the jury is in

The SNP govt wanted, during the present state of emergency, to abolish juries. No attempt to do that has happened in Englandandwales, where jury trials are simply postponed for the duration. Mercifully, within a day they were stopped by all the Unionist parties: and okay, as the Unionists are not in a majority, also by the opposition of law professionals from their own ranks.

Human rights here have just passed through a breathtaking moment of emergency, and who from? From the reputed progressives who have told us for years they want to give us a nice more progressive state of our own, and campaigned against Brexit's likely rollback of ECHR-associated human rights safeguards. The independence movement's entire claim that Scottish governments and state would be innately more progressive and fairer, now stands smashed by this. This will always be there as a fact of history in the debate.

Notice it follows within days the MeToo extreme feminists' oopenly disliking that a woman-majority jury found Alex Salmond innocent. This has rightly split the nats into a bad fight on Facebook and in the National, where both the loyalists who saw politicality in the whole trial, and the scrupulous over the vital human right to presumption of innocence, have seen through the evil raving believe-what-we-want injustice of the radical feminists and their witch-hunt of men.

The Crossgate Centre on Mar 24 displayed on Facebook a reply to that character of radical feminists, that they well deserved, and deserve everyone to contemplate:

《 This tweet from Rhiannon Spear, the SNP National Women's Convener, in response to the Alex Salmond verdict yesterday is absolutely appalling, and has drawn a well-deserved backlash from SNP members and the wider Yes movement on Twitter. Her contempt for the principle of presumption of innocence, juducial due process, and not least the jury, 9 of whom, the majority, were women - makes her unfit for office.

Never mind respecting entitlement to presumption of innocence, clowns like you can't even respect a verdict from a female-majority jury if it goes in the accused's favour. You epitomise the entryism piggy-backing on & destroying an SNP where it is because of indy supporters. The tweet itself, Mar 23, and its reactions, are here.

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It was natural for society to wind down gradually

I have been interested to observe this. Every frequently meeting group known to me has been psychologically reluctant to stop. It was always been irresistible to go on and achieve their next meet so long as folks generally seem well. There is that mismatch, then, between a thinking group's natural instincts and the advice. Folks have stayed active until last weekend before the move to major shutdown from Mar 16, feeling they owed to each other to try not to drop activities, and there was always a next meet that would still be good to get done if folks were still well. Precautions like separately wrapped food started, and Anglican churches stopping their handshakes and shared communion wine from a shared cup; but knowing there were not yet many cases, folks all seemed to need the week of build-up of threat awareness, before the govt announcements of Mar 16, to get mentally ready to stop their social activities.

That felt right. It's particularly reasonable for support activities for vulnerable groups. It points against the kneejerk armchair opinion there was on Facebook for a sudden instant "lockdown" on the shockingly authoritarian model seen in some countries like Italy. As a report by Robert Peston raised, heavy handed lockdowns put the elderly at risk of unseen neglect inside their homes, which counters the argument that the authoritarian lockdown makes them safer from the virus. I agreed with the government keeping the country active as long as we were still mostly healthy, and being driven by events re when we had to tip over into shutdown. Because it all matched folks' irresistible common sense day-to-day behaviour in my experience, mine included. That has been the real practicality of folks' social and political lives, during the descent into this health emergency.

a dangerous passport trap, they must not be over 9 1/2 years old even if over 6 months left

TRAP ! KEEP NOTE OF THIS. #globalapartheid #passport6months

From a story in the Independent titled "BRITISH TRAVELLERS FACE BEING TURNED AWAY AT AIRPORTS OVER NEW PASSPORT EXPIRY RULES AFTER BREXIT." A funny title when we are after Brexit now, as if they have not yet got used to that. Or is it intentional to jolt Brexiters with a reminder that we are not yet into full Brexit conditions until they hit at the transition period's expiry, next new year?

It's important and devastatingly unjust what they are reporting. You can get caught out + pigheadedly oppressively denied travel, with all the serious lost money that means!! as well as humiliation, if you use a British passport that you think is okay because over 6 months left, but that is over 9 1/2 years old. Until 2018 Britain used to give back paid-for time on passports and issue them for longer periods than the exact 10 years. But in conflict with that well-intentioned move, arbitrarily oppressively + pointlessly, many countries don't recognise validity beyond 10 years + their 6 month rule cut you off at 9 1/2 years no matter the actual expiry date.

From next new year, our transition period's expiry, this will include the EU. The EU is wrong to choose to have these rules, even if most of the world has. Passports are unjustly losable documents anyway. There is fault on both sides in this, + honestly admitting so makes a more rational case to Brexiters than a line of always placing all the fault on Britain's side. It is wrong when Rejoiners are unwilling to say that, + want to place all the fault only on Britain's side in every story like this. Honesty with the balance of fault is needed in any hoping to shift attitudes when Brexit's impractical results hit.

response open letter to Lisa Nandy, to Mark Frankland's

Response by Maurice Frank to Mark Frankland. He is a Yes supporter, English and liking Scotland's political life better - though his argument from no visible homelessness in his home Dumfries does not ring true at all to the Central Belt cities. On Jan 18 Frankland wrote and blogged an open letter to Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy, in an angered response to her Andrew Neil interview. It s going viral akonv nats on social media. This response is to Lisa Nandy too, + is confirmed emailed on 20 Jan 2020 -

In urgent factual correction of MARK FRANKLAND's open letter to you on SCOTLAND, here is a too underreported fact about our situation. There is in fact a shocking family-wrecking racist prejudice that the Yes movement and SNP have, to date, still never removed from their policy. It is just as bad as anti-Semitism or Windrush. It has been there ever since their White Paper in 2013, it also surfaced as far back as our 1999 election, when a Labour broadcast warned: "If you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a Scottish citizen? No! They will have to apply."

It is a prejudice against nationhood through family ties, against being Scottish and entitled to citizenship by the practical connections that routinely go with having a parent who is. Copied from Quebec, they proposed in the referendum that automatic citizenship should only be by birth or residence at the instant of statehood.

Now, calling any category of citizenship automatic can be problematic, as a person with several possible citizenships may not want the one that some official wants to deem automatic: so I have no problem with asking claimants to descent citizenship to take an active step of choice for it. But obviously what must be automatic is that they get it. That is, it must be unrefusable.

Faced with inability to get any Yes source to say this, during the campaign, I lodged EU petition 1448/2014. This was not the naive humble type of petition making a request, it was a citation of ECHR article 8 on family life: so it remains a legal resource for anyone to cite and use. It cites, that article 8 obliges the EU to disown shun and sanction as an international pariah racist state, and not build any relationship with, a Scottish state where citizenship by parental descent is refusable.

Since then there are 3 limited successes to record fairly:

• In the National of 9 Jul 2016, Paul Kavanagh's column included parental descent in a list of European norms of citizenship.
• only verbally on a stall, a self-declared international law expert in the Yes Marchmont and Morningside group in Edinburgh concurred that ECHR will require us to honour this citizenship entitlement.
• at Perth's hustings last May 16, which was recorded, the Greens' Maggie Chapman gave the right answer on this.

There are good "Yessers" who persist in an unsecured faith that this will not be a problem. Some are my friends. But there are frequently encountered Yessers with the prejudice, to show it is a serious problem. Many of them hold that their theory "civic nationalism" defines a country as its presently in situ population, and makes it virtuous to reject anything to do with "blood and soil" - and they will class family ties as implying blood and race. They faithfully think it is a progressive line against genetic views of race, to reject our emigrants' offspring from being Scottish, hypocritically at the same time as claiming emigration as a Yes issue! As well as simply being xenophobic excluding and hateful, this line breaks apart families. Nationhood by parentage has always come from the life practicality of folks’ ties to their families, to the places where their families’ lives are rooted, and to family’s mutual support and sharing of resources. All nothing to do with genetics and long predating all knowledge of its existence.

They won't budge when you explain that. They cling to a seeming fear that to admit any practical humane argument for families will be a blunder into a naughty endorsement of blood-related thoughts. So they put themselves in an absurd mirror-image position, of calling inclusion racist and calling vile family-breaking exclusion anti-racist and progressive. During the campaign I had a bonechilling conversation of this nature with a Radical Independence stall, arguing that line in all theoretical earnestness, opposing and calling racist any parental descent citizenship at all, constantly asking "how far back do you go?" to everything I said for nuclear families whose practical position is obviously not the same as the distant past's generations. MP Angus Macneil denied to the Sunday Post 23 Feb 2014 that anyone who has never lived here is Scottish.

The position of an emigrant's child, born in diaspora and growing up in the wrong country, has a parallel with the transgender position in the wrong gender: it too can be an emotional dysphoria with a practical basis. Not to uphold it is a social inconsistency. Their identities collide with the horrible school bully attitude I propose to name "birthplace racism", even dividing siblings: the bigotry of regarding country as dictated by birthplace. Then should the racists could get to see their victim rejected by the country they identify with?? Birthplace has visibly not correlated with country ever since the ancient Jews' Babylonian exile in the Old Testament, many folks are born in places they have no further connection with, Labour's morally outstanding recent election policy of right of return for the Chagossians recognised descent nationhood, it features on both sides in the Israel/Palestine problem. But given that common sense life practicality makes citizenship by birth also a natural right, notice a cruel exclusion by the Yessers here too. Against an older SNP pledge, they wanted to make citizenship by birth only apply to preexisting British citizens, thus continuing to cruelly exclude folks born to visiting parents who the British rules have excluded since Thatcher's changes in 1983. I met such a person online and failed to get Yes to solve his position either!

Just as Tory ministers with immigrant backgrounds have been happy to do anti-immigrant things, existence of some diaspora-born Scots in the independence movement's lead names does not disprove this descent citizenship scandal. The onus can only be on Angus Robertson, Lesley Riddoch, Mike Russell, Iain Macwhirter to explain why they support a movement containing prejudice against themselves. Meanwhile, by human rights there is never in the world a duty, there was not in 2014 either, to allow independence votes for any nation unless it is known that its citizenship rules will always comply with all family and personal practicalities without any cruel gaps.

Maurice Frank

from the moment of the election! new travel laws designed to persecute Roma

AND VOTERS WERE TAUGHT TO BELIEVE IT WAS LABOUR that had become affected by a racism associated with the Nazi period ??

- This is sourced from the Conservative manifesto - https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/12/gypsies-travellers-boris-roma-crackdown-conservative-tory/?fbclid=IwAR2wq2noQ0xJeDJc3zdI7eHivKOPPrjK39RiPQMOm0MukHtG1u678Zu5MK4

My evil head teacher, at our breach in 1985: "Any society requires enforceable rules, even in mundane matters such as traffic control, laws are necessary. If a school is to function then it too has to have rules. Opinions may vary as to the type of rules required, but none the less rules there must be !

One Gypsy mother, who wished to remain anonymous due to the possibility of violent retaliation: “I will become a criminal everywhere I go. I would be a criminal staying on a friend’s farmyard, even if I was invited to visit. At motorway services. In a layby. Popping into the supermarket,” she said. “There is no minimum time frame mentioned. From the minute I apply the handbrake, and before I stop the engine, I will be illegal.”

The proposed laws would allow police to seize the homes of Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller people by force and to destroy their property without compensation. The proposal also says Travellers can be banned from the local authority area for up to a year, cutting off access to support for homelessness, which often requires someone to have been a resident in the area for a length of time, leaving many in fear of having to live on the streets.

#election2019 #travellers #Roma #Conservatives #antisemitism #homelessness #law

Perth march numbers shown as wild lies on video

The nat march in Perth Sep 7 was 3160. The lyingly claimed 20K would have stretched a great distance through the Letham housing estate where they started. The 3160 stretched for hardly a block.

A blow for the more defensively aggressive + closed minded flavour of nats in that region, than in the big central cities, who were awaiting the little march's arrival at North Inch park.

Amazing Perth Video Reveals March Lies As the subscript explains, the march was spread out by big gaps in it. To that I can add: it strted in 2 separated clumps. One beside the sports field, the other 2 minutes down the street.

The National has run an up-itself headline complaining that BBC news did nof report it. There are many things BBC news does not report, while it often reports praising itself: any thinking person should realise it has its own selective worldview like all news media have, and should look at several sources. The same as you would not trust the National on its own. But in this case, there is a reasonable point about newsworthiness that is getting made on the National's Facebook page. It has long since ceased to be newsworthy that largely the same 3K folks bus around and hold repetitive marches in different towns every few weeks of the year's warmer half, then lie that they were many times bigger than they were.

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.