(Added April 16: Ah well, we lost, and I'm only just recovering! Actually 45% for Yes was higher than I expected at the outset of the campaign, though when we got so close at the end it was pretty devastating to get no cigar. I'm confident we will win next time but not sure when that will be. I may add another section rubbishing all the 'Scotland, independent now in 2016, would have been bankrupt because of the oil price drop etc.' nonsense, health permitting, but for now here, unchanged, is what I wrote then).
I'm a committed supporter of Independence for Scotland, a member of Academics for Yes. I am not an economist or political scientist, but a philosopher. I have been trying to follow the academic arguments on both sides of the debate. I have certainly read nothing like all the vast reams of material produced; on the other hand I've probably read more than is good for my mental health.
At any rate I've tried to draw together an assessment of the arguments in three pieces. Firstly, 'A Case for Scottish Independence', which sets out an essentially moral case, rather than one based on economics. A main thrust here is that mainstream unionism is in fact a rather nasty anti-Scottish form of nationalism, based on a view of Scots as not quite up to the mark, as a national grouping. I try to justify this strong claim in 'Ten Absolutely Crap Arguments in Favour of the Union', which is written in rather a knock-about style. My claim is that the level of argumentation by unionists, including highly intelligent unionists, is so utterly dreadful it can only be explained on the basis that they are still in thrall to a common view among the Scots political elite through the ages, namely that the Scots can achieve great things but only as second-in-command, only under the wise tutelage of the English.
But surely one can't thus write off all those analyses carried out in recent years by a wide range of highly respected experts and which have been used by the No Campaign? In 'It's the Economy, Dunderheid', I argue that such analyses either focus on start-up costs in creating a new nation (or in our case reviving an old one), or point out that there is no certainty that an independent Scotland will grow faster economically than the rest of the UK. The latter is clearly true, but then no nation would take as a serious argument against maintaining its independence that it might be a little richer if it handed over the main levers of power to another nation. As to the former, take-off for an independent Scotland is bound to be a little bit turbulent, we can't know in advance how turbulent (whereas we do have fairly strong reasons for believing that our economic fate will be pretty grim if we vote no). But if reasons of that sort were any good, no one would ever leave the parental home.
The pdf files, imported into the new Google sites but unedited from the 2014 originals, are below.