trust a journalist?

Joyce Macmillan is no star of positivity in referendums. It was me whose letter against her chairing of the Edinburgh launch of the Yes-Yes campaign in 1997 was published headed "Worse than Westminster?" in Charter 88's journal Citizens, an edition from early 1998. Frustrating it is no longer online to link to, it was once, since Charter merged into Unlock Democracy. She slapped down speakers who made any point from their personal life experience in support of the campaign and proposing the campaign could use their point. She showed she just wanted it to be an elite class's safe controlled campaign pushing out anything so unpredictable as real life.

Already before this, at a day event by Oxfam in 1996 that she chaired, when I raised the constitutional case against rent and mortgages she chose not to make the 2 politicians beside her (Menzies Campbell and George Foulkes) respond to it on grounds that "I don't think anyone know what you're talking about" without making any opening for me to explain in full where it comes from so that she would know what I was talking about, and without expressing any concern that her newspaper colleagues had not made it known to her.

Within this year she was writing in her column that a No win is inevitable and getting cornered by electoral luck into holding the referendum at all was tragic for the SNP. But last night she was on Newsnight, with a totally changed position, saying the No campaign is too negative about the country's virtues and predicting that if it continues their support will evaporate, i.e. a Yes win. This from a position of declaring as Yes-inclined now herself.

This is selective. It should follow equally that Yes support will evaporate if that campaign continues not taking voters seriously:

• by having policies that require the agreement of some party outside our new state, Britain or the EU, that has already said it won't agree.
• and By spivvily not responding to enquiries for clear positions on items like the citizenship item raised here already.

If we are just faced with 2 spivvy campaigns both messing us around and not addressing details seriously, the winning side may be the side of not voting at all.

You've Been Trumped, and so have young homebuyers

Anyone who has seen the film You've Been Trumped, now touring the country, has seen an insight into the moral standards of any bandwagon backed by Salmond, that all voters need to see before the referendum. Not necessarily to vote No as a result, but only to vote Yes if they can see the Yes cause being in caring enough other hands than only Salmond's, that also are strong enough to make any difference to what a new state would be like.

Salmond was interviewed totally fawning over Trump. You remember it was the SNP government that intervened and overrode Aberdeenshire council's planning rejection of Trump's rubbish. Salmond stands there and says the economy takes precedence over the environment. A development not creating local jobs at all, existing only to benefit the world of rich privilege that has enough benefit already, that has the absurd purpose that they will fly across the Atlantic Ocean just to play golf then fly back again, an action whose carbon footprint is just like a boot in the sky splatting on top of us all, overrides a sensitive piece of coast with an equilibrium of dynamic sand and a rare habitat. Destablising the coast. Digging up all the sand dunes and the grass anchoring them, and spreading artificial sand flats here there and everywhere just burying the landscape that was there before.

Vandalising Scotland, in fact. You see it going on around the affected residents' homes, and this is the new Scotland they have got from the SNP, as noticed by one who used to vote for them. This it seems is the Scotland that Salmond the patriot wants to offer in the referendum, wants to tug the heart strings for. He who has helped a man whose fortune could lift many of the SNP's recent voters out of privation, to start digging the heart out of a piece of Scotland. A piece in Salmond's own region, too. Be independent, but not be physically intact as a landscape.

A properly informed referendum is one where the voters know all about that. Are more acutely conscious of what is going on on their coast than they were in the last election.

Meanwhile, a prediction has made the papers that the housing market won't recover into its proper form accessible to everyone, like in the 90s it did recover, and that home ownershiop will on average be unaffordable until folks are in their 40s. What is that going to do to Scots living in exile because their parental homes are in exile, who may have grown up in exile like I did? How are they going to get their human right to live in Scotland not in exile? and get it before they might die for any number of accidental reasons, evilly after never having lived in their own homeland at all? Salmond can help them every bit as keenly as he is helping Trump. He can publicise how rent and mortgages no longer constitutionally exist. A fact, covered up for 16 years, that once made publicly known, abolishes the housing market in its present form completely, so abolishes the problem. Salmond and the SNP know all about this. See the second post on this blog, my submission to the National Conversation, I detailed it all in there, how it follows from how the British state was treating returns of exiles to Scotland in the 1990s, lying to us that our new homes were in rough areas when they provenly were not. Have we ever heard the SNP speak up for the victims of this, and fot the committal fact of the areas concerned being okay?

It is vandalism of this nation, just as much as supporting Trump is, to choose not to expose the truth about rent and mortgages, when our young diaspora are out there suffering the oppression of economic entrapment in exile, not sharing in the new Scotland which is theirs by right.

the National Conversation suppressed some responses

When the National Conversation did a consultation about holding the independence referendum, the website announced that some of the submissions received were being withheld from the public. Their own discretion was in control of making that choice. Here:

http://www.blogger.com/www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/05/24131023/0

This blog is for publishing what was censored, and opening to scrutiny the merits of why the SNP government should wish to suppress it. So where is the "harmful to others" content? and where is there any offensive content, apart from views they disagree with? If you spot any, come and comment here and point it out.

Perhaps other writers of the blocked submissions would like them put online here too? I expose here that they have just chosen to suppress views they disagree with and find embarrassing to their own views' merits. Including on issuesd to with racism and with the status of nuclear weapons, both would be important issues in the referendum. That filtering makes for a fiddled secretive and partial consultation process.