Liberation Scotland's wish to disenfranchise one million "incomers" - isn't that a rather sinister echo of Reform UK's language about deporting "strangers"?

I was thinking of writing a blogpost tonight about the latest chapter in Stew's prolonged temper tantrum about the Crown Office and Police Scotland impertinently refusing to accept that he is their Overlord and that they must defer to instructions from him (he's called his latest article 'The Land Of Do-As-You-Please', but 'The Land In Which Stew Is Not Actually Il Duce' might have been more apt).  But as I'm on a bit of a roll today with expressing some rather severe doubts about Salvo and Liberation Scotland, I thought I'd instead take a look at a long Twitter post from the latter, because I'm both struck and disturbed by how the language of the post echoes Reform UK rhetoric.  Whereas Thomas "Shut That Door" Kerr wants to deport "strangers", Liberation Scotland and Salvo merely want to disenfranchise "incomers".

"The dumbfounding thing is, when the SNP-led Scottish government goes to Westminster to ask for a 'Section 30' order, it is apparently quite content to hold the same, warped, glorified opinion poll, open to the same British state inspired political, media and corporate propaganda, the same monarchic intervention, potentially the same last minute 'Vow'. And worst of all, the same totally inappropriate local authority franchise giving a vote on the Scots nation's future to anything up to a million incomers who would have no right to such a vote to elect a national government anywhere in the world, never mind one on a matter of such immense moment of a nation's exercise of self-determination."

That isn't just deeply offensive to many hundreds of thousands of people who are committed to Scotland and in many cases identify as New Scots, it's also factually inaccurate because there are in fact countries such as New Zealand in which even non-citizens are able to vote in national elections.  But that isn't even what we're talking about here, because there is no such thing as a Scottish citizenship and there won't be this side of independence, and therefore most of the million people being referred to in fact share precisely the same citizenship as "Scots", however that term is being defined.

For those of you who genuinely want to strip voting rights from English people resident in Scotland in a future indyref, even if you don't accept that is morally wrong and undemocratic, I would at least ask you to ponder how tactically foolish it is.  I know Salvo and Liberation Scotland don't accept this, but ultimately we will need UK government recognition for our independence, however grudging, and we won't get that by fiddling the franchise and cheating our way to a Yes majority.  The franchise has to be seen to be fair otherwise the entire exercise is a waste of time.  Furthermore, even if you're naive enough to believe you'd get away with fiddling the franchise for an indyref, we'll still need votes from these "incomers" in regular elections that occur before then, and telling people you're going to disenfranchise them is a rather unpromising way of asking for their support in an election.

And you know what?  Some of you really won't want to hear this bit, but it's true: Alex Salmond had no truck whatever with the idea of removing the vote from English people in an indyref.  When he phoned me up in the autumn of 2021 to "ask" me to stop disagreeing in public with Barrhead Boy about the subject, the point he repeatedly stressed was that I didn't actually need to have that argument, because Barrhead Boy quite simply wasn't going to get his way.  "No party led by me will ever support anything other than a civic franchise" he told me, and that's pretty much a word-for-word quote.  What he meant by a civic franchise was the same local government franchise that was used for the 2014 referendum.

I must say the pedantic hair-splitting about whether the 2014 referendum was a binding vote or a "glorified opinion poll" seems totally alien to me.  As it was an agreed referendum, and as both governments publicly committed themselves in advance to implementing the result, it's stretching credibility somewhat to suggest a Yes vote would have had no effect.  There were many things wrong with the 2014 vote, but its technically non-binding status was not one of them.

And no matter what terms a future referendum takes place under, I'm struggling to see how you're going to prevent propaganda from the British state or monarchy, or a repeat of "The Vow", unless you're actually going to ban the No side from campaigning or the media from reporting what they say.

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This is Post 5 of "Seven Days of Retro Scot Goes Pop" - a shameless gimmick in which I attempt to solve this blog's funding problems in the space of a week with a conventional text-blogging marathon to help promote my Ko-Fi donations page, during which period pre-moderation in the comments section will be switched off.  My target for the week is to either get up to 60 regular monthly supporters on Ko-Fi (as of now I have 21), or to reach £1500 in one-off donations to the page, or some sort of combination of a bit of both.  In an equally shameless attempt to coax KC's stinking rich Tory landowner chums in Surrey into helping to fund Scot Goes Pop, I have pledged to try to leave pre-moderation switched off even after the seven days are over, but only if at least one of the targets is met in full.  Yes, it's time to play hardball with our resident "Nessie" enthusiast.  

If you might be interested in making either a small recurring monthly donation or a one-off donation, please check out my Ko-Fi page HERE.