no bitterness no peace

The BBC was at its cultic drip-drip mind-wearing worst over its repetitive Mandela obituaries, which all other news was simply abolished to make way for. On radios Scotland, 4, and 5 last night, all of them alike, the so-called news consisted of only this one event and lofty top folks' remarks on it. Even when they paused to say, now the headlines, so you thought you were going to get something else, even the headlines consisted only of this one single item repeated again.

Yet the same day, we had had our strongest wind storm for years, with a startling total closure of our rail network, and the major bridges, stuff falling through the roof of Glasgow Central station, and a lorry blown over. You would think we wante to know about the immdeicate local situation of our own lives?

A dissenting blog here: www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2013-12-06/a-dissenting-opinion-on-nelson-mandela/, and Medialens who linked to it, shows that the reson why Mandela is getting so deified now is because during his government South Africa was bogged down into the neocon world economy and totally failed to solve the racially disparate poverty inherited from apartheid. Can well remember the serious papers, at the time, reporting about continuing ill-treatment of white employed black farm workers. John Pilger on interviewing him in 1996 on breaking his word on privatisation: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54583# .

As Pilger mentions, Mandela portrayed expedient deals with the old white economic elite as part of "reconciliation". And this totally illuminates why the BBC line has been all about how wonderful he was for choosing against "bitternesss" and "revenge". One BBC headline report, which is supposed to be fact not opinion, stated as a fact the opinion that Mandela saved South africa's peaceful outcome this way. All the while, because he is in such media favour, they choose to make no mention of Winnie Mandela and the necklace atrocities in 1986, and how though the Mandelas divorced it was ambiguous whether Nelson ceased to be aligned with her on that and certainly his death announcements treated her as a linked and a perfectly fine figure in the face of that savage history. Same as with Churchill, which this selective deification is similar to, they chose to forget that he had believed in forced sterilisation of the poor and in a lower grading of the races ousted by colonial white societies worldwide.

The fad for talk of reconciliation processes and anti-bitterness propaganda, and the age-old anti-revenge line by the major religions, are about taking away fairness and even its expectation. Their purpose is to acculturate ordinary people into a state of passive fatalism with whatever an unjust course of events has given them, away from expecting feeling any entitlement or claim to redress and the writing of wrongs. It is a way for political elites to avoid bothering with any outstanding injustices at ordinary people level, whenever they dispose of a difficult situation is the quietest life way for themselves that presents.

It is an agenda that threatens us in the Scottish referendum process too. It is the way any anomalies about citizenship, anyone unfairly left out of it, could be ever so gently hushed away by the BBC. It has already started in the media consensus that we should just treat the White Paper as a sketch of ideal wishes none of whose detailed contents are actually committal to anything. Suffer from this? Oh but that's bitterness you see, no no no, gotta have reconciliation, innit? or it will be the same with any deflated hopes felt after a No vote, and when the system clams up to give us no further political reform and reminds us it had always been noncommittal that it would. Oh no don't keep on about this at us, that's bitterness you see, innit, no no no, you had your vote, gotta have reconciliation, now.

That's how the trick will work. Be on guard not to accept it.

if Labour says the Union is an election issue, feedback on SNP policy must matter

The Labour campaign has now declared the Union potentially at stake in this election. Hence they too should agree that it matters that public consultations on the independence policy should not be censored, and responses withheld from public access, by the SNP.

Granted Labour says nobody cares about the constitutional issue, but if the SNP wins the election it is certain Labour will care in opposition to the issue.

Meanwhile the Greens don't sound anything like as total on independence, in their manifesto, than the SNP. Though they support it, they support a multi-option referendum that might just bring stronger autonomous powers.

I have been quite against the Greens for years, for telling us to use public transport but refusing to take positions on specific injustices to passengers and bad operating done by particular transport services. That line was exploiting us. You don't tell the public to do something potentially inconvenient and kick away all question of doing anything to ameliorate the inconveniences. During the election last year I had a letter published in the Metro making this point. But in the present Green manifesto I acknowledge progress and movement on this issue. Perhaps it is because Scottish level is the level where they feel most empowered to actually do anything with their electoral successes, hence more ambitious? Or have they actually responded to concerns like mine?

This time they are not just giving us their old waffle. Most importantly for my previous discontent, they are calling for "greater regulation of bus services". This will make some difference to all the aggro and shoving around that the giant private sector bus companies now give passengers with impunity, and even the consulting on that policy will be an opening to press those issues in detail and how the public have been left in the lurch by the Greens not getting drawn on this issue before. They also want to subsidise reductions in transport fares, and we know how those have rocketed and are some of the most extortionate in Europe. They propose specific railway reopenings, they will keep the bus pass system which the Tories and Lib Dems both want to cut back which would make some folks' lives significantly less free, and to budget for facilities for physically "active travel" which is some shift away from their former line that it rigidly always must be public transport. Come to think of it, maybe those extortionate fares are what have forced the Greens to shift their demands on us?

They have shifted. They are also taking the strongest anti-cuts agenda, universal right to a bank account, and good left wing taxing of big business, also motivated by trying scale business away from bigness again in the face of the the peak oil problem. So I'm voting Green this time.

This means voting for the other pro-independence party besides the SNP, which according to Labour's warning, might swing the difference for the SNP to get the referendum through this time round. Presumably, the Greens too won't want to have the referendum if they think they will lose it, and that might remain the case for the whole of the next parliament as it did the last. Or it might not.

I have no grounds to believe the Greens will necessarily be any fairer than the SNP towards consultation feedback. But knowing how the SNP has handled it already, it will be better to have 2 parties than 1 behind the process, just to spread our bets and try to give voters more leverage on both for how they treat us in all further consultation process. This thought, realistically sceptical about the Greens and not putting faith in them, is further good reason to vote for them.