This isn't a party. It's an argument, made in public.

No. Nothing here runs candidates or asks for your vote in an election. It's a policy model and a live testing ground for it. If a real party ever adopts pieces of it, that's a decision made in public, elsewhere, not something decided on this site.

No. You can disagree entirely on the timing or the method of independence and still shape what a decision-making model would look like if it happened. The Foundation Paper's premise is a post-independence Scotland, but arguing about the mechanism doesn't require agreeing on the politics that gets there.

Yes. Voting here is tied to living in Scotland, not to earning or to how much you pay. Students, carers, pensioners, people between jobs, and people who can't work all vote on exactly the same terms as anyone else. Legal residents get full voting rights after a defined period too, without needing citizenship. And in practice almost everyone contributes anyway: VAT is part of the same pot, so it's paid by anyone who buys anything, whatever their income.

Mostly at the wrong scale, or without a split between principle and policy. Ancient Athens couldn't verify a million ballots overnight; national referendum systems stay narrow because paper ballots don't scale to routine budgeting. Every clause here splits into two tiers: a handful of unchangeable rules about how power moves, and everything else, which is what most day-to-day decisions actually are. That split, plus modern verification tools, is the actual bet: that the past failures were about scale and safeguards, not the core idea.

A short bill of rights sits inside the unchangeable core, entrenched above the ordinary budget vote, changeable only by the same overwhelming supermajority that protects the rest of the mechanism. A single bad-tempered budget cycle can't touch it, by design.

Elected ministers still exist and still run departments day to day. The difference is what they're allowed to do with that power: they execute what's already been decided and can be removed the moment they fail to, rather than accumulating power for a fixed term. Direction stays with citizens; complex execution stays with accountable ministers. One role gets a deliberately different removal rule, the Digital Democracy Commission, which runs the voting platform itself, precisely because it is the body that would need to catch a vote being manipulated.

A Digital Democracy Commission, elected the same way as any minister, a public record, a vetted technical or security background, then a genuine public vote, but protected from being removed the ordinary way. Commissioners serve staggered five-to-seven-year terms, not the annual cycle ministers face, and can only be removed through a judicial misconduct process, never an ordinary budget-style vote. That protection exists for one specific reason: if a commissioner correctly catches a vote being rigged in favour of whoever currently holds a majority, that same majority can't simply vote them out for the inconvenience of having been caught.

Right now, honestly, it's a testing ground. There's no fixed political power behind it, no party, no funding to disclose. It exists to find out whether a genuinely detailed version of this model holds up to real argument before anyone attaches it to an actual referendum. Whether it happens depends on whether enough people decide the model is worth backing once they've actually read it and tried to break it.

The Foundation Paper was written by one citizen, deliberately unsigned. The site keeps that habit: there's no team page, no founder photos, because who first wrote something matters far less than whether it survives being argued with.

Your postcode proves you’re in Scotland and sets your region; it’s never shown. Your email exists only so one person can’t quietly re-register as ten citizens. Your handle isn’t shown either, handles get reused across platforms and can be personally identifying, so it’s used only to secure your account. What appears next to your contributions is an auto-assigned citizen number only, the same one on your profile, never your handle, postcode, or email.

Because a chosen handle isn't real anonymity. People reuse handles across platforms, pick recognisable ones, or end up identifiable just by combining a stated region with their own writing style, especially in a smaller region where only a few hundred citizens might take part. Instead, you get an auto-assigned citizen number the moment you join, permanent, yours, and not traceable back to anything you'd rather keep private.

An automated filter catches the obvious stuff, and any citizen can report the rest. Spam and flooding go to a small, publicly named moderator team for a quick call, every decision logged. Anything serious, hate speech, threats, doxxing, illegal content, always goes to a randomly drawn panel of citizens instead, who see the content and the rule but never the author, and no moderator can shortcut that. Every removal gets one appeal to a completely fresh jury. The full rulebook is public. Read the Rulebook.

Finance isn't a normal ministry. It runs the pot rather than competing for a share of it, and reconciles every proposal against the total before anything reaches a ballot, so what citizens actually vote on is a set of budgets that adds up. Ministers whose plans overlap are expected to negotiate a joined-up position first; where negotiation genuinely fails, the competing versions go to citizens as a structured choice, both cases, both costs. Which means refusing to negotiate wins nothing: it hands the decision to a public vote you might lose. Full detail in Part III.

Only the routine detail inside their own remit, which is the job. Anything that creates an offence, changes a legal right, or alters what people are entitled to is primary legislation, and primary legislation goes to a citizen vote. Above every vote sits an entrenched bill of rights that no ordinary majority can cross. A minister cutting welfare or rewriting immigration by decree isn't a risk this model carries; it's structurally impossible. Full detail in Parts III and IV.

Nobody reads a thousand pages. Citizens vote plan-level, up or down, with the case for and the case against published beside each proposal in plain language. The honest part: participation is voluntary, and the people who turn out for optional votes are never a perfect cross-section. That's why turnout is published on every single result, and why constitutional-scale decisions require a minimum turnout to count at all. Full detail in Part V.

The vetting threshold. Ten years of verified, relevant experience in the specific field, checked before anyone appears on a ballot; fame doesn't substitute for a record. The broader question of who shapes opinion isn't fully solved, and the paper says so: abolishing parties doesn't abolish the layer between citizens and decisions, it changes who occupies it. Paid advocacy must be disclosed, unusual voting patterns are published openly, and the case against every proposal sits beside it at the moment of decision. Full detail in Parts III, V and XV.

The same civil service legal drafters who write legislation today. Every proposal is checked against existing ratified law before its vote opens, and anything that would override an existing provision has to say so on its face. Where contradictions still slip through, the later ratification supersedes the earlier, and a Constitutional Court sits above all of it. Full detail in Parts III and IV.

The Foundation Paper is the current draft of the whole model. The Blueprint is the live floor where anyone proposes a specific change, argues it out, and, if it clears its threshold, gets folded into the paper’s next draft. The paper is the snapshot; the Blueprint is where it gets rewritten.