Cameron 'keen to rekindle Middle East peace process': BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit's finding

A final exchange with the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit, following previous correspondence.

 

British Broadcasting Corporation White City, 201 Wood Lane, London, W12 7TQ

Telephone: 020 8743 8000 Email: ecu@bbc.co.uk

Editorial Complaints Unit

Mr J Hilley
 
Ref: CT/1400241
8 July 2014

Dear Mr Hilley

News (6.00pm), BBC 1, 13 March 2014
 
I am writing to let you know the provisional finding of the Editorial Complaints Unit’s investigation into your complaint about a news item on the above bulletin. I do not believe there are grounds to uphold your complaint but I hope I can explain the reasons why I have reached this decision.

As you will no doubt recall, the phrase which prompted your complaint came at the end of a brief report, as follows:

David Cameron has urged the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to be partners for peace. On the second day of his visit to the Middle East the Prime Minister held talks with the Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas. Mr Cameron also met the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who is a peace envoy in the region. Mr Cameron is keen to rekindle the Middle East peace process.
 
You have asked what evidence there was to support the assertion that

"Mr Cameron is keen to rekindle the Middle East peace process". I have to say that it seems to me to be a reasonable interpretation based on Mr Cameron’s words and actions. As you will recall, he visited the Middle East and held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his joint press conference with Mr Abbas [1], the Prime Minister said:

We have had good discussions today and I want to focus on three issues. First the peace process and the leadership that both you and Prime Minister Netanyahu show by entering these negotiations. As I said in the Knesset I believe you are a partner for peace. I know that achieving lasting peace means difficult decisions and real determination to keep going. Britain has faced its own experiences on this front and we will do everything we can to help you.
 
Our position is clear and has not changed; we want to see a two state solution. A sovereign, viable and independent Palestinian state, based on 1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps, alongside a secure Israel. And Jerusalem, a sacred city to three great world religions, must be the shared capital for both sides, with Gaza a fundamental part of the Palestinian state…

… Over the last two days I have been encouraged from my discussions with both yourself, Mr President, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, that the will is there, so I urge both sides to seize this window of opportunity.
 
The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines on Impartiality [2] allow journalists to "provide professional judgements, rooted in evidence" (Section 4.4.13). I think the extract I have quoted above provides sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that Mr Cameron was keen to rekindle a Middle East peace process and did not require the kind of caveat or attribution you have suggested.

On the third of your numbered points, I think the use of the phrase "peace process" was reasonable; whether or not a settlement can be reached is open to question but there is undoubtedly a process
(backed by various international governments) to try to find such a settlement.

On your fourth point, I have explained that it was acceptable for the presenter, Sophie Raworth, to provide a professional judgement based on evidence. I do not believe, therefore, that there was breach of the Impartiality guidelines.

On your final point, the Editorial Guidelines on Impartiality include particular requirements relevant to long-running or continuous output (Section 4.4.26). These make it clear that

"due impartiality may be achieved over time by the consistent application of editorial judgement in relevant subject areas. For instance, it is not usually required for an appearance by a politician, or other contributor with partial views, to be balanced on each occasion by those taking a contrary view, although it may sometimes be necessary to offer a right of reply". I think that makes it clear that there was no requirement in this context to provide a counter view to Mr Cameron’s.

In conclusion, therefore, I don’t have grounds to uphold your complaint but, as my letter of 16 June explained, this is a provisional finding. If you’d like to make any comments on it before I finalise it I’ll be happy to consider them, providing you let me have them by 23 July.

Yours sincerely

Colin Tregear
Complaints Director

1 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/press-conference-in-jerusalem
2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/page/guidelines-impartiality-introduction/

----------------------------------------------------

9 July 2014
Dear Colin Tregear
 
You say:

"Mr Cameron is keen to rekindle the Middle East peace process". I have to say that it seems to me to be a reasonable interpretation based on Mr Cameron’s words and actions.

Indeed. And it would have been truly amazing had Mr Cameron's words not seemed anything other to you.

You simply repeat Cameron's speech and cite this as a ''reasonable interpretation" of events. How very 'considered'. How very BBC.

This and the rest of your 'reasonable' ruling is entirely predictable. As ever, the point of such complaints is not to expect acknowledgement or seek redress, but to help expose such routinely biased output and the multiple levels of BBC officialdom, including the ECU, serving to defend it. 

So, I have no further comments regarding the complaint other than to hope that readers of this exchange are able to see what's deemed 'impartial' coverage by the BBC, and the kind of dutiful establishment-speak that passes for 'independent adjudication'.   

It's rather fitting that your letter comes as Gaza is being brutally bombed once more, with the BBC again engaged in its own assault of 'Israel responds' news and comment.

No doubt Mr Cameron and Western others deeply complicit in allowing that suffering to continue, through their enduring support for Israel, will declare themselves 'keen' to see an end to the killing. And no doubt the BBC will continue to amplify those hollow sentiments through their own slavish reporting of such words.

Yours sincerely
John Hilley

Jon Snow's standard, but not very constructive, dismissal of Media Lens

There's been a most illuminating set of exchanges between Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, the Editors at Media Lens and other Twitter contributors.
 
Media Lens had tweeted Snow to flag-up an excellent letter from regular ML contributor Ed Murray on Snow's appallingly tame interview with Hillary Clinton:

Media Lens: An uncomfortable email for @jonsnowC4 to read - which he will likely ignore or brush away. http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1404548492.html

 Ignoring Murray's points and ML's tweet, Snow later tweeted:

Jon Snow: Media Lens: 18,000 Tweets; 14,000 followers/ JSnow 8,500 Tweets 424,000 followers:If only you were more constructive, you might help!

A direct exchange between Snow and Media Lens followed:

Media Lens: @jonsnowC4 Jon, 'You say what you like, because they like what you say.' From our alert (which has 229,577 hits) http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/731-you-say-what-you-like-because-they-like-what-you-say.html
 

Jon Snow: @medialens but have you thought that perhaps they don't follow you because they don't like your hostility to ordinary hacks?
 

Media Lens: @jonsnowC4 The only people saying we're hostile to hacks are (some) hacks. Most readers understand we're asking reasonable questions.

Most readers seemed to agree, taking Snow to task over his boastful claim:

Robin Monotti: Very narcissistic argument @johnsnowC4 that's the kind of comment that gets us on @medialens side

And:

Anthony Atanasio: @jonsnowC4 @medialens: Its hypocrisy, pandering, and propaganda that most of 'us' feel hostile towards. @medialens is a breath of fresh air

Seemingly realising his faux pas over journalistic 'status' and follower numbers, Snow evaded another reader's challenge:

Irk Hudson: @jonsnowC4 There's a mere handful of people in positions from which they can reach national audience; only reason for your follower numbers.
 

Jon Snow: @IrkHudson Irk there's a hunger for a constructive critique of mainstream journalism: if Media Lens provided it, followers might gather!

Snow repeats the 'not constructive' charge here:

Ariel Adam: @jonsnowC4 my dogs bigger than your dog. And it ate my homework.
 

Jon Snow: @Ariel_ Adam And Media Lens for some reason keeps eating its own homework instead of campaigning constructively!

And here:  

James Van Wilson: @jonsnowC4 Made yourself look a bit self absorbed and without an actual point to make there Jon. Twitter equivalent of pulling rank.

Jon Snow: @jamesvanwilson It's simply that Media Lens is remorselessly negative..I cannot think of one time when they have sent a constructive Tweet!

As most contributors to this exchange, and other endorsers of Media Lens (reminder for Snow: ML consists only of its two editors and webmaster, not its followers) recognise, there could be no more non-abusive and positive project currently shining a critical light on woeful media performance.   
 
But what does Snow mean exactly by 'constructive'?
 
One only need watch Snow's interview with Clinton to see the safely-moderated version that passes for 'probing journalism'.

Is this the kind of 'constructive' approach to 'challenging' power, 'challenging' other journalists, or 'challenging' journalists on their claims to be 'challenging' power, that Snow thinks Media Lens need to adopt?

As her cosy engagements with Jeremy Paxman, Jeremy Vine and other media notables showed, you can be pretty sure that Clinton and her protectors would not have permitted Snow an interview had he posed any real threat of critically-constructive questioning.
 
For example, the interview includes Snow asking Clinton about the West's 'failure' to press Israel on illegal settlements. All seemingly 'constructive'. But why is US-Western 'action/inaction' actually viewed by Snow as a 'failure' - a regularly-repeated line which assumes fair, neutral and benign input?
 
Instead, why didn't Snow highlight America's role as a principal and criminal supporter of Israel, and specify the $3 billion a year it gifts the Israeli state to continue its brutal military Occupation? Why didn't he call out the US as a fundamental cause of the problem, and grill Clinton on her own complicit part in that 'failure'?

Where, elsewhere in the piece, was the serious indictment of US-directed murder and mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt and Syria? What of Washington's protection of terror state Saudi Arabia? 

If she so now 'regrets' supporting the invasion of Iraq, why isn't she calling for its perpetrators to be prosecuted for war crimes? Is she herself fit for public office after her willing participation in such a crime?

Where was the question on her husband's wicked sanctions policy that killed half a million children in Iraq?

And, rather than cordial nods to her becoming a grandmother, deferential citing of her book and conjecture on her presidential candidacy, where was the reminder of her infamous, inhuman line: 'We came, we saw, he died'? 
 
Whatever proprieties one expects of interviews, precisely none of those questions lack real constructive intent. None need be posed in abusive terms. They simply require to be put firmly and courteously to power, and held up to journalists claiming to hold power to account, as Media Lens routinely do.  
 
Is it lacking in constructive observation to say that in this interview, as in so many other liberal 'interrogations' of elites, Snow has not just 'failed', but is part of a deluded journalism that helps sustain the illusion of a 'constructively critical' media?  
 
Which, again, is simply what Media Lens is asking in its relentlessly polite tweets, alerts and other output.

Is it 'hostile' or 'negative' to ask why Snow is so unwilling to partake in constructive discussion on how power should be spoken to, and what part people like he himself play in that dialogue? Rather than trite dismissal, why doesn't he engage in evidence-based discussion of the issues?
 
Doesn't Jon Snow's own hostility to such engagement speak volumes about the pretensions, boundaries and self-preserving ego of liberal journalism?               

Israel's purging of Palestinian children - don't mention The Occupation

This disturbing video shows Israeli Border Police ruthlessly beating Tarek Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian-American boy of 15.

 

It's another grim reminder of the kind of 'justice' Palestinian children can expect from 'the world's most moral army'.

 
As Jonathan Cook blogs, the beating and unlawful incarceration of Tarek is consistent with the inhuman treatment experienced by the family of Tarek's murdered 16-year-old Palestinian cousin, Muhammad Abu Khdeir.

Autopsy results have confirmed that Muhammad was burned alive after being abducted in Jerusalem. Arrests have now been made, though Palestinians have little faith that proper justice will ensue.
 
Tarek has also now been released. But, as reported by Rania Khalek for Electronic Intifada, Tarek's father and other family members have struggled to get US Consulate officials to press Israel on Tarek's behalf:

When asked if he expects any accountability or justice for the treatment of his son, Salahedeen said, “No way, this is Israel. There is no protection for Palestinians from the police or soldiers or army.”

Speaking movingly about Muhammad's murder, his cousin Dimah Khdeir also criticised general media indifference to Palestinian suffering:

No one cares. The media doesn't. Obviously, you’re [Yolande Knell of the BBC] talking to me, you’re part of the media, but there’s something crazy going on. But for the most part, no one talks about the Palestinian situation, the Palestinian case. It’s quieted, it’s shushed because most people support the Israeli government. No one cares if six people are missing, 10 people die, two kids are kidnapped, 10 women are killed. No one cares about Palestinians.

One wonders whether the BBC and other leading media would have even covered such Palestinian killings had three Israeli teenagers not been killed earlier. For, as with the treatment of Muhammad's cousin and other family, it seems there's a higher premium placed on Israeli deaths. 

 

As suggested by a tortured article from the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland, it's also revealing how media comment and analysis is routinely framed as 'tit-for-tat' revenge, a 'cycle of vengeance', all feeding the convenient narrative of 'two sides' locked in an 'intractable conflict', rather than the true, but never properly contextualised, fact of an Occupier and an Occupied. 

 

Here, in a deplorable statement, is what senior BBC correspondent Kevin Connolly has to say about the 'weighing' of such violence: 

Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli security sweeps conducted across the West Bank, as the Israeli army searched for the three boys and for clues as to what happened to them, but I think Israelis would argue that the nature of this crime – these three boys were from a religious college on the West Bank – they were just hitchhiking home for the weekend — the nature of it, the brutal abduction, the murder, the fact that the families were left for two and a half weeks not knowing the fate of the boys — there was a special kind of chilling factor, a cold blooded calculation to that crime that slightly sets it aside from the other waves of violence that we report on across the Middle East. [Original emphasis.]

Amena Saleem responds:

So what we have is a supposedly impartial BBC Middle East correspondent elevating three Israeli deaths above all others in the Middle East and justifying this elevation by claiming that the circumstances in which they were killed were uniquely awful.

While effectively relegating Palestinian lives to that of Israelis, Connolly has, likewise, nothing to say about the primary cause and context of the killings: the Occupation. Indeed, it's sobering to think that this vital word is almost entirely excluded from BBC and other media output. 

 

We are all human beings. We share the same hoped-for humanity, the ability to comprehend the pain families feel when their children are murdered, beaten and locked-up, and to recognise how children themselves are scarred and blighted by violence. But we also have a humanitarian duty to help identify the central cause of that violence: the historic crime of the Nakba and Israel's brutal removal of Palestinians from their land and homes. All present questions and possible resolutions must still return to the core illegality of the Occupation.    

 

Complementing widespread protests, this was the scene yesterday in Glasgow's Buchanan Street as people gathered to denounce Israeli terror and the rampant media bias that prevents these essential truths from being properly aired.   

More 'Israel responds' spin from BBC: Biased Bombardment Continues

As Israel intensifies its relentless assaults on Gaza, the BBC maintains in its own relentless bombardment of brazenly biased coverage.

One of the most consistent BBC falsehoods is the 'Israel responds' line. Not only does this present a distorted 'tit-for-tat' narrative  - why doesn't the 'timeline' on 'responding' begin with Israel's actual occupation of Palestinian lands or/and the strangulation siege of Gaza? - it's a clear violation of the BBC's own supposed rules of 'impartial' engagement.

BBC reports set a vitally misleading context for viewers in constantly repeating the message that Israel is simply 'responding' to Hamas rockets or Palestinian 'provocation'.

Consider the following passage from this BBC online report:

In the past few days Israel has launched air strikes after rockets were fired from Gaza.

There is high tension in East Jerusalem ahead of the planned funeral of a murdered Palestinian teenager. There have already been two days of clashes there between masked Palestinians and Israeli police over the kidnap and murder of 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdair.

The motive for his killing has not been confirmed but there are claims it was an act of revenge for the recent murders of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank. Israeli police are investigating.

Notice that while the 'motive' for Israeli air strikes is taken as a given, a 'bald fact', the motive for the killing and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdair is treated as a 'claim', as in "there are claims it was an act of revenge".

Why are these same words not similarly applied when reporting Israel's bombing of Gaza?

The amended line would, thus, read:

"In the past few days Israel claims it has launched air strikes as an act of revenge over rockets fired from Gaza."

This, at least, would have the merit of treating Israel's 'revenge attacks' as contestable claims - even amid all the other regular 'Israel says' quotes, comments and approving repetition contained in such output.

The actual truth is that Israel has never needed any such pretexts to bomb Gaza - it bombs Gaza at will, out of a deliberate policy to terrify, contain, demoralise, dehumanise and break Palestinian resolve.

There's no chance, of course, that the BBC would ever venture that kind of unconditional statement or view.

But it will routinely churn out this 'matter of fact' line:

'Mr Cameron is keen to rekindle the Middle East peace process.'

Again, not Cameron 'claims' or 'says' he is 'keen', just the straightforward acceptance that he is 'keen', and that there is an actual 'peace process' to be 'rekindled'. 

My complaint over this specific line, with all its deeply-loaded assumptions of 'benign assistance' and omissions on Western culpability, has now made its labyrinthine way to the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit. One awaits with usual interest the Kafkaesque excuses and mitigations being prepared.

Meanwhile, the BBC and other posturing media contrive to show that they are reporting the killing of a Palestinian teenager with the same intensity as three Israeli teenagers. The Guardian even ran livestream coverage of the Israeli youths' funeral services, but evaded comment on whether they would do likewise for the dead Palestinian youth.

What's crucially absent in BBC and other 'leading' media commentary is the contextual scale of the daily murder and oppression of Palestinians.

In what should be a seemingly obvious opportunity to relate such facts, the BBC has steadfastly refused to highlight the vast number of Palestinian children murdered by the Israeli state.

All it had to do was state the undeniable statistics, as distilled here by Media Lens:

The missing, ugly reality is that over the last 13 years, on average, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, 1,523 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel's occupation forces. Over the same time period, 129 Israeli children have been killed. Thus, the ratio of Palestinian children to Israeli children killed is more than ten to one.

Just imagine the differing awareness, hostility to Israel and pressure on our government to act if the viewing public were being routinely reminded about that kind of shocking truth.

As with the BBC's selective suppression of death figures for Iraq, the state media is playing a critical role in hiding Israel's crimes, the West's criminal protections of a brutal ally, and the media's own complicit part in the whole disgraceful story of Palestinian suffering.  

For more of the crucial illumination the BBC refuse to provide, please read and share ML's vital alert article:

Some Deaths Really Matter - The Disproportionate Coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Killings

Yes protest BBC's biased coverage of independence

An impressive number of Yes supporters assembled outside BBC Scotland HQ yesterday to protest the propagandist nature of its referendum coverage.   
 
The protest organisers estimated the crowd at around two thousand, rather than the 'hundreds' stated in the BBC's own cursory report.
 
Notably absent from their coverage was any mention of a rousingly informed speech by University of West of Scotland Professor John Robertson.
 
Robertson recently published a damning body of research confirming the BBC's biased referendum output, detailing how stories, interviews and other reportage were all weighted in favour of the No campaign.
 
Professor Robertson has also outlined his findings and views to a parliamentary committee at Holyrood, attended by the heads of BBC Scotland. 
 
Despite all this evidence, Robertson told the gathering yesterday that the BBC's "bias has gone into overdrive now."
 
He noted the BBC's constant repetition of shrill warnings over independence, from politicians and militarist figures like Lord George Robertson to celebrities like hairdresser Nicky Clarke. The No-serving quotes and soundbites are being uttered so routinely, he said, it's almost like "a parody".
 
Professor Robertson spoke of how No-supporting business elites are being deferentially treated. Citing the Weir Group, he said that, unlike the hostile interrogations of Yes figures, the BBC had posed no awkward questions to Weir, such as mentioning their past supplying of weapons-purpose pipes to Saddam Hussein, while the sanctions policy in place at the time was leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.  
 
As an example of BBC bias by selective omission, Robertson noted an Open Democracy article on the latest Social Attitudes survey showing increasing public approval of the NHS in Scotland, as opposed to decreasing confidence in a more commercially-driven NHS in England and Wales. Why, asks Robertson, is this kind of vital information not being headlined by the BBC?
 
Alongside his cited research, Professor Robertson also noted the close, insidious connections between senior BBC Scotland and main No political figures. 

He also criticised other media academics for failing to come to the forefront in defence of his research. Many, he said, "like being on the BBC".

Robertson's thoughts and the overall protest message underscores the widening disaffection of Yes voters towards the BBC. While applauding those holding Yes stickers from behind the BBC's windows, there was widespread talk about the necessary purging of the BBC in the event of independence.
 

The BBC's bias here is part of the same establishment-preserving remit, from its complicit presentations on Iraq, Afghanistan and other criminal 'interventions', to its loaded context and glaring omissions on Palestine-Israel.

Typical of its failure to cover mass anti-war demonstrations, six thousand complaints were recently sent to the BBC after its paltry mention of a fifty thousand strong march in London against austerity.
 
Thankfully, as with those showing support from inside BBC Scotland, there are still occasional glimpses of critical insight, such as a fine Radio Times piece by Jack Seale, helping to demolish the illusion of 'left-leaning bias' at the BBC. For good measure, Seale even cites Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor, who describes"persistent claims that the BBC is institutionally biased to the left as "bollocks"."

Indeed. If the BBC is so 'left-leaning', why are the highest executive chairs always filled with people like Lord Patten? And why are we seeing the current efforts to install establishment figure Lord Seb Coe?

All these questions of elite entry and patronage are being increasingly exposed as more of the public come to see the Union-serving motives behind the BBC's independence coverage.

This fine video of the protest outside BBC Scotland offers some excellent thoughts on the case for independence, and what needs to be done to the BBC.

Resist Militarism action at Finnieston Crane, Glasgow

 

Highest commendations today to the White Feather activists who carried out this brave and imaginative protest against militarism and war propaganda.

On a day dominated by news coverage of Armed Service events, this radical action serves as a valuable reminder of how routinely we're bombarded with messages of 'benign
militarism', all serving to disguise the vast crimes being committed by US-UK-Nato forces.

The huge banner draped by the four courageous activists over the iconic Finnieston Crane on Glasgow's river Clyde faced, appropriately, the main media offices of STV and BBC Scotland, the latter, predictably, choosing to omit any mention of the action.


The protest was, however, reported by STV:

Speaking from the top of the crane protestor Frida Grey said: "When children in Scotland go to see tanks and bombs today in Stirling that's part of the normalisation of military culture. "We've been engaging with police all morning and explained we want to stay here for Armed Forces Day. This is a peaceful protest about getting a message out. "I would encourage people to think more carefully about celebrating military culture. "There is sacrifice and commitment from people in the Forces, but we have to work towards a demilitarised future."

Arrested on breach of the peace charges, these four admirable women have shown, by the tallest moral example, that there are true, humanitarian alternatives to war, spurious 'intervention', corporate-serving weaponry and the insidious culture of militarism that urges us to celebrate it all.    

Follow police and court proceedings against the 'Finnieston Four' via White Feather WW1.

'The white feather  - a symbol of cowardice given to men who did not enlist in WW1. We reclaim it as a symbol of defiance and solidarity.'



Update: Monday 30 June
Court hearing

After lengthy delays, 'lost paperwork' and legal arguments, all four appeared before the judge, pled not guilty and were granted bail.

The Crown had tried to insist on a set of 'special conditions' preventing the accused from entering what they called the Commonwealth Games 'event zone'.

Asked by the judge to specify what was meant by an 'event zone', the fiscal listed over a dozen extensive areas of the city, including the entire Marathon route, around which the women would not be allowed to enter. It also included the Queen's Baton route.

The fiscal accepted the judge's point that this could effectively mean the accused being unable to leave their homes to go to their places of work, study and other locations.

The defence lawyer argued that such restrictions were both disproportionate and logistically unenforceable. He also noted that this had been a specifically anti-war protest, with no particular bearing on the Games.

The judge, sensibly, agreed, also wondering why the Crown had brought the case before this lower district court while seeking such a severe prohibition.

All four were released on standard bail conditions, the only proviso being that they stay 50 metres away from the Finnieston Crane.

Trial dates were set, and the 20 or so supporters in the gallery broke into applause.

There was also a good gathering of supporters with placards outside the court before the hearing, breaking into the improptu chant: 'no weapons, no war, free the Finnie Four'.

Yes to our independent imagination

Watching the recent Tory, Labour and LibDem collaborations on Calton Hill - Labour followers, take historical note - brought home just how deeply terrified the Unionist parties and wider No establishment are of a Yes outcome.

You! Yes, you! Stand still laddie!

It was like some panicked assembly of headteachers trying to reinforce rote obedience in the face of creative insubordination.

With chief No 'headie' Alistair Darling losing credibility by the day, Better Together had also summoned John Major, no less, to issue more stern warnings and threats. 'Call the schoolmaster', indeed.

From the classroom to the workplace, the media box to the ballot box, the system cultivates conformity. So too with the referendum.

The hard negative may have been expediently softened - Saatchified - to 'No thanks', the 'more powers' sop reluctantly peddled - how thankful we should be for added permission to 'run the tuck shop' - but the true intimation is still one of censorious warning: be in line, know your place, fear the consequences, don't even risk contemplating another country, another system, another school of thought.

The No side's worry isn't just over the political, economic and social potentialities of independence, immense as they are. It's the deeper alarm any establishment feels when watching a collective stirring of the independent imagination.

Just think for a moment about that kind of independence, that power to reject what's laid down for us  as 'safe', 'benign' and 'sensible'.

As Chomsky notes, people are systematically encouraged to feel dependent, passive and powerless:

 “All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”  

It's the very psychology of social control; a hegemony that works so effectively because we ourselves take refuge in the 'comforting' mitigation.

Thus, the same subservient mindset: we're 'too poor', 'too small', 'too alone' to be independent. Even, in its 'more astute' version, the voice of 'sober restraint': we're 'too cautious', 'too prudent', 'too canny' to make that kind of 'leap'.

Parts of the No-sided left reinforce that sense of 'unworthiness', failing to grasp the imaginative idea that, beyond fair concerns over currency, Nato, monarchy and other such matters, something truly worthy could be crafted from this new, dynamic situation, much more than could ever be expected or hoped of from a conformist status quo.

Are we to dismiss the strategic opportunity of independence to help change these things? Or do we hold to the same old unionist mantras and clone party assurances that things can only be bettered through 'staying together'? What is even meant by 'together'?

The very notion of 'Better Together' is not just a political fiction - what 'commonality' do austerity-afflicted people in Glasgow's Shettleston share with financial elites in the City of London? - it's the injunction to know your station, played out via the concoction that any political 'bond', any social 'connection', can only be realised through the artifice of a British state.

How have people fallen so long for that kind of mythology? Clue: look to generations of conformist party politics and a particular Labourist conditioning that instills aversion to radical thought and serious alternatives.

And yet, despite all this fear-inducing narrative we're still engaged in a marvellous, inspiring debate. While conflict rages in other parts of a fracturing world, we're immensely privileged to be having this great civilised discussion, not only about borders, parliaments and the like, but on the peaceful construction of the radically compassionate society.

Deeply concerned about this exciting chatter, the No heads are reduced to alleging abuse and bullying in the playground. 

A dutiful media pitch in. On the day the Scottish government announced its intention to make the removal of nuclear weapons a constitutional certainty, this key story was relegated by the BBC to No-serving headlines about online abuse against No donor JK Rowling, and comments - one erroneous, the other factual - made by Salmond's political aide about a Labour campaigner's claim to be 'just an ordinary mum'.

While pointing to the crass exploitation of these stories, and very likely involvement of UK intelligence forces in undermining the Yes campaign, Jim Sillars has issued a timely reminder of just how much the establishment welcome online abuse and the headline exaggerations that come with it.

The far greater abuse is that, while such vitriol remains marginal, and manifest on both sides, senior No figure Alistair Darling can get away with making much darker inferences about 'blood and soil' nationalism, and likening Salmond to Kim Jong-il.

Darling's smears are part of a futile attempt to paint a nascent civic movement for meaningful change as 'ethnic nationalism'. In contrast, the No campaign's own rearguard promotion of British nationalism is being rumbled as the last line of a desperate propaganda.

Which is why we're seeing this latest pandering on 'more powers'. Yet, as a recent poll suggests, there's already a deep distrust of such promises. It really does take some imagining to think that a No vote will result in Westminster rushing to 'reward' us, rather than wielding more political punishments.

Any falling for the 'more powers' line would also see discussion of Trident consigned to the political wilderness, while a Yes vote would, as the establishment acutely know, mean its certain termination. 

As Iain Macwhirter neatly tweeted:

John Major nails it. Independence means "the end of Britain's nuclear weapons".

Coming around the Gareloch recently, I watched the dark sight of a nuclear submarine being escorted back to its bunker at Faslane. It's monstrous presence on these beautiful waters, and the £100 billion required to maintain/upgrade it, has provoked many laudable reactions, from public disgust to active resistance. Yet, my own feeling on this occasion was one of excited anticipation, in realising the historic opportunity we have at this very moment, this small collective of people, to defy big power, rid this country of wicked weapons, and show others across a mad-militarised world what's really possible.

Just imagine being able to say we did that for ourselves, for our children, for the greater humanity.  Just imagine how much that seriously pending prospect terrifies the No elite. Just imagine what kind of confidence that act would give people in seeking to build the progressive society.

These are not abstract thoughts. To imagine is not some passive indulgence in which we wish forlornly and abandon hope. It's the very architecturing of the reality to be grasped.

There is, be reminded, the unambiguous reality of a commitment in any written Scottish constitution to banish all nuclear weapons from Scotland. Ponder that for a moment: how to disarm a nuclear bomb with a ballot pen. Imagine passing up on that opportunity. What futile imaginings to believe that such a goal would ever be possible under the current political arrangement of a warmongering UK state.

Imagine also, having helped deliver a No outcome, how you might feel in 2015, watching the likely return of another Tory government or a further right-lurching Labour variation. Things can only get better?

Much better alternatives are before us. And in taking them, we can be a benign and progressive model for others to follow. With a little imagination, the tremendous potential for building some real togetherness can begin.