bouncing on a poll

It is the perception of several of the papers, that that after the British parties vetoed a currency union the polls showed an initial bounce towards Yes, out of anger against having a British decision impose a situation on us, but that this has now converted into an eventual clearer swing to No as the outcome. Probably so, but why?

It is the perception of seemingly all the papers, that it is because the merits of what Osborne says has got through to us, or that we are accepting there won't be a currency union and being daft enough to think it matters. That does not sound right: all indications until now have been that nobody much among voters, only Salmond himself, ever cared about the currency union issue or was ever keen on the idea. so it can't be that, can it?

So here is a different idea. Isn't it more likely that folks' initial reaction to the currency union announcement, the Yes bounce, reflected and still reflects what we think of it. We did not all change our minds about it after a bit of thought, how likely is that? So something else, not the original announcement, has caused the swing to no that has followed. So what else has happened affecting perception of the issue? -Salmond's absurd response to it. Treating us as stupid, saying don't believe what they say, believe what I want to believe. Showing in the Yes campaign a character of unconvincingness and no regard for factual verification. not being offered any factual answer on the issue, any dealing with the position as it is. That's what is widely recgonised as the nonsense in the line the SNP has taken on this. So that's what has turned the polls back to No. Not the demerits of currency union itself or of the British announcement - but the demerits of responding to any issue with gameplaying frivolity and selective blotting out of facts. Some place to have in history.

Yeah - and?

www.facebook.com/VoteNo2014/photos/a.177722718953393.48305.174186732640325/658717074187286/?type=1&theater

Summed up perfectly by the SNP's incredible non-reply, on TV last night, just of "Yeah - and?" to the point that their policy is to surrender sovereignty into a union! and by these Facebook comments on it:

• When Annabel Goldie asked Fiona Hyslop about the ceding of sovereignty a currency union would create, she had a very simple response "Yeah....and?", It now seems like SNP ministers don't have much to say on some of the most important issues in this debate!
• So, having won your Independence, you're going to give some/all of it back to the people you've just won it from, except WITHOUT any input into ANY decisions that will be taken on your behalf by those very same people. Is it just me or is this a totally bonkers suggestion!
• At last an honest response from an Independence supporter. It's a shame it's a mere foot-stamping, petulant response worthy of a teenager who has just been found when she lied.
• Wanting both to use the pound and have the Bank of England setting your fiscal policies for you. That is Independence so light it is verging on Featherweight.

nationalists continuing the Clearances

NATIONALISTS CONTINUING THE CLEARANCES !! Yes, you read that right.

Before campaign details and policy crystallised, the Yes position offered great possibilities of helping the diaspora and producing a more liberal regime over citizenship than the British one. That is all utterly extinguished now. In the time since the White Paper came out, the Yes campaign has turned very ugly and sinister. It seems to be pandering to the racist vote now popular in all British politics, and to an anti-outsider racist strand in the SNP's support. It is betraying and backstabbing the Scottish diaspora, in ways that actually form a continuance of the clearances, dividing families and taking Scots' country away from them.

Have already mentioned here how the latest circulated Yes paper described the terms of automatic Scottish citizenship as not including the children of exile, the Scots born in what we now call "rUK" (rest of Britain) if they can't move home before indy day to qualify for citizenship by the absurd arbitrariness of living here on that one day. Already mentioned that neither they nor any of the Yes supporting parties have answered enquiries about it, about interpretation of the provision for "may register for citizenship."

Now something has happened that clinches a turn to a sinister appeal to outsider hate on the Yes side. An SNP MP has actually denied that the folks at stake in this issue are Scottish. It was in this Sunday Post story yesterday.

ON WHAT ENTIRE BASIS, SQUARED WITH THIS, ARE THE SNP PLANNING TO HOLD A HOMECOMING FESTIVAL ????? This Angus Macneil, MP for the Outer Hebrides, may be remembered in history as the exploder of every decent opportunity this referendum could ever have been and its association instead with dividing families, with hate between siblings, with dividing Scot against Scot, with tearing a whole section of the nation out of it, absolutely the stuff of the clearances and racial persecution.

In the Yes campaign's absurd party of wishful thinking, saying just choose not to believe anything that gets in our way, they are all wrong and bluffing, just believe whatever Salmond wants to be true, they might answer this point by claiming that the pledge for the common travel area and an open English border means that foul play upon the Scottish diaspora does not matter. this is of course convenient wishful thinking and wrong. The EU common travel area might cease to include either country, either one, we know there are uncertain futures around that attaching to voting either way. rUK might put a closed border on, it has said so, it owes nothing to make Salmond's inconsistent promise, to belong to the British common travel area yet have an independent border policy, work. So exclusion from citizenship can translate into exclusion from living here.

So until he and the Yes campaign pledge automatic right citizenship for the children of exile without our new state having any power even in theory to say no to any of them as citizens, and they have been totally reluctant to do that as yet, many many Scottish families with cross border links now know that the practical and moral position has been totally swung to voting No. Done actually by nationalists' own attitudes to thwe world community of Scots.

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.

Yes for who?

On the same day as the news of their sudden narrowing of the polls gap, the Yes side may have blown any deserving to win. Unless they put something right, they have let it slip through their fingers just when your spirits were highest, tragically by a thoughtless piece of racist sloppiness from the ideas-conservative heart of the SNP.

The latest Yes paper, which came through my door today, states "all British citizens who were born here or live here on day one of independence will have a right to a Scottish passport." It said nothing at all about the diaspora born's position, it was written in a way that the public can read as meaning the diaspora born who can't move back here before independence day are not necessarily entitled at all. It presents the exile born as not counting if they are not already here, it does not present the diaspora as equal.

They may be kids who will only be adult after the date, or young adults stuck in the family economic dependence that is deliberate Tory policy,

I know the White Paper clarifies that the exile born for 2 generations can also register for a passport by right - btw a betrayal of Salmond's plan of only a few months previously, to make it 3 generations. But this point is about the public message, rather than the less known detailed facts. The presentation has suddenly sloppily slid back to the 1999 election, when the SNP made that crucial policy foul-up and was open to attack by Labour as dividing families. This may cause racist bullying, among the thick laddish type of adult, and among schoolkids some of whom are in the 16 franchise where already before this Yes was said to be trailing unexpectedly.

An interesting site linked to by Yes supporters on Facebook is "100 Artists and Creatives who support Scottish independence." The list includes diaspora born Lesley Riddoch. Were the folks in the campaign she supports remembering all their supporters when they wrote the paper?

taking to the hills in Russia?

Green leader Patrick Harvie is gay, and outspoken on gay equal ops. Russia has swung to a chilling explicit state anti-gay hate policy, showing that modern diplomacy does not tie dodgy states never to breach those lines. So it seems logically natural, as well as right, for Harvie to talk of "Putin's brutal regime": against the Sunday Herald's creepy story of Britain wanting to draw anti-separatist diplomatic solidarity from Russia and imagine that actually winning voters!

But Harvie leads a CND party that has always wanted us to live stripped of defences against Russia. Does he no' find the brutal regime a worry that way? It's a very unusual acknowledgement of fact from a Green. They never call Russia a brutal regime, not even back in the Soviet era did they do that, it sat so ill with the CND policy. Why does he think the good pro-gay folks in Russia are not stopping Putin's policy by means of the type of civil resistance movement that CND believers have always claimed we could beat off an invasion by? Because it doesn't work, that's why. Because populations, full of political apathy and social nastiness to each other in normal times, can't suddenly stick together in comradeship to achieve a solid mass effect whose first pain is upon themselves, and can't halt all the functioning of social services and food supplies they need for themselves too, see. As the fuel blockaders found in 2000.

This thought's noticeability goes against his own Yes side, if it persists in being intellectual-left fashionably CND and ideologically revelling in defencelessness as a great cool option. All the smaller Yes parties, including his, are pushing it that way. But looking at Putin's regime, in order to vote Yes we need to see the intellectual-left CND posturing watered down enough that de facto we will still be under the West European Bomb, allied to it and seeing that its coverage won't in fact be capable of restriction to only a part of this island and not to the whole.

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.