If you missed it live, here’s the audio recording of the debate held at the Volunteer Rooms in Irvine on Friday. (The event wasn’t video-recorded, despite Clan Destiny Films having a high-quality camera team there, because the Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, Brian Donohoe, refused to give his permission.)

Click the image for the two-hour MP3 file.

It’s a long listen, but an intriguing document of the event, at which a majority of the packed crowd seem strongly inclined to a Yes, with most of the questions (and a considerable amount of barracking and booing) aimed at Donohoe and Richard Leonard of the GMB trade union, the other No speaker. Donohoe can rarely have had a rougher ride from the public in what’s a super-safe Labour seat.

There are several telling moments, including Donohoe insisting oddly at 51 minutes that Norway doesn’t actually have the high standard of living and public services that everyone else on Earth thinks it does, but for us the most revealing was 28 minutes in, when an audience member asks, referring to Atos and welfare reforms, “What’s going to happen to the sick and disabled if we vote No?”

Donohoe’s response is garbled but unequivocal:

“Nothing will change as far as the disabled and the people who are handicapped are concerned. Nothing will happen in terms of a vote that will say that you maintain yourself and the strength of the Union. That’s clear and that’s the case as it is.”

So there you have it. Vote No and nothing will change. If you think, in the words of another senior Labour figure from the west of Scotland, that the current state of the UK is “as good as it gets”, by all means reject independence, and abandon all hope.