yes George, show us what the democratic means is

Because as we are now, devolved, eveyone living in Englandandwales is at liberty to escape this shocking pre-fascist virtual banning of protests and demonstrations there, by moving to Scotland. Compare that to how a Scottish state under racist "civic nationalism" would want to reject even some Scots from making that move. To make citizenship by descent tefusable is to hand over our economic emigrants' families, on a plate, to what George Monbiot has described in the Guardian.

Paragraph from a Guardian article by George Monbiot, 19 Oct 2022, on public apathy towards environmental protest:

《 Writing for the Mail on Sunday, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed: “There is widespread agreement that we need to protect our environment, but democracies reach decisions in a civilised manner.” Oh yes? So what are the democratic means of contesting the government’s decision to award more than 100 new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea? Who gave the energy secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a democratic mandate to break the government’s legal commitments under the Climate Change Act by instructing his officials to extract “every cubic inch of gas”? 》

But George Monbiot himself ignored the court change, after he spoke at a Globalise Resistance conference in Glasgow 2001.

The court change benefits fightability of everything he urgently cares about. Since he has experienced arrest on an environmental protest, intentionally indeed, George Monbiot arrested for defying Extinction Rebellion protest ban - 2019,  he surely has every personal motive to care against the largely media-ignored violation of the human right to presumption of innocence, by the US and Canadian border systems giving innocent arrested people a worse status for entry. The court change helps fightability of that too.

So WHEN MONBIOT URGES YOU TO LISTEN, ON THE ECO EMERGENCY, MAKE IT CONDITIONAL. ONLY LISTEN ON CONDITION THAT HE EXPRESSES SOME LISTENING TO THE COURT CHANGE.

videoed fascism

Perth4Europe videoed its hustings in Perth yesterday with a promise to publish it to give the hustings a wider reach.

It will show both good and bad news, botb progress and dug in bigotry, on the moral question that ruined Yes: citizenship by parental descent. It will show Green leader Maggie Chapman giving theright answer! at last doing what no Green would do during the indyref, placing them behind parental descent as one of the conferrers of citizenship.

But it will show SNP candidate Heather Anderson openly tell an audience "I'm not willing to do that" and parrot about the SNP being for civic not ethnic nationalism. The question had already cited European Convention on Human Rights article 8, family life, and how compliance with it is a condition for joining the EU.

Consider the reaction if a candidate declared as "not willing to say" black or Jewish citizenship? This is exactly the same, a stance of racial hatred of one branch of Scots - and when the sane candidate had even mentioned our emigration rate in her opening speech! What action would be available against a directly hateful election pledge to take citizenship away from a colour group? The same action applies against this.

It forms a decisive item in the legal evidence for population-scale racist crime in the Yes citizenship plan, and for ECHR requiring the EU to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state if it goes Anderson's way.

"how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries"

From Paul Kavanagh's "Wee Ginger Dug" page in the National:

" It's quite likely tbat an independent Scotland will extend citizenship to every British citizen resident in Scotland when independence is achieved, and to everyone born in Scotland or who has a Scottish parent. That is, more or less, how you qualify for citizenship of most European countries."

This is not yet the atrocious racism problem in the last indyref solved. "Quite likely" of course is not certainty. But welcome, and record and keep, that a columnist in the National, the nats' own paper, has put in print that he finds parental descent citizenship natural and an axiomatic likelihood. Has he forgotten the White Paper or is he a welcome vanguard of the nats deciding to change it? Are they going to comply next time with the ECHR human right to family life? This writer has chosen encourage a spark of hope for it.

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.

CIVIC NATIONALISM CITED IN RACISM

Every gradually building concern of the alert questioning voter, during the ref, against the term "civic nationalism", that it was serving as a device for racism against the diaspora, is proved accurate and terrifyingly vital.

From exactly the same Guardian story on Irish Republic citizenship as in the previous post. See the comment under it posted by "Ricayboy" at 6 Mar 2016 00:10. It explicitly cites civic nationalism in support of the emotionally savage bully hate crime of birthplace racism - the bigotry of saying that folks' country is dictated by birthplace. It contends that birthplace racism follows from civic nationalism and is the modern PC position. He says nationhood by family and descent "goes against the 'civic nationalism' that we are all supposed to believe in and has more in common with the ethnic nationalism that has supposed to have been consigned to the past."

THERE IT IS IN THE OPEN. EVERY NAT MUST DISOWN IT OR ELSE STANDS PROVED TO BE BACKING RACE HATE AND CLEARANCES.

In the hate writing of a racist who wants the Irish diaspora not to have citizenship of their country, who actually regards them as not Irish when he is writing about a state they created, "Surely nationality in the modern world has to do with where you are born and grew up, not to do with blood and ancestry?" THIS IN A MODERN WORLD WHERE FOLKS OFTEN DON'T GROW UP WHERE THEY WERE BORN! They may have no further connection with their birthplace in their lives, e.g. th Silent Twins, Barbadian, born in Yemen and left it at 8 months old. According to him, the modern hip racially fair PC of civic nationalism makes fair and logical that siblings, growing up in fhe same place, whose parents moved between their births, should be forced to belong to different countries. Birth should force a country on you in an era that says it's wrong for birth to force a gender on you! Have you thought of how a diaspora born child of exile growing up in the wrong country parallels transgender griwing up in the wrong body?

According to his PC civic nationalism, the exiled Palestinians are not Palestinians and the Jews globally are not Jews, both people were successfully abolished when they were cleared out of the land - that line of hate would start a Middle East war!

That is what birthplace racism says, so according to this guy that is what civic nationalism says. Nats?

in a little box with nasty barricades

For the anti-outsider racism against Scotland's diaspora which made it morally necessary to vote No, the worst of the leading nats was Jim Sillars. He it was who actually proposed that the Scots born in diaspora as the offspring of our emigrants - whose emigration itself was supposed to be a nat issue - should be filtered for desirable skills the same as migrants with no roots here, before they can live in their own country. He took this line of xenophobic hate speech towards a section of his own nation, in his campaign dialogue with George Galloway and to the Yes meeting on 7 May 2014 at Liberton school, Edinburgh. SSP leader Colin Fox was sitting beside him and continued to do a campaigning tour with him calling him a friend.

I saw it because it was my question on citizenship by descent that he was answering. He told the same meeting that he was a Eurosceptic who would rather Scotland be like Norway and join EFTA, he retains from 70s nationalism its anti-EU strain, the idea of sacrosanct national sovereignty not getting pooled and united with anyone. Anti-Europeanism is now another racist anti-immigration position, because it means, and at British level much of it is motivated by, ending the union of free movement and travel. Going back to having nasty barricades up to the rest of the world outside your little box of global apartheid.

It fits him perfectly that he has now announced he's campaigning for an Out vote in the referendum, and splitting with the SNP mainstream by it, as he has ranted against the party control created by Salmond. The nats are better off without him, but will they realise it and break with his sick level of anti-diaspora bigotry?

Sillars will have no claim to moan or to claim any crisis if Scotland votes In and Britain votes Out. It is a matter of record that he wants the opposite.

nat racists drove their own councillor out of their party

A Scotsman story on a councillor in the south who has left the SNP because she is Chinese and has suffered racism in the party for it: www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/chinese-snp-councillor-quits-amid-racism-claims-1-3852813

For "not being Scottish and organising a Scottish event"! Read the story, you will see it's about a bigoted nat culture of being anti-outsider and spitefully keen to call folks not Scottish.

Matching exactly the way I heard Pat Kane spin the meaning of their "Civic Nationalism" idea, and Hebrides MSP Angus Macneil's hate stirring against Scots who had not lived there, which I wrote to the islands' local paper about, during the ref. That they saw the whole Yes project as only for the benefit of the folks already living here, as an insular community looking into itself, and viewing everyone else, including the Scottish diaspora!! with paranoia as outsiders only to be given as much of a place as would serve the emplaced community's self interest.

Will the Electoral Reform Society prevent Yes peer pressure bias ?

To Juliet Swann the admin worker in Electoral Reform Society's 2-person Scottish office. Their director Willie Sullivan works for Common Weal and has long given the impression of being a Labour Yesser.

“If the Yes bias in yesterday’s session on citizen’s conventions was accidental, you will be happy to agree with measures to prevent its repetition. This event was supposed to be nothing to do with backing either side on independence. From the main speaker, it was: nothing wrong with the main speaker. The offender was the supporting speaker with a Canadian experience who came after her.

To prevent hijacking of events, a rule needs to be billed, saying: whenever a claim is made in favour of either side on independence and in the referendum, someone on the opposite side will be entitled to respond to it. Even though this is a diversion from the meeting’s intended topic.

Otherwise, speakers can use events supposed to be about other things, to project claims on behalf of one side as measured facts without having to justify them. The supporting speaker, you will remember, claimed to have measured that Yes voters were more likely to have researched their facts than No voters.

This was obviously intended to make No voters sound stupid and propagandise that the facts pointed to voting Yes, and it was presented in support of a pushily self-satisfied Yes voter in the audience who had expressed that prejudice already. We then had to make the most of our opportunity to contribute to the intended topic’s discussion, without getting any opportunity at whole-room level to give a No voter’s defence to the claim made against us. As a result, that Yes voter left believing she had picked up a scientific statistic in support of her prejudice, and she was not accessible in the informal time at the end either as she chose just to engross herself with a friend then leave. Any number of folks could have seen the spectacle of her prejudice confirmed and been swayed by it themselves too. These all left without ever knowing that a No voter present in the room thought they had missed a big fact when they researched their votes, and thought the statistic claimed was misleading because it did not consider whether voters chose reliable sources for their facts.

My counter to the statistic, as a No voter, would be: (1) it assumes the voters had available all the facts they needed, but facts of big importance to me on racism and citizenship were not easily available, (2) did these voters question the Yes campaign on facts and dig behind them, or just accept claims as facts because they wanted to believe? (3) some voters for a status quo may be choosing on the evidence of life experience, hence have less need to read up on it, this does not make their choice less intelligent. This just to show I have an answer – and if I slipped in claims for my side into an event about something else, you know the Yes voters would have an answer and would be indignant to have it heard.

This is a question of whether ERS events and their findings are reliable, or will be corrupted by bias towards the Yes movement’s undemocratic game of peer pressure. I find it necessary to circulate the question openly, so that future participants and the whole reform scene be alerted to watch out that you make the right choice to prevent hijack bias by always having a right of reply to it when it happens.

As you know, I raise this question already from a position of lapsed membership, because of the unanswered question on exactly where you shared our local group’s voter question action towards the 2 ref campaigns.”

This may be read by folks who never reached the meeting, so I would mention about that too. Why was there any need to do this relatively small meeting as a limited places book your place event? They told us there was a waiting list of folks who had not got places, they emailed asking we to tell them if we weren’t coming, yet by the chance of stormy weather on the day folks did not turn up and there were lots of empty seats without the waiting list folks having had a chance to be there. This was brushed aside quite trivially saying the weather would make them relieved. This is a totally unsatisfactory standard of practice towards inclusion in democracy! the very thing we were there for!

For 10 million global citizens

UNCHR launches campaign to end statelessness. The UN says a third of about 10 million stateless people are children, who can pass statelessness to future generations.

This comprehensive write-up is by Al-jazeera: www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/11/unchr-launches-campaign-end-statelessness-201411451131537335.html

My immediate response to UNHCR, pushing the idea of citizenship union:

" On statelessness and your campaign. The Scottish crisis has already led me to propose a new constitutional idea which fits perfectly with shifting the global culture away from the fragmentation of citizenship which causes much of statelessness. You might like to back it: a multi-country CITIZENSHIP UNION.

It seems very significant, that Al-jazeera comes from the non-Western postcolonial world, yet in its report on your campaign it has explained that "Statelessness results from people falling through the cracks when new countries are created". So that this a deliberate avoidable racist crime has accompanied the world's postcolonial shift to a large number of smaller states. Indeed that it seems to be a deliberate device to create enslavable populations.

The Scottish nationalists too were planning to betray the common sense principle of automatically inheriting citizenship. Their plans were going to make it refusable. But in Europe's present racist mood, the media and No side would not do anything to focus on and expose it. I lodged a petition to the EU, number 1448/2014, against accepting a Scottish state's valid mandate to exist if voters had been unaware of this. It has not been made redundant by our No vote, it still holds for all the other secession movements in the EU.

The interventions from 3 ex-British countries appealing to us to vote No in contradiction of their own seceded position, were what enabled me to propose citizenship union. I first proposed it in advance of our vote, to 6 countries. I have resubmitted it in the public submissions, at both British and Scottish levels, on where Britain's new settlement should go now.

It would close some of the holes of statelessness. It will not immediately close them all though by choice it could. It will be an enormous culture shift in the whole global nature of citizenship, away from it working in the single country ways that cause statelessness, and to a global community which the peoples of lots of countries will be attracted to seeing their country included in.

I have posted here before on the geopolitics of citizenship union: Divided world shut doors, on the geopolitics of citizenship unions. As Salmond pointed out instantly, for the 3 countries the contradiction is that they all became independent from us historically themselves, and now they have the accompanying divisions of citizenship. To make their appeal to us make any sense, to back up in practice their geopolitical concern to keep the British state and make its new settlement succeed, they need to be willing to go for this. To form a citizenship union, as many democratic countries as can be brought in would all simply agree, in one sentence, that all of each other's citizens are now their own citizens too. Any catching up by their own citizenship laws would be done after the treaty is made, to be bound by it instead of miring it.

There would only be one citizenship of the entire scheme, unlike in the EU's modest moves to citizenship union folks would not remain identified as just one member state's citizen. That way, racist reactions like UKIP's to undo the whole thing would be made totally impractical. But this would be between totally independent states still free not to join in each other's wars: and obviously folks can not have obligations for any type of compulsory service put on them by any one of the other states which they are not resident in nor have asked to have any connection with, so this structure will also be a good safeguard against such forms of service being able to exist in any of its members. The only margin of independence the members would lose, would be to act on enough of a scale at odds with the others geopolitically as hit ordinary citizens' lives adversely.

Astonishing chilling threat of mass deportations.

The SNP's threat issued on Jul 14, to take away residency from the EU citizens already living here, effectively a mass expulsion from the country, if we get trouble with rejoining the EU, was an eye opener and shocker for many. The mask dropped from how racistly the nats are willing to operate, all that means for what a new state would be like, and how it correlates with the shocker they are doing to families in their citizenship plan.

Could there possibly be any more to come, you were already wondering?

This has turned up, from Yes street activity, openly being offered to voters. A booklet produced by the famously English-based Yes blog Wings Over Scotland, called "The Wee Blue Book". A booklet of what they say are key point to convert you to Yes and supposed to be difficult for No supporters to answer - in fact they are all the scare claims and unevidenced assumptions you have heard before and very easy for No supporters to answer.

But on p61, in the chapter "Negotiations" on what would happen after a Yes vote, up pops this surprise:

" Scotland being out of the EU would certainly hurt Scotland, but it would massively damage the rUK too in several very obvious ways.

It would be disastrous for rUK businesses, but more to the point it would cause bureaucratic chaos the likes of which has never been seen on these islands, as 400 000 English, Welsh, and Northern Irish people suddenly lost the automatic right to live in Scotland and a similar number of Scots risked expulsion from the rest of the UK.

It is barely an exaggeration to say that the whole of Britain would grind to a halt. People wouldn't know who they could do business with and who might be deported the next day." - !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS A THREAT TO CARRY OUT A MASS DEPORTATION! A RACIST ATROCITY! IT IS IN THE CASE YES ACTIVISTS ARE NOW MAKING TO THE PUBLIC IN THE STREET! THERE IS NO THREAT ON THE BRITISH SIDE TO THROW ANYONE OUT, THIS COMES ENTIRELY FROM THE YES SIDE. DO WHAT WE WANT OR WE THREATEN TO OVERTURN THE LIVES AND TAKE AWAY THE LIVELIHOODS OF, AND DEPORT, THEY ACTUALLY SAY THEMSELVES DEPORT, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE! WHO AT PRESENT LIVE PEACEFULLY IN A UNITED COUNTRY!

THIS IS THE NATIONALIST MONSTER ON AN INCREDIBLE SCALE!PRINT COPY AND SHARE THIS POST!And remembering that Yes's citizenship plans don't make it unrefusable by descent from a parent, and Alex Salmond himself would not tell me on his phone-in on Jul 29 it would be unrefusable, you can tell that by "English Welsh and Northern Irish" who would lose their residency and become subject to DEPORTATION!!! yes read it in there!!!! they likely count a good number of Scots by background and family too!

THIS IS A FRIGHTENING TIME OF HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCY. WHEN HAS BRITISH POLITICS EVER CONTAINED SUCH A BARBAROUS THREAT OF EXPELLING POPULATIONS????? VOTE NO, VOTE AGAINST THE SIDE THAT MAKES THIS THREAT, AND BE READY TO CHALLENGE THE LEGITIMACY IN INTERNATIONAL LAW OF ANY SECESSION PLAN INCLUDING THIS THREAT AT ALL.

XENOPHOBIC MASK TOTALLY OFF THE NATS NOW!!

From the Scotsman, www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/sturgeon-warns-europeans-could-lose-right-to-stay-1-3475453 - STURGEON WARNS EUROPEANS COULD LOSE THE RIGHT TO STAY if we find ourselves outside the EU with a hiatus in that same rejoining process that Salmond lied about having legal advice on.

A big serious mask has now slipped. Now displaying to all a seriously unpleasant scale of anti-outsider character to the Yes cause and its so-called "civic nationalism". This use of a new clearances as a political bargaining tool is a wake-up call against voting Yes! to all voters with European friends.

This comes as no surprise to all voters who had checked up on Yes's citizenship plans, who already know that they will not budge from planning to divide families and shockingly close Scotland to some Scots by not giving unrefusable citizenship to the children of our emigrants who are exile-born and not resident here on indy day. I have often found decent Yes supporters shocked to hear of that and unable to answer it. Many of them must now be further troubled trying to explain their side putting this shadow over European guests.

I suggest they change side. You will feel refreshed in conscience and know that was the right and best step you could take. As can be followed in the back posts here, as a voter whose moral priority is pro-immigration and border liberalism my conversion to No has copnsistently become ever more right, after I had leaned cautiously to Yes in the early part of the campaign in 2012-3, when before they had revealed any plans their rhetoric was in favour of border liberalism, all now long since totally thrown away.

citizen holes?

"Any person who at present is entitled to British citizenship for any reason of Scottish background, will be entitled to Scottish citizenship." - is this the case?

And indeed: "Any person born after 1983 who would have been entitled to it if born before 1983".(When Britain made its rules viciously worse allowing itself to exclude kids born here to non-citizen parents.)

This is the simple statement the Yes campaign needs to make to prevent there being any gaps or loopholes in the description of citizenship in the White Paper. Voters could campaign for this statement, to the Yes campaign and our MSPs of Yes supporting parties. With this on simple statement, any flaws and loopholes anyone finds in the table of proposed citizenship criteria in the White Paper, which you can find at the end of chapter 7, will be automatically solved.

Without this, the campaign could be thrown away by any loophole found. If it was shown that any Scots from the diaspora were going to find it harder to belong to their own country when it is its own state than they are under the Union, bang would go the moral and anti-racist case for statehood which is based so strongly on reacting against the present frightening racist drift in British politics.

The references to parents who qualify for Scottish citizenship are a sloppily worded loophole that badly needs clarifying by making the statement proposed. The table is worded in the present tense, implying the parents qualify now hence are alive now, and if one of the possible qualifiers is to live in Scotland on independence day, then it implies being alive on the day. However, the question what if parents who met all the proposed citizenship critieria at the time of their deaths had died before independence day, is answered in question 379 of the question section at the end of the White Paper. Only when you see that do you see how it removes a danger there would be from reading only the table literally as it is written. For someone who would need their forbear's residence on the day as affecting whether the forbear was a potential citizen, the danger of a loophole is certainly still right in there, for from the wording it is not clear whether a parent who died before the day is considered for which country they were intending to live in on the day, and what if they died before their intended move?

The White Paper's wording suggests the SNP has not listened to anyone or learned anything since it was tripped up by Labour in the 1999 election over defining citizenship in much this way: a Labour broadcast that said, if you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a citizen? no, they will have to apply.

The White Paper has messed up here, also in describing as automatic the citizenship of all the non-Scots living around the world with no connection with Scotland who but who chanced to be born here. It is an obvious fact that they will not become citizens against their will of a state they don't live in or want anything to do with. Obviously only if they register their existence will they be citizens. This means in practice the position for them is the same as for Scots born in exile and returning from it through their parents'/grandparents' etc. It is bad that for hastily written rhetorical purposes it has not been worded the same, when sat down and reasoned on it amounts to the same in practice. The White Paper's questions section seems to say it is for an international law reason so that they will be our citizens rather than stateless, but again, logically that should apply the same to both groups.

It is good, though, that the word "register", which means taking up a right, has been used, rather than "apply" which would imply the possibility of a no. But the inconsistent arrangement as described in the White Paper has allowed some of the papers, describing it, to use the word "apply" and frighten voters by it.

A much worse example of racial mischief features in the right wing Spectator's article on the White Paper. Its its list of what it contrives to present as surprise developments, under citizenship it says: "It had been assumed that only those living in Scotland at the time of independence would become citizens of the new Scotland. It has now emerged that Scottish citizenship will be an awful lot wider than that. The White Paper reveals that anybody who was born in Scotland can become a Scottish citizen and have a Scottish passport. Not only that, but all those with a Scottish parent or grandparent could become citizens of the new Scotland too."

"It had been assumed" by who exactly? Only by said Spectator itself. Never has it been suggested at any point in the campaign that Scots living in economic exile who can move back now within the Union would suddenly cease to be able to move back. No national liberation that would be. Only mischievous appealers to the racist vote would conceive the thought.

On the question of whether anybody who was born in Scotland can become a Scottish citizen, rhetoric had always suggested it but the White Paper is cagier than that and is actually CONTRADICTORY! The potential Scottish or British citizenship eligibilities that your parents or grandparents had are involved in the tables of different categories of opportunity to register, including for folks born here. Though it is good that this means the White Paper is at odds with birthplace racism, it would be bad enough to blow the whole Yes campaign apart if loopholes are found that exclude anyone with a background here that could be registered through their birthplace, from citizenship and being able to live here. Hence the need for a simple policy statement as suggested above, to keep the position clear and just. The contradiction is between question 379, which says citizenship by descent would require a parent or grandparent to have been born here, and the table, which does not say that and just says those forbears needed to qualify to be citizens, which could be in other ways than birth.

Spoiler

2018 they say today is when Cameron would hold a British EU referendum.

Is that 5 years of relief or of intolerable uncertainty for our European friends here?

It is a total spoiler for the Scottish referendum, where to make an informed vote we need to know the EU vote's result first. Having them the wrong way round makes the Scottish voter a gamble, voting either way. With voting Yes the gamble is how much trouble Spain can make for us in the EU, it is with voting No that the gamble is worse: which way will Britain then go? Perhaps expecting that a No vote is more popular at present, it will manipulate us, to blunder into ending up going with a British nasty tabloid racist vote to leave the EU, instead of having the chance not to make that choice.

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.

Schengen first, EU afterwards

Now the big row on EU membership. How disgusting of the Lib Dem leader, Willie Rennie, to say in parliament at PMQs, oh dear if we need to renegotiate our EU membership upon independence we will have to join the Schengen area .

I WANT TO JOIN THE SCHENGEN AREA. So should any humanitarian. So should the Lib Dems.

They are supposed to be the party of the European ideal. That includes common united travel among all these countries, moving away from apartheid passbook barriers betwen them - NB think about it, border controls and passports are a global apartheid structure, keeping the whole world living in separate racial boxes.

All we look likely to get in this campaign, on all sides, is them all bowing to the tabloid race hate vote. Lib Dems doing it, SNP certainly doing it by saying no no we won't join Schengen we will stary in the British Isles common travel area. The British Isles common travel area means the nasty chilling unfriendly "UK Border" corridor at the airport, the walls lined with intmidating threats, including the humanly unreasonable atrocity of being threatenable with prosecution if you have lost your passport during your flight. Then what if a criminal assault you and steals it, that is your fault and makes you criminalisable? It is against the facts of human fallibility, hence against human rights, for travel to depend on carrying any losable document at all. The medical conditions of dyspraxia and attention deficit affecting dexterity and fine motor skill, help to force this issue under discrimination.

The SNP has at least been good enough to say before that it wants us to have a more welcoming culture than the morally foul British immigration regime, that is the single item with most potential to attract my vote to Yes if the SNP stops blowing it by censoring its consultation responses from publication. So why the hell contradict it by pledging not to join Schengen? Probably because the threat that England would then slap border controls on us is unpopular. of course while it lasted it would be bad for that to happen, a new barrier, but it would be less bad than the good done by reducing the territorial size of the nasty racist UK Border regime and giving us the whole Schengen area without a barrier. We should be willing to squeeze England in that way for having the tabloid racism in its political culture, and to take some affordable trips to the continent instead of to England.

Though it was the EU that created the Schengen area and it is betteer to help to hold it in place by belonging to the EU, you can even belong to the Schengen area without being in the EU. Norway, which I visited recently, does that and certaibnly feels just like its EU neighbours as a result. For this reason, to be keener on Schengen would get the SNP off the hook of the difficulties over whether our EU membership would be continuous. We could stand eager to sign up to the Schengen area even for the duration of an interruption to EU membership. That will make the interruption less serious, hardly noticeable at the level of real people's travel.

Banned demo

On Saturday a demo in Glasgow which I was on, in support of refugees who are housed there, was shut down in mid rally by the police and everyone sent home. We were not even told the reason why, but that it would involve a fascist counter-threat was fairly guessable. Speakers sent away who had not yet spoken included political ones.

The demo organisers are lodging a complaint over this. It has turned out that the police threatened use of the Public Order Act to ban a hundreds strong demo on grounds of public safety, force its participants by law to run away, because just 25 members of the SDL were counter demonstrating.

Nicola Sturgeon had sent a support message to the demo, and the Green leader Patrick Harvie was among the speakers present. So what do both say about whether independence will reduce the prospects of this type of thing happening?

The demo was about how new business contracts for housing refugees have resulted in sudden evictions of them onto the streets, including them coming home to find their locks changed. Speakers cited that under human rights throwing anyone onto the streets is illegal. They will all be interested in taking up my case that rent and mortgages no longer constitutionally exist, then? As explained here to the housing policy consultation Firm Foundations in 2008.

There was some sentiment expressed that independence will enable us to stop being part of British policy to have refugees treated like this. The corruption and absurdity was highlighted, of a policy that allows them to refuse a person refugee status when the country the same person has come from is acknowledged as too dangerous to return them to !!!

If independence is going to make that humanitarian difference, they should be getting on with it, not waiting another 2 years. eh? But it is time to clarify what protections against racist policies will be built into the new state? and built in whoever wins its first election, not assuming it will begin with an SNP government? There is a discrepancy. the SNP has appeased the racist vote by saying we will stay in the British Isles travel area and not join Schengen. How will we stay in the British Isles travel area without staying in the British humanitarian disaster of the present ayslum system? On what basis does Sturgeon promise we will not stay in it?

May get Schengen

Teresa May-Not, she should be called. Hatchet Home Secretary who wants to say no to families, they may not be allowed to share a rational healthy future living in the same country. There is a Tory family value for you. Immigration oppression again, at British level. Vote for us because we will keep families apart, not take dependant relatives into the same country as the valued new member of our community here doing valued work.

She says vote for Britain for national barriers and national paranoia and tribal bullying. In direct contrast to this appeal to the evil vote, she says vote against a separate Scotland because it would be in Schengen and more open to immigration.

That is exactly a reason to vote for a separate Scotland. Because the Europe-wide immigration union is compassionate progress, makes life more sensible. Everyone simply goes where they need to go. Immigration is a flattery to us and makes our lives better, and when it comes under a continent scale agreement is balanced by emigration too, returning the flattery to other countries. Thinking folks like immigration.

So does this clinch a Yes vote as right? It should, because the SNP should take this line. Do it with the Scottish diaspora in mind too. Any SNP literally deserving its own name would do this. The real SNP conspiciously has not. On the same day as welcoming creation of an internet domain called .scot , the SNP has denied May's silly scare stories. Implying that being in Schengen is a scare story. Defending on the Tories' terms. But being in Schengen is a cosmopolitan justice. It keeps us out of a British racist agenda, keeping out of which is what our diaspora need, whether in Schengen or the Commonwealth. If we by joining Schengen made it geographically sensible to draw the Irish Republic in too, England could be morally deservedly isolated in continuing to go the tabloid way.

Instead the SNP is doing what it always slags all the British parties for doing, following a Tory led consensus, saying we will stay in the British Isles Common Travel Area. That, like may other of their actions posted on here, makes them more doubtful in bothering with our diaspora at all.

hate crime

The Metro free paper today printed an act of racial hate on its letters page, as many bus passengers have seen. A character pen-named "Rockin Rob" of Bishopton was printed writing "you are not and never will be Scottish" addressed to Rod Stewart.

Nobody is ever entitled to tell any other person that they not the national identity they identify as being. That is how genocide starts. By hate exclusion of targets.

A clear crime of racial hatred stands on record perpetually and poses a criminal test to the SNP government for the referendum's legitimate status. If they prove noncommittal about this, they will be involved in letting racial hatred happen and that will invalidate their proposed new state right from its launch. This will only not be the case if they are absolutely rigidly immutably watertightly pinned down committal, in pledging that it will be part of their new Scottish state's constitution that anyone who says any other person is not Scottish is automatically jailed for a crime of racial hate.

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?