Used in campaigning on Scotland and all claims to its EU rejoining prospects.
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As the lodger of EU petition 1448/2014, simply as the person who cared enough to lodge it, I am a party to the law situation between EU and Scotland.
ECHR human rights are part of EU law. 1448/2014 was not the naive humble type of petition making a request, it is a citation of ECHR upon the EU’s duties of action. As such, it sits in record permanently as a legal resource, for anyone to cite and use. To ensure it was an admissible petition it started from grounds of the Scottish electorate’s unawareness of the issue with citizenship, a petition on that, an undeniably petitionable aspect of the independence mandate if Yes had won. With that ensuring its place in the record, then it did its real purpose. It cites that ECHR article 8, family life, obliges the EU to disown shun and sanction Scotland as an international pariah racist state and have no dealings with us – unless our citizenship by parental descent is unrefusable.
I lodged it during indyref1, benefitting from EU membership by the power to lodge it – as a result of discovering that the Yes campaign’s plan was infected with a horrifying racism against the family ties route of national belonging, and that this hate was actually part of some interpretations of “civic nationalism”. Yet this fail conflicts with Yes’s rhetoric of generous borders! After the White Paper, for the whole time from then to poll, I found that no part of the Yes movement would say that citizenship by parental descent would be unrefusable. This includes Salmond himself to me on his last phone-in. This is why I voted No, and did a flyer campaign “No to a new Clearances”.
Yet in early 2013, pre White Paper, Salmond had portrayed that we were going to follow Ireland, with a 2 generations provision for descent. My Yes vote was safely in the bag then. Did he get a nasty bigot response from his followers and change his mind into going back to a more excluding policy when it came time to publish the details? The White Paper policy, followed by Yes ever since, has a 2 generation provision “available” to apply or register for, but “available” can be refusable. Automatic citizenship was kept only to birth and residence at the date of statehood, and those only for preexisting British citizens too. The model copied from Quebec, that in the 1999 election had allowed a Labour broadcast to say:: “If you move to Newcastle and have a child, will they automatically be a Scottish citizen? No! They will have to apply.”Policy officer on it Nickola Paul answered me that the details, including of “any discretionary elements”, would be decided in the statebuilding after a Yes vote – an admission that it could be refusable.
Ever since the White Paper, there have been frequently encountered Yessers who hold that their theory “civic nationalism” defines a country as its present resident 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 or blood, to reject our emigrants’ offspring from being Scottish. This hypocritically at the same time as claiming emigration as a Yes issue! Hence progressive to be xenophobic excluding and hateful and break up 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 doctrinally forbidden endorsement of “blood” or “ethnic nationalism”. So they put themselves in an absurd shocking mirror-image position, of calling inclusion racist and exclusion anti-racist and progressive. I attended Common Weal’s big day in indyref1, and had there a bonechilling conversation like this with the Radical Independence stall. An earnest young stallholder argued that line eagerly, and based on Marxist theory of nation. He argued against any descent citizenship at all and kept calling it racist! He constantly asked “how far back do you go?” to everything I said for the practical life needs of nuclear families. His scientific certainty that his rejection of a whole population group was progressive, entitling him to switch off all critical faculty about it, is plainly identical to the way folks believed in the Nazis.
To refuse citizenship of their own country, to a person who is born in diaspora to emigrant parents and does not chance to be resident here on the date of statehood, to make them unentitled to caring services and even to refuse them residency, stops families from living their family life together or in proximity, stops them giving each other practical care, stops them pooling their resources and giving each other economic refuge in time of need: thus breaks up families.
During indyref1 there were: Angus Macneil the Outer Hebrides MP who mocked counting as Scottish anyone who has never lived here – Sunday Post front page 23-2-14, Jim Sillars, who told George Galloway his son might not get citizenship, and told a big Yes audience at Liberton school 7-5-14 “We can’t have an open door” and that he wanted the diaspora-born to be treated as immigrants and filtered for skills, “and we must not be afraid of this”, Alex Neil, who confirmed at Tynecastle school Yes meeting 12-3-14 that descent citizenship would be refusable and said it was because of “undesirables”, which could easily mean the poor, and Pat Kane at his Stevenson lecture 19-3-14, who explained civic nationalism as a project for the resident society’s benefit, selecting from the rest of the world as benefits us and he would be first to call any more openness wrong. – These all confirmed and evidenced the poison’s seriousness, and motivated 1448/2014 as an urgent move to block it.
But it is significant that Sillars and Neil were both Brexiters. Any EU-based Yes campaign will be ideally placed to jettison this evil in its predecessor, along with nationalism’s anti-outsider wing.
To have such a bigotry is a particular embarrassment at a time when the British PM is diaspora-born ! Plaid Cymru had a diaspora-born leader in the 1990s through the winning of devolution, Dafydd Wigley, and prominent founder, Saunders Lewis. Irish nationalism, with diaspora-born James Connolly and Eamonn da Valera prominent in its history, was never led this way, and now Ireland’s 2 generations of descent citizenship are a popular resource against Brexit. Just as Tory ministers with immigrant backgrounds have been happy to do anti-immigrant things that would have excluded their own parents, 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, Craig Murray, to explain why they support a movement prejudiced against themselves. I experienced Riddoch dodge the question in an indyref1 meeting..
Robertson’s open letter to the EU referred to a problem of how to “give the assurance and reassurance needed for voters to change their votes from No to Yes”, and to “the legitimate concerns of many No voters”. How has he as a parental descent Scot himself, had no concern at the prejudiced policy towards parental descent Scots, and been happy even to serve as the SNP’s depute leader in that time? NB His organisation Progress Scotland did not answer an enquiry so.
3 limited successes to record fairly:
* In the National of 9-7-16, Paul Kavanagh’s column included parental descent in a list of European norms of citizenship. Then it published a letter from me thanking for this 11-7-16.
* only verbally on a stall in Edinburgh’s Meadows Festival, a self-declared international law expert in the Yes Marchmont and Morningside group concurred that ECHR will require us to honour this citizenship entitlement.
* at Perth’s hustings 16 May 2019, which was recorded, the Greens’ Maggie Chapman gave the right answer on this. But sitting beside her, SNP Heather Anderson was still not willing to do it.
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. So, not to uphold it is demonstrably a human rights inconsistency.
Their identities collide with the horrible school bully attitude I propose to name “birthplace racism”, that even divides siblings: the bigotry of regarding country as dictated by birthplace. They have visibly not correlated ever since the ancient Jews’ Babylonian exile 6 centuries BC, many folks are born in places they have no further connection with. To apply birthplace racism to the modern Israel/Palestine problem would start a Middle East war
But calling out birthplace racism certainly does not mean opposing citizenship by birth, whose existence is also a natural right from a common sense practicality: of being allowed your life in the place where it chances to start. Thus I comply with the rule that it is always racist to exclude and against racism to include. Birthplace as one among several standard ways to get citizenship of a country is right, because it covers for any practical life circumstances the person was born into. It can be disregarded where it is a false positive and the person has a different country identity.
The White Paper’s plan has a cruel exclusion here too. Against an older SNP pledge, it made 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 in the Disqus system, with the horrific username “Without Heritage”, and failed to get Yes to solve his position either!
The wrong to birth citizenship keeps a wrong also existing in the British system: so it is only the wrong to parental descent citizenship that is preventable by voting against independence. But there are these 2 shockingly cruel hateful gaps in the SNP’s and Yes movement’s plan for citizenship, and it will require fixing both to make us human rights compliant. Any move to rejoining the EU comes up against this. It is part of the situation facing any reentry campaign. So no researchers and campaigns on that possibility can overlook it. The SNP govt can solve both items in an instant perfectly easily by policy shift. The event of solving them for us will carry the great advance that precedentially it will make the whole EU tied to these ECHR compliances too.
Because racism matters.
court change 