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IN politics as in religion, honest doubt is often more interesting than dogmatic certainty.

As people shout their certainties about how we should vote in the referendum, my doubts may be of some help to the large number of Scots who are still in the "don’t know" camp.

First, I have to explain where I’m coming from – geographically and politically. I came from London to make my home in Glasgow 34 years ago and intend to stay here until my dying day, whatever happens about independence.

I joined the Labour Party as a student in 1947, and have stayed with them since – apart from a break of some years following our entry into the Iraq war.

You may have marched with me when 80,000 of us carried this newspaper group’s placards through Glasgow saying, “Not in my name”.

I’ve always believed that the most important question facing Scotland – independent or not – is whether we can enable people living in the UK’s greatest concentrations of poverty – mainly around the Clyde – to enter our society’s mainstream and gain the opportunities every Scot should have.

Is Glasgow to belong to Scotland or not?

I used to think we’d stand a better chance of getting the right answer to that question if we stay in the UK with the resources of the whole island to help us.

But I’m no longer sure that the rest of the UK has much interest in the question.

When I joined the party in 1947, most people worked with their hands. If the party could gain their support, they would win elections. Since Labour had been created by their trade unions, their co-ops and socialist groups, that was always possible. But those days are long past.

The party now have to convince all sorts of people – different classes, races, religions and ages in different regions of the country – that their cause is just. If they only pander to prejudices of swing voters in a few marginal constituencies (all in the midlands and south of England, and more likely to read the right wing press than papers such as this one), then radical politics will die.

That is what is happening.

I know all the arguments against independence and most of them are sound.

I believe the biggest problems my grandchildren will face – world poverty, climate change, terrorism – have to be tackled through closer collaboration between nations.

Creating new, small nations distracts us from that. But it looks increasingly as if staying in the UK means we shall leave the European Union – the world’s biggest political achievement in centuries.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, if he wins the next Westminster election, has not yet promised a referendum on that. But neither has he refused one. Nor has he made a fighting case for the EU.

We seem likely to be living in a country that continues to impose increasingly punitive and humiliating sanctions on its poorest citizens who have to live on social security benefits.

Labour seem determined to show they will match the Tories’ brutalities.

The Human Rights Act – a great achievement – may be repealed; as our present Home Secretary threatens.

We may continue living under the most centralised government in the Western world – strangling local government and killing off independent civic leadership.

Green policies may be dropped or downgraded. It’s already happening.

And our armed forces seem likely to be fighting wars, not in our name but as mercenary outriders of American foreign policy.

“Labour”, you may say, “will change all that”.

I wish I could believe you.

Their leaders may want to reverse these trends but if they do not go out and fight for these causes, they won’t be able to.

They no longer have the support of movements and social classes that instinctively trust them. But they do have powerful enemies determined to challenge and discredit them.

If this is the way the UK is really heading, I would rather get out, whatever the hazards of independence.

Looking still further ahead, we have to recognise that a vote for independence – or even a narrow rejection of it – will pose difficult questions for people living in Northern Ireland, Wales, and even the north of England.

There will be others hoping to follow in our footsteps.

The referendum will not be the end of this story. It may lead us into the endgame of the United Kingdom.

David Donnison is a professor emeritus at Glasgow University. His books include The Politics of Poverty and Speaking to Power