in its relations with Israel.
Egypt through its disputes with Tanzania and Kenya over use of Nile water.
Libya, Syria, Iran through the Lockerbie bomb trial. This is by reason of case content, nothing to do with who was guilty. But for Iran it is now more diplomatic to cite the case of the arrest of Bob Levinson.
Turkmenistan through Ukraine's gas pipeline dispute with Russia.
Kazakhstan through the American court action on oil contract corruption at government level there.
Uzbekistan through the ambassadorial exposee on evidence obtained by torture there and used in Western courts.
Kyrgyzia through its anti-terrorist border operations with Uzbekistan.
Afghanistan through the pursuit of Bin Laden after 911.
Pakistan through a dispute, reported by BBC in 2000, between supporters of enslaved women and the British embassy for not helping them escape.
India, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia through the World Wildlife Fund's campaign for tiger conservation, conflicting western romanticism with local populations affected by the homicidal absurdity of conserving a human predator.
Nepal through the Gurkhas' lawsuit for equal pay and pensions.
Vietnam through a church publicised refugee dispute overlapping China.
Cambodia through its enactment for a trial of the Khmer Rouge Holocaust.
Laos through Peter Tatchell's application to arrest Henry Kissinger.
Thailand through Sandra Gregory.
Burma through the Los Angeles judgment on the Unocal oil pipeline.
Sri Lanka through its call for the Tamil Tigers' banning in Britain.
East Timor through public reaction to the judgment against trying Suharto.
Papua New Guinea through WWF's Kikori mangrove logging affair.
Vanuatu through the Raymond Coia investment scam case.
Nauru through the Australian civil liberty challenge on the Tampa refugees.
Fiji through its land crisis's nonracial solubility by a Commonwealth constitutional question on rent and mortgages.
Tuvalu through environmentalist challenges to America's rejection of international agreements on global warming and sea level.
Marshall Islands through the Nuclear Claims Tribunal cases.
Philippines and Malaysia through the international police investigation in the Jaybe Ofrasio trial in Northern Ireland.
South Korea through its jurisdiction dispute with the American army.
North Korea through its apology to Japan for abductions.
Mongolia through the diplomatic clash over Bat Khurts.

All members of the Alliance of Small Island States are court change, as from AOSIS's notice of dissatisfaction with the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate change conference in 2009. This adds the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Dominica, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada, Guyana, Surinam, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde Islands, Sao Tome e Principe, Seychelles, Comoro Islands, Maldive Islands, Singapore, Palau, Micronesia, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, West Samoa, Tonga.

AOSIS members with court change cases already listed were: Antigua, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Belize, Mauritius, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Vanuatu, Fiji.

Council of Europe members already listed before they joined were:
Bosnia through a sex slave scandal involving Russian and American military.
Serbia and Montenegro through war crimes cases in the Yugoslav period overlapping Bosnia.
Monaco through International Amateur Athletics Federation drug hearings there.