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.

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!!!

voting Labour no more?

Nicola Sturgeon in PMQs today, said independence will mean no more getting taken into illegal wars by Labour Governments.

No it won't. Unless it's a one party state, independence will have no means to mean anything of the kind. We might elect a Labour Government, that is very likely on Scotland's voting history, and it may make the same choices as Blair's did. It's this fallacy again, that is happening on both sides, of assuming independence will mean SNP policies. Why should it?

Even if it was an SNP Government, look at the SNP's manic fetishing over regiments and military traditions because of the patriot vote around them? They were close to the media tycoons, how can we know they would not be close to the pushes for Western interventionist wars?

Johann Lamont's comparison of all the SNP's recent watering down of independence with Life of Brian and its famous scene What Have the Romans Done For Us, was so accurate and apt. Spot on.