leaving the gatekeeper.

An "Edinburgh Research Council", first time I've heard of them, and a professor Jo Shaw, have produced some research on the issues around citizenship for a new Scottish state. They want to make a ripple by suggesting it would effectively be the UK instead of Scotland that got to decide who would be a Scottish citizen.

So isn't that an obvious danger from the policy of remaining in the British Isles Common Travel Area? A position the Yes side has too recklessly bound to because Alex fears the unpopularity of having a border control?

But the wider position with the rest of the world makes this counterintuitive. It's right not to want a border control, a barrier between people, a part of the nastiness of global apartheid. Certainly we should say we won't put a border control on by our choice. But how do we minimise border controls and maximise our access links with our diaspora, unless our actions are independentof being dictated by the UK? and by the chilling mounting racism of 2 of its leading parties, and real threat of it leaving the EU? In order not to have border controls dictated to us by them, and barriers put on our diaspora - and by it, exactly as the prof says, treated as not independent! - we need to be willing to pursue a separate line from the UK's even when we know it will result in them slapping a border control onto us.

If we can't get a common travel area with anyone because our own needs, with our own diaspora to retrieve from the oppression of exile, are more open door and liberal than any other country will agree to, then that is what we should do. Better to be an ingathered and enriched pro-migrant people than to be casually able to pop next door. But if we can get compatibility with this openness from the European travel area Schengen, then we will obviously be better off in Schengen than in the British Isles Common Travel Area. Even if England and Ireland slapped border controls onto us, that's 2 countries doing that, in exchange for the gain of having no barriers with 26 countries.

one of the heard

Alex, if you want this to be the independence generation, you need to make us the HEARD GENERATION. None of whose responses to the consultation stage of your bill get excluded from the record. It's simple. Otherwise, you are telling us you want to go down in history for throwing away the independence generation by not listening to them.

Blair Jenkins leader of the Yes campaign says "If you are sick and fed up of the corrosive and cynical world of Westminster, then next year we can be rid of that." But not of its currency. Rid of the entire way British politics works while still using a currency issued as part of British politics and controlled by it. Everyone can see this is contradictory and a mess up.

When you meet Yes supporters informally, they find Alex's currency union sellout an embarrassment and millstone to them. All the other Yes supporting parties besides the SNP would go for issuing our own Groats. They don't want our spending and budgeting to lie held to ransom by another state that we will have no vote in or influence over. Because they know that is actually less independence not more!! and will find us betrayed and still under the cuts regime they told us we were voting to get rid of.

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.

within snatching distance

There you are, Yes folks. Henry McLeish, one of our former Labour Prime Ministers

-let's call 'em that, none of this "First Minister" artificiality, after all Northern Ireland had Prime Ministers 1921-72 -

still as yet a No voter himself, says Yes is still winnable. Wrote it in the Scotsman. For all the stated practical reasons of keeping a socially just line on social services and staying in the EU, that you tell us is what you want to win it for. As good as concedes the Yes case, straight after that naff American pollster was calling its defeat. The No case is not inspiring anyone.

The Yes case is not inspiring anyone either. Leave it as it is, you will miss the chance McLeish has conceded you have. Stop compromising with the tabloids and make the campaign more participative, use the items folks sent in to your consultations instead of going with the British level's keeping them unpublicised, then folks could trust you, then you could snatch back your chances.

No-brainer. Always has been.

While Peru becomes court change, what says the Scottish govt about it for a Scot abroad?

Gordon Wilson had been saying the Yes campaign is soulless, again. It's the result of it not wanting to say anything new and outside the carefully filtered range of ideas that the political class comfortably tolerates for itself. That is what they care more strongly about than actual statehood. No new content, no acknowledging that the court change exists, no inspiration to reopen the homeland to all the diaspora, means no inspired public. That will be their place in history, they created this moment and just offered same-old.

At this moment, silence on the court change means silence towards a Scot in trouble abroad, and towards all the parents worried for their own young adults travelling to the same places. Ibiza belongs to Spain, and like us, Spain belongs to the Council of Europe, whose member countries are where the court change began. The first to be made court change by the item of corrupted practice by the European Court of Human Rights, in making a factually impossible decision and calling it final, that created the court change in 1999.Full write-up explaining the court change has long been on this blog, here It abolishes final decisions, which makes all court decisions open endedly faultable on their reasoning, including for being corrupted. So the court change applies to the present case of Melissa Reid from Scotland and Michaella McCollum.

They have a pressing humanitarian need for it to become publicly known, so that it can be used to actually scrutinise all worries over the handling of their case and be used to challenge any bad standards in it. But are our Scottish government and Yes campaign going to do this? Or our British government and No campaign, either? Many folks before them have had a pressing humanitarian need too, but have not had the court change publicised for them: including shockingly many asylum deportees from Britain, and including the folks deported to the US a year ago labelled as terror suspects after a deficient process at the ECHR.

Reid and McCollum's case extends the court change to another country, Peru. It may be our media's fault that I had never before found a case that extended it to Peru, which has been a very late reached country, and that in fact there is a much earlier case that does it: but until we discover that, at least their case does it and the people of Peru now have claim that the court change applies in their country. When a legal case overlaps between a country that has the court change and another country, the court change causes the case's content to be open endedly faultable and not final. This forces each country involved in the case to deal with open endedness. So for those countries that were not yet court change until the case happened, open ended non-final case content, hence case outcome too, is created in their legal system. THEY BECOME COURT CHANGE TOO. It is a brilliant opportunity that this lets folks all over the world help each other to get a massive advance of democracy in their countries. It just needs to be widely enough realised.

Because Reid and Connolly's case overlaps between Spain, which is court change, and Peru, it makes Peru court change too.

overall impact of the benefit changes

This is circulated by Liam Byrne the shadow minister for work and pensions, seeking for folks to ask their MPs, of any party, to support a British parliamentary vote for a study of the total effect all the benefit changes combined. Not just of each single change in isolation, which can always be made to sound less. Some of the impact comes from combined effects. Remember absurdly, this is about the system we now face keeping until 2019 or beyond after independence, too!:

After more than 3 years in power, it’s time for this government to finally come clean and tell us exactly what impact their changes will have on the lives of disabled people and their carers.

So on Wednesday 10 July, Labour will drag ministers to the House of Commons to debate the changes they have made that affect disabled people, and at about 16:00 we will force a vote to demand a Cumulative Impact Assessment by Oct 2013 at the latest – and we will be calling on MPs from across the House to support it.

I am asking supporters to help build pressure on the government in 3 ways:

• Write to your MP and ask them to back the motion
• Write to your local paper and explain why we urgently need a cumulative impact assessment
• Tweet your support using #MakeRightsReality – here’s the link to the motion (liambyrne.co.uk/?p=4534)

This government is failing to support our disabled people. It’s time for Ministers to come clean, admit where they are getting things wrong and change course.

Please share this page with anyone who might be interested.

Here’s the motion in full:
“That this House believes that the Government should publish a cumulative impact assessment of the changes made by this Government that affect disabled people (to be published by Oct 2013).”