Yes to save the Union

Vote Yes to be sure we will stay in the EU. So the Sunday Herald and Nicola Sturgeon portrayed it.

That is how it may well turn out, but they are being too sure too hastily. Spain's capacity for wrecking vetoes in the EU remains. Reasonability is never to be relied on. Nor is "oh but you want all our luvly oil."

If England drifts as clearly anti-EU as the tabloids there are now trying to take it, which will be a sinisterly deliberate drift to racism in our politics like we are supposed to believe can only happen in Germany or South Africa, then even with the concerns of wrecking by Spain it will still be a better choice to take the pro-EU path of voting Yes. The referendum would then be a choice between 2 ways of having our EU membership interrupted, and Yes would be the choice that says we want it back. But it won't wash without specific answers from the Yes side explaining how we could trust our new state, explaining how they can bind it ahead now, to keep upholding the EU citizenship we already have and the secure place here of all our European friends who have come to live here. e.g. I have been greatly helped in some medical work by a Polish friend who came here without the type of already lined up employment that racists would demand, and who now has employment doing key good in the field concerned. Whether we end up back in the EU or in a Norway position in both EFTA and Schengen, just as good because it keeps the European open borders, we need to know what safeguards that no racism will be pandered to during the long haul.

It is being talked up that the British major parties will all come behind a EU referendum for 2015/6. That deprives Scotland of a properly informed decision in its own vote. It is happening the wrong way round, and no journalists yet are challenging that. But by becoming better at dialogue with voters than they have been, the Yes side have an opportunity to show they will be the safest choice. Only if they take said opportunity will they be the safest choice.

die of debate

According to the Sunday Herald's last front page, reckless new workfare rules for disability/sickness benefits are going to cause a lot of health damage from pushing folks into unsuitable placements they can't cope with. This comes from the British end, under whose powers the welfare system still rests. The Yes campaign will say this is a good humanitarian reason to leave Britain. Become a state where both major parties are progressive, "no more Tory governments" as had been on the SSP's Yes voting posters in Edinburgh.

But look at the independence timetable. It is actually longer than the British government's term, Salmond the reluctant seceder will take until 2016!! to actually do it. Clinging to every crumb he can on Britain's table. All this suffering will still happen while we are still waiting.

Oh but me must have a good long debate. So if folks die under pushing around by the benefits system and Atos, under 3 1/2 years of us still subject to this new system, they die to give us something to debate, do they?

the nat clearances?

The long term Nat maverick Jim Sillars who finds the SNP totalitarian, and their former leader Anti-Gay Gordon, now want us to leave the EU. In the wake of Salmond's mess up of the Scottish EU membership issue and doubt, they have jumped on the same Euro-angry bandwagon as the British right wing and tabloids.

This when the sudden mushrooming to seriousness of a chance of Britain leaving the EU had become the strongest looking reason for voting for independence. Instead the contagion has spread to both sides. That is bandwagons among the political class for you.

How do they expect our European friends and guests, living here and playing a welcome and often major role in many of our lives, to feel safe? Anti-EU voices on both sides need to be challenged to clarify what they intend for the future of EU citizens living here. The obvious fear is of a new clearance, a mass expulsion from the country of people who are friends or workers with real lives intertwined with ours. Thanks to Sillars and Wilson the question now exists against both sides. Before, it was a question for the No side. Salmond too, who you have noticed never clashes with the tabloid racist vote, should have made clear that our friends can stay here if our EU membership is interrupted. Pandering to the British tabloid consensus against Schengen in a way that is absurd for a movement to separate from the country where that nasty consensus is strongly rooted, neither has he ever touched the option of joining Schengen even from outside the EU, like Norway and Iceland and Switzerland. That would secure our friends here. Would Spain veto that too? Even if it would, it is right to propose the option and put Spain under an isolated pressure on the issue.

Both sides, tell us our friends are safe. Otherwise, the referendum will be like poker! We are not informed enough on both futures if we don't know what the EU membership outcome will be with either of them. That is why we fairly need any voting on the EU to be done before on independence. But it won't be, neither side is offering to do it that way round. What a spiral. Sillars and Gordon have said vote on the EU after a win for independence. No, we need to already know what our own decision is on whether we would be in the EU before we can vote for our own state in the first place.

SACC adds an African country to the reform SACC won't acknowledge

On Sep 27, when the deportations of Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad to America's supermax solitary confinement jail system were still preventable, I had to post on here how the campaign most prominently fighting their cause to Scottish supporters, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, was wilfully ignoring an outstanding multi-country democratic reform that it has never denied is real and that could help fight their case.

The court change, which is also explained in my submission to the first independence consultation in 2010 whose non-publishing prompted this blog. So that if the same Scottish government as this week has been caught wasting many thousands of public money on a now abandoned court fight to hide legal advice that never existed, had been open that the court change exists and had ended its now 13 year long cover up by the media and the political class, it could have prevented the deportations too.

Incredibly, today SACC has circulated to its Facebook supporters a link to a Daily Mail story telling another really important story that the court change contributes to - and by it SACC has added another country to the list of those whose people can lay claim to the court change. Mahdi Hashi is a British citizen of Somali origin who has been stripped his citizenship arbitrarily whole abroad, by Theresa May by a dangerous power of decree that she does not need to take through the courts. In the past he had refused pressures to join MI5 to spy on his own community to monitor which way their geopolitical sympathies were going. It is feared he is being secretly held in a rendition camp in Jibouti.

By rebuffing enquiries into this, both (1)by the action of rebuffing them and (2)by it being part of Hashi's case consequently that there is unrefuted potential evidence he is there, Jibouti has taken part in Hashi's case. It is a legal case that overlaps into 4 countries that are already court change: Britain, the US, Somalia, Somaliland. By this, the open ended non-finality of case outcome that the court change carries is introduced into a matter of Jibouti's legal system dealing with. By this, Jibouti too becomes a court change country. The court change now applies to Jibouti.

It may be that Jibouti was already court change through an unpublicised earlier case. But that Jibouti is a court change country as from now, from Hashi's case, we know thanks to SACC. Yet SACC still won't refer to the court change in its own writings or say a word acknowledging it is real, will it?

EU mucked up

Nobody needs telling that Salmond has not had a happy day in the newspapers. Or in his party. Blink and savour having a majority government while it lasts, it may be over any minute.

Just when the SNP's years of tabloid law and order nastiness towards the young seemed to be starting to thaw, as he pledged a bill to make the voting age 16 properly. How will all that young bashing, the tightening up on pubs and their under-18 licensing, look in hindsight if the same party that did it makes some breathtakingly ironically British history by turning out to drive votes at 16 into place across all Britain's elections? After the half generation of nasty reluctance and faffing there has been by the British major parties, continuing not to do it, all through the new era of reform opportunities since Thatcherism ended in 1997?

Just when Salmond seemed to start turning a bit nicer to the young again, now that he needs their votes, he had to go and spoil his whole enterprise by the sneakiness over our continued EU membership, where the SNP has now been tripped up. To try to be popular he persisted in saying he would go along with the existing British system's narky old racist line of not joining Schengen. If we had to rejoin the EU as a new member we might have to join Schengen: GOOD - I want to join Schengen. So does any rational and humane person who fears the losability of travel documents and finds covering the world in apartheid passport barriers an obstacle to common sense life. Though Schengen only exists because the EU does, you can even belong to Schengen without belonging to the EU, like Norway, which is worth knowing if our membership gets interrupted.

It was not worth telling fibs and blowing trust for the whole Yes campaign when it was falling behind in support already, to get out of joining Schengen and pander to Tory passport racism. That will be a mortifying mortal failing for the Yes campaign to be remembered with in history.

OCT 26: Newsnet Scotland here has posted a story that was in the Herald, of the European Commission Vice-President saying EU citizenship once given can't be taken away. Yes supporters on Facebook can criticise the BBC for not majoring on this story, but they are seizing on it too eagerly, it does not establish Scotland would be in the EU, only that we would not lose our citizenship for travelling to the EU.

You've Been Trumped

"You’ve Been Trumped", the award winning documentary by film-maker Anthony Baxter, will be broadcast across Britain next Sunday 21 Oct at 2200 on BBC2 and BBC HD (2255 in N Ireland) and repeated at 0020 on Tuesday 23 Oct.

You've Been Trumped tells the story of the extraordinary confrontation between the tycoon Donald Trump and a proud tightly knit community of Scottish residents, following the controversial approval of the Trump development at Menie by Alex Salmond's government, gratefully for which Trump is now talking of suing them over a wind farm. The Trump golf course has been built on a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) after the government decided the "economic benefits outweighed any environmental concerns."

scarred by 10 months and a random bit

An awful lot of 16 year olds are going to feel damagingly betrayed, from the British end not Salmond's, and alienated from politics yet again, as the media now will spend 2 years keeping telling us they have been given the vote. When the great day comes they will find they have still not been after all. For Cameron has forced the trick device only allowing Salmond to use the electoral register complied with the 18 age limit, so that 16 and 10 months and a random bit is the actual age the referendum franchise will be given at.

Unless of course, unless the agreement now gets the fight for a lower voting age won within the next 2 years. We must all try for that.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/votes-at-16-a-seminal-moment-for-scottish-democracy.1350307449