wilting Lily

Blogger "Lily of St Leonard's" is a strong Brexiter, and philosophically determined Tory, though she is adaptable as a voter and now backing Galloway's Alliance For Unity. Even for folks like me not sharing those views, she used to be a good read for following how Scots of her views were reading political events. Same reason as why it's sometimes good to read the National. But the lily is wilting! Her reading of the position, where she used to be confidently predictive of Brexit actually strengthening the Union, is shifting. Gradually, not too visibly until you check back.

Best about her used to be that she wrote well in support of Alex Salmond getting a fair trial, and against the MeToo-related witch hunt of men. She was willing to act across sides to do that. But now she is writing about Salmond's case making a party point from SNP inaction against him at the time in question and lack of Scottish media chasing of it: in a way that rather clearly assumes him guilty, and arguing it from exactly the MeToo-corrupted standards of conviction in the US that she used to condemn. It's a disappointing change. It may show an increased sense of all-out back-to-the-wall fight against the SNP.

An even more startling shift is from
www.effiedeans.com/2019/09/the-remainer-rearguard.html
to
www.effiedeans.com/2020/08/knowing-terms-of-divorce.html.

That's from
"It never crossed my mind in 2014 that if Yes won the Scottish independence referendum that Scotland wouldn’t get to Leave the UK. I thought the SNP’s claims about the Scottish independence were exaggerated at best dishonest at worst. But we all had had the chance to contest the political claims of the Yes campaign. If they had won, I would have accepted the result. It never would have crossed my mind not to do so. I did not expect to be given a second chance if my side had lost."
to
"Just as Nicola Sturgeon argued for a confirmatory referendum on Brexit, so too the British Government could require a third referendum on independence after the terms of the divorce were known. The same ten questions and more could be asked an answered during the transition period in which Scotland would remain an integral part of the United Kingdom. Only when all issues had been resolved would there be a referendum on the terms of the divorce. Scotland could accept them meaning independence would happen or decline them meaning independence would have been rejected."
!

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.

bridge parting troubled waters

The absurd declaring unsound and closing of 2 modern road bridges on the Forth-Clyde Canal, breaking the through navigability of the canal, and even trapping some boats in the middle section unless they can be removed overland, and no word on timely repairing of modern built bridges that must be repairable! Whwt a shambles of running a country that is not yet the state they want it to become! To break up one of its travel networks, the one associated with the engineering star of the Falkirj Wheel!

It shows they can't be planning to need canal boat owners' votes in a ref any time soon.

Nats not wanting budgetary home rule!

No there should not be a devolving of the power to call a repeat of a ref you've already had recently, away from the British polity having any say in it. It would be a dumb thing for them to vote for that ib the Scotland Bill, vote away any power to stop the fanatics from keeping us voting and never accepting any result until it's their way. It is totally constitutionally right to dismiss Salmond's nerve in proposing this. His own predecessor Gordon Wilson has already told him, talk of a second ref annoys No voters and gives false hope to Yes voters, earning the votes of neither.

No it is not a unionist trick to devolve lots of strong income tax powers, as some tricky jerk was just arguing on Radio Scotland. The argument was that income tax is a power no government electorally likes to exercise, so that it's not real home rule to give us a power we won't want to use. AND IT'S NOT REAL BELIEF IN SELF-GOVERNMENT TO BE UNWILLING TO USE IT! It's a total contradiction of nationalism, it's what you would have to do in your own state. What happened to saying we have a more left wing culture more eager to vote for tax and redistribution? What price every moan the SNP government makes about supposed budget cuts, when it has never chosen to use the devolved tax power of 3p that has existed ever since the 1997 referendum? Was it worth devolving that power? To sustain the claim of a left wing culture you have to say it was.SO WHY HAVE YOU NEVER USED IT, innit?

Common travel binned already: try visiting Ireland.

Britain has been breaking the British Isles common travel area with Ireland, affecting both parts of it, without admitting so in any prominent political outlet.

Since 2010, shows this paper from when they started it, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/257182/cta.pdf, they have done immigration checks on the crossings from Northern Ireland to the mainland. It is shocking to see it, as I did on the Belfast to Cairnryan crossing, with "immigration enforcement" on their uniforms, checking identity and asking exactly immigration type questions about where you were travelling to - on a domestic travel route that is wholly inside the UK. It is not caused by NI's history, any extra security because of that would be security rather than open explicit immigration checking. Dangerously it does not make NI feel treated like part of the union, does it? The idea behind it is supposed to be, that the Republic is more liberal on immigration, and the Irish peace requires there to be easy crossing into NI by road an appearance of open border between the 2 parts of Ireland, so Britain will let the Republic's policy govern who can reach NI but it will still put a trap in an unexpected place to catch folks trying to reach the British mainland. This is why it is only being done in one direction, coming from Ireland, not going to it.

A friend who has visited family in the Republic reported that he was asked for his passport when crossing into NI on public transport! This is exactly what is not supposed to happen under the common travel area, and all our media debate on the EU and during the referendum took as common knowledge that it does not happen, that we have a happy little passport-free travel area with the Irish Republic. Googling, you can find stories since 2011 of this happening. It's not being publicised in media and politics, it's only folks who travle to Ireland and experience it who are getting to know this is happening.

As a No voter who is migration liberal and has no love at all for Britain's present border culture, I'm writing against Britain's practices here and accusing that they weaken the union. But this revelation is more of a problem for nats than unionists, because during the referendum the Yessers relied heavily on claiming they could predict that rUK would keep the common travel area with us because it would be rational. They insisted cavalierly that we could dismiss as bluff all contrary talk. Some Yessers actually relied on this, to argue that my anger at Yes's citizenship plan betraying the Scottish diaspora was unnecessary, because the common travel area resolved it. Predicting common travel's certainty to remain in place would mean, all the Scots born in the rest of Britain to emigrant parents and still living there at the date of indy, who Yes intended to betray without unrefusable citizenship of their own country, would still always be free to move home as part of common travel. So it would not matter how deficient and full of loopholes Yes's rules for Scottish citizenship were. This is clearly disproved by what is happening to Ireland. If intrusive migration checks are now capable of being intruded sinisterly upon civil liberties even inside the UK, between its nations, and if we are illicitly and dishonestly breaking the travel area with the Irish Republic too, both of these shocks show how easy and casual it would have been for rUK to put them onto a new Scottish state's border.

It's obviously another reason not to vote Conservative if you care for the union.

they tested the water

SNP's UDI talk slapped down. It can hardly be a surprise to them that it would be, that we would assert referendums are part of the constitution.

We will need to always remember how naughty they were to test the water. It was calculating, wanting to find out whether they could avoid having one.

within 3 days of losing they rewrite the rules

Referendums are part of our constitution for any change in the governing system big enough to be a constitutional change. That has been well established since the 90s, since the present post-Thatcher wave of constitutional reform got going - but the precedent's establishing can be traced back to the first EU referendum in 1975. For which Tony Benn, though his side lost that vote, was credited with adding referendums to our constitution.

3 days after losing this referendum, Salmond and Sillars are talking of dropping the need to have one, and considering an election win for pro-indy parties in 2016 to establish secession on its own. No longer want to have to hold a referendum after the experience of losing this one.

It is neither legal to declare UDI, nor constitutional to do it only 20 months after losing a referendum. If they actually do this, the population of Scotland will be put in a civil war type dilemma between which state to hold is legit here and to affiliate to. Will we end up like Cyprus with populations fleeing to either side of a green wall or getting trapped in a rogue state against their will with loss of international rights?

To suddenly write of such prospects evokes disbelief in peaceful familiar Britain - so remember nobody imagined the Northern Ireland troubles before they slipped into them very quickly. We have lived through exceptional days of constitutional instability recently and now we have 20 months' notice to take a position on the rights and wrongs of ref losers announcing a unilateral constitutional change abolishing what they lost only 3 days after they lost it. This is getting mad. This is not a democratic movement this is getting ever more fanatical on the tide of mob emotion they stirred up. As the dream falls from their hands, they clutch out after it.

www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/salmond-we-don-t-need-referendum-for-independence-1-3548270
www.express.co.uk/news/uk/513637/Salmond-s-plan-for-indy-coup-as-he-claims-independence-possible-without-new-poll?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daily-express-uk-news+(Daily+Express+%3A%3A+UK+Feed)

Trust it to be Sillars, the most extreme and racist of the leading nat voices, the same one as made that threat against No-voting businessfolks before the poll. That they lost, by a bigger margin than the polls had said, indicating there was a shy No's effect or a drawing back from the brink like in Quebec, was a morally great statement for democracy against intimidation and peer pressure. Long to be commemorated.

Never again, "for at least a generation", will voting SNP feel like a normal party choice. From now on it will be a vote for the intimidatory movement who frightened the country out of putting "No" posters in their windows then who began hunting for ways round democracy within 3 days after they lost.

Britain has clear notice of the nats' ravings, anyway. 20 months to prevent an illegal civil rebellion and a drift into violent troubles.

"Alex Salmond lost. It is not for him to try to overthrow the will of the Scottish people in some sort of coup." - Johann Lamont

frank

Comedian Frank Skinner, in advance of coming up to the festival, has given a muddled view of the ref. Desperate nats could take it as a celeb endorsement of voting Yes, because he has said that from a selfish point of view he would vote Yes if he lived here. He happens to be factually wrong in that, he has listened to all the unevidenced propaganda that life under indy would not be, as it would, just as neocon as British life. But the muddle is, from the point of view of living in England he has also endorsed us to vote No, saying that would be better for them, that seriously telling argument of the fear of rUK being left more right wing by our departure.

A reply to him, as posted under the Herald article:

Mr Skinner esquire, You might not vote Yes if you lived here and had done some digging for yourself into Yes's plans in an are the campaign has not focussed on: citizenship. Being conceived in Scotland would not be enough for your son to get their favour. They intend to make it refusable by the state, not an innate right, for the Scots who were born in the rest of Britain and can't be resident here on indy day to inherit citizenship from their parent. I have often found decent but overfaithful Yes voters shocked to hear of this, and generated a few extra enquiries by it, but always with the same answer. With government, Yes campaigns national and local, including Helensburgh who checked it with a lawyer, and all the yes supporting parties, they won't budge - they won't make this class of citizenship unrefusable. This is a basic assault on family life, against ECHR article 8, and a new clearances, an intention to reject Scots from their country. If the British or European shared travel areas break down, citizenship will affect who can live here - and only last week, totally slipping the mask, we heard Sturgeon's seriously unpleasant threat to throw out all the EU citizens here if we hit any problem with rejoining the EU. The so-called "civic nationalism" they have claimed is wonderfully progressive and non-racist turns out to be so deeply racist and anti-outsider that it even kicks away Scots' extended families - for what it means is only caring about the population who chance to already live here. Even when emigration features in Yes arguments!

Dividing families is a very practical matter preventing them caring for each other or supporting each other against poverty and welfare troubles. Yet a stallholder for Radical Indy kept dodging answering this with the diversion "How far back would you go?" and called it good socialism to subject the exile-born children of our emigrants to the same filtering for skills as Yes proposes for migrants from anywhere with no roots here at all. To reject our children taking no account of life misfortunes, education systems working badly, abuses hushed up by punishment as was revealed in Savile, as causes of not having high value skills.

I have petitioned the EU not to accept the ref process as legitimate or a new state as mandated if the mass of voters were unaware of these sick plans. Now the Yes campaign especially its meetings consists of an ever more raving Project Fear threatening all sorts of lurid right wing prospects if we vote No, without any disproof that they would happen the same under indy too as our major parties are just as neocon inclined as the British ones. Everything they threaten is actually a reason to vote No, in order not to betray branches of our families who have already suffered life misfortunes to also suffer rejection by their country and being abandoned to suffer all the threatened things living in the rest of Britain, cut off also from the help of their families here unless they emigrate too, and shorn of our leftward impact on British elections. While in the union we can vote against right wing horrors instead of having them thrust on us by a big powerful neighbour with no say in it, let's take your endorsement of voting No for that reason.

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.

What a way to run a railroad to London

Oh no they don't mean anything they say, they mean what I want them to say. Whatever I want it to be that they said, of course really they said it, just TRUUUST me and take it from me, you don't need to actually listen to their words saying the opposite.

You can't go through life communicating like that. It's unconvincing and silly. it's wishful thinking. I don't like what someone said so really they meant the opposite, really they meant what I wanted them to say - consider how that works out - no more toys means more toys, no consent to sex means consent to sex, we voted Yes but it means No. IT DOESN'T WORK. Would you buy a used car on that basis?

The referendum has become a shambles and tragedy. Alex Salmond, who called it, has determined on the following tragicomic place in history. He will go right up to poll asking you to vote for a statement of faith that his silly unionist idea that contradicts independence, currency union with the country you are leaving, you can ignore the No clearly given to by the entire political class of Britain and believe what the cheery salesman wants them to say. He's not going to railroad them.

This is the Yes campaign that is so caring about our ordinary lives it has not answered about the issue in the last post, the citizenship of Scottish exiles who can't return before indy day. On the Facebook Yes pages you can read yeards and yards of emotionalism about a great natiomnal moment to seize.

To continue the Clearances' logic by the moral obscenity of taking automatic citizenship away from some Scots, to make indy a way of shutting our door in some of our own people's faces, to want to tie us to the austerity programme through servitude to the Bank of England without a say over it, to call for an extra year of Tory government instead of the next British election on time during the indy process, to shut his eyes and make this ridiculous spivvy assertion that we can take his word that 3 parties don't really mean they won't do what he wants, and what he wants is unionist anyway.... WHAT WAY IS THIS TO RUN A YES CAMPAIGN?? A unionist, implausible, ludicrous, people betraying, spivvy way. AAAAAAAAAAH. If there was any national opportunity moment it's this SNP leadership who threw it away.

The sensible non-SNP wings of the Yes campaign who never wanted a currency union now need to split with Salmond and his train crash of nonsense.

the land of hope is poverty

It has been said that unionism, voting No, leads in the polls among the young and this is supposed to be an irony given how the referendum is making a first by lowering the voting age.

How many aged under 25, now threatened by Cameron with cutting off of support when in need, are still going to see the union as a country "sticking together"? From the voice who tells them "the land of hope is Tory"? The land of hope is not sticking together with its mass scapegoated young, is it? He tells them - "think of all we've achieved together" and deaths in a war of occupation that we should not be fighting are actually his own example!!!

clockwork yellow

The deja vu today is intense, and intensely dismal.

When a referendum goes 2 to 1 for No in the polls, historically that means the jinx has struck again of uncertain voters running for the emotionally easy option of caution. This is just like 6 weeks before poll for AV in 2011, after the Yes campaign disastrously neglected touse the power they had, to mailshot the country with info against their opponents' claims that played on public uncertainty towards the unfamiliar.

It feels the same spectacle, like clockwork, and historically these moments tend not to get turned round. But yes there is an obvious difference in this case, that there is a whole year left to go. That way there is still time for situational shift and mood shift. But when voters have turned cautious, they are fearful, and they won't be reached by jaunty dreamy optimism, they will need a fear jolt in the other direction, a reason to fear the status quo. Screamworthily even the bedroom tax does not yet seem to be giving them that jolt.

From now until anything changes or until the No win has happened, it's a wake for a chance of great reform thrown away, by the controlling political culture of choosing to filter what they got in from the public and select not to put all the reform issues into public record. They can still revers that choice, but Salmond won't, will he? He would rather be remembered in history as sending his own dreams down the plughole, than have democracy unfiltered and all wrongs necessarily made known and dealt with.

Fallout of fall

Look to the autumn for the ref's biggest question. We know that now from the Scotland On Sunday. It has told us that is when a white paper is coming on the post-independence policy for citizenship. Whether a Scottish state will be there for our people's diaspora, the descendants of a deportation atrocity whose presence out in diaspora is a past wrong's present result.

This has not yet featured enough in the campaign, because they say, rightly it feels, the Yes side's reading of public mood on it it uncertain. But there is ethnic justice in this, for a wronged dispersed people. Scots living at home are a minority of under 20% of our whole people, so their public mood is not entitled to reject most of their own kin from their own land. Which way our state's founders want to be remembered in history on this, particularly in every place where the diaspora still suffer in present pain from a past wrong, swings more strongly than any other item whether it is right to vote for our state at all.

There remains plenty of time and prospect for campaign scrutiny to turn onto this.

the court change reaches Central Africa

Another update on the court change.

The Central African Republic accuses Chad of an intervention a role in causing a coup there. Because that is a cross border legal dispute that overlaps between Chad and the CAR, and because the court change is already claimable by the people of Chad, this is all it takes to establish that the court change now applies to the CAR too. This is how easily folks all over the world can help each other to get the court change.

Yes this does have something abstractly to do with Scotland: the question why don't we fear independence leading to a political culture where coups can happen? if that is what happened when new states were created in Africa without a bedded in deterrent balance of estates of power to fix democracy in place. It has to do with interdependence, with all Europe's multi-country institutions and our interests tied in to them, that have worked for all the countries to keep each other democratic. Made democracy stick in Germany, where it had only ever had one terribly economically flopped 13 year period of democracy before its present state was set up in 1949, and that was all East Germany had ever had before 1990. Made it stick in Greece which had a coup as recently as 1967, in Spain which had a coup attempt as recently as 1981, with no more such events since they have been in the EU. Slovakia went in an authoritarian direction after its independence in 1993 and was pulled back again when it was pulled into having interests in joining the EU in 2004.

On neither side of our referendum is the picture comfortable or safe. We are being asked to be all light heartedly feelgood over our future at a time of the most heightened starkness since the European institutions have been around that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We are being asked to vote Yes by a Scottish government capable of introducing a charge for criminal defence even when it confirms your innocence, we are being asked to vote No by a British government talking of withdrawal from the whole European Convention on Human Rights. It's the way the British level political culture has swung, into racism and manipulated anti-European feeling calculated to make society more authoritarian, that is by far the more dangerous and worth avoiding course at present. The more of a referendum issue can be made out of the contrast, and out of Scotland intending to stay anchored to structures of interdependence that make it difficult for countries to dump democracy, the more the Yes side can be grilled on the criminal defence costs policy's total contradiction of the best looking reason at present for voting Yes.

It's your future innit? Is it?

As was bound to happpen with any voting date announced far in advance with any fixed age limit on the vote, the young, the future, whose mood the Yes campaign want to lift and appeal to, find themselves or their friends excluded from a historic event, life scarringly narrowly, by chance of birth. Even with votes at 16 that is still the case. A case of turning 16 2 days after the now announced polling day of 18 Sep 2014 featured on Radio Scotland's current affairs phone-in this morning.

If you decide fear of ribaldry is what matters most to you, if you decide the knee jerk prejudice of adults with secure lives actually carries the day against including the whole country in this event, then the trauma for the rest of their lives for young Scots who lived through this referendum very narrowly too young to vote in it will also for the rest of history be what you did to the generation whose futures this vote swung. The only way not to do that it to follow the education reformer John Holt's model that each young person taking up voting and joins the register when they personally feel so ready and inclined.

Chaos in a snapshot

Today's Scotsman is a complete snapshot of all the contradictory issues in collision, the whole smorgasbord of messing with we are getting from both sides.

"Salmond seizes high ground on welfare reform" its editorial says. Going for a campaign issue complete with mailshots to households, out of the welfare cuts process at British level. Going for the progressive consensus he keeps claiming exists in Scotland since the Tories ruined themselves here on constituional rather than welfare issues, and on the day when said fair minds will be alarmed by a result has been announced from the purge of Incapacity Benefit, when a third of its claimants have been pushed out of the benefits system into visibly much more precariously uncertain lives in the middle of a depression.

Intended message being - vote Yes if you have a conscience about benefits or a fear of being affected personally by their deconstruction. Yet news on the same day - the same day!! who managed that?!! - is that Salmond's government has passed the first stage of its undemocratic morally sinister Criminal Legal Assistance Bill, abolishing such a human rights basic as free legal defence against criminal charges, making criminal defence paid for. Even a proposal to refund the charge if you are found innocent got thrown out. Macaskill said it would make folks doubt the innocence of folks for whom the court decided not to refund it. But why would the court be given any power to decide that at all? That was not explained in the story.

Why was the story on this located under ordinary home news and away from the pages of referendum coverage? Do we have an elite wanting it not to become a referendum issue? After all, many lawyers and even the Edinburgh Bar Association were outside parliament demonstrating against the measure. As Salmond says vote Yes to protect the benefits system from getting destroyed, had he even noticed that the news on the same day said vote No to avoid living in a state to be founded with no tradition of a benefit of legal defence, where to suffer undeserved accusation of crime shall actually cost you money?

Who trusts a government capable of passing such a basic attack on human rights, with the human rights standards of a newly founded separate state?

This follows after Salmond's other recent show of ever so healthy ethics towards a question of law, his booboo on EU membership. This has affected the campaign oppositely than he wished. On the same day, in the same paper, a Labour No columnist, Brian Wilson, tells us that 60% of voters now appreciate that new state EU membership is not a bagged certainty, not "automatic" at all.

But what is the point of telling us that with the British EU referendum of 2017 hanging over us? Unless you can find a way to bring down the coalition and regain British government before the 2014 referendum and cancel the 2017 one, and be willing to cancel it despite its popularity with the racist vote? Assuming that hopeful scenario ain't in the offing and we are still stuck with these 2 votes in the wrong order, how you do even make a start on decide your vote by how to keep us in the EU when your vote is already being chaotically pulled opposite ways by the questions of how to protect our civil liberties and our benefits system?

How does a country with a progressive consensus end up with such an agonising and mucked up historic vote where there is no obvious progressive way to vote and either way will do nasty things to us? The civil liberty message to vote No has become, for safety in ordinary life, a pressingly urgent rival to the welfare message to vote Yes. While the EU membership message is no longer to vote Yes but may not yet be to vote No either. Who ever foresaw this scale of mess up?

Great, but great-great?

The referendum's most morally important issue has at last surfaced in the news, here in the Herald yesterday www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/salmond-snp-favours-irish-style-citizenship-after-independence.1358446515 and it has an inconspicuous short item on an inside page of today's Times. It has never been top of the Scottish media's agenda are spinning totally the wrong agenda and can be supposed not to care a fig about the majority of all Scots in the world the diaspora.

Salmond has told a TV channel in New Zealand, at last, it has taken long enough, that our new state would have an increased openness to citizenship entitlement for the diaspora, than is the case now in the union. That they would copy a model used already by the Irish Republic, extending to great-grandchildren. Even the Herald article has a racist slip-up in its wording on this, it refers to great-grandparents who were Irish. Yet the measure's obvious point is that all the descendants are Irish too. To word it such as suggests the 2 diasporas are not actually Irish or Scottish is of course to oppress them.

Great-grandparents is still far from enough generations to embrace all the descendants of the clearances. Do we want a referendum where both sides' position is genocidal? That would make its result's international validity questionable, and it is what will happen if neither side gives citizenship to all the diaspora who identify as Scottish unto perpetual generations, specially including all the descendants of the clearances.

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.

scarred by 10 months and a random bit

An awful lot of 16 year olds are going to feel damagingly betrayed, from the British end not Salmond's, and alienated from politics yet again, as the media now will spend 2 years keeping telling us they have been given the vote. When the great day comes they will find they have still not been after all. For Cameron has forced the trick device only allowing Salmond to use the electoral register complied with the 18 age limit, so that 16 and 10 months and a random bit is the actual age the referendum franchise will be given at.

Unless of course, unless the agreement now gets the fight for a lower voting age won within the next 2 years. We must all try for that.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/votes-at-16-a-seminal-moment-for-scottish-democracy.1350307449