You can’t throw a brick at the Scottish media at the moment – however much you’d like to – without hitting half a dozen articles all repeating the same mantra: that despite the post-Brexit surge in support for independence, a Yes vote would be more difficult to achieve because the economics are now harder than they were in 2014, due to the collapse in the oil price.

Weirdly, almost all of these articles simultaneously insist that any new White Paper for independence would have to abandon the Sterling currency union advocated by the Scottish Government the first time round (despite there being little to no concrete evidence that it was a significant factor in the No vote, other than the commentariat all loudly agreeing with each other that it was).

The problem is that those two claims – if for the sake of argument you take them both to be true – introduce a whacking great elephant to the room, which all the people making the arguments are pretending not to notice.

Because the Scottish Government’s position was that a currency union was the price of Scotland agreeing to take on a share of the UK’s enormous debt (currently sitting at around £1.6 trillion), and more relevantly the servicing payments on it, which cost Scotland around £4 billion a year.

An independent Scotland would have no legal obligation whatsoever to accept any of the UK’s debt, a position the UK government unequivocally acknowledged in 2014:

So it follows unavoidably that should the currency union idea be abandoned – most likely in favour of a Scottish pound pegged to Sterling – then Scotland would leave the UK to shoulder all of its own debt, and start off with finances £4bn better than anyone has thus far calculated amid their endless lurid “black hole” predictions of economic doom based on not understanding how GERS works.

(Other factors commonly ignored by the “too wee, too poor” cohort include the fact that the price of oil has rocketed from $28 to $48 since the start of 2016, and the fact that a 75% collapse in the price only actually reduced Scottish GDP by 1% anyway, because a low price benefits lots of companies and consumers, generating increased investment and spending and thereby tax revenues, wiping out most if not all of the losses from the oil industry.)

The simple legal fact that Scotland would not be obliged to accept any UK debt is not disputed by any serious experts.

Which leaves all the Unionists determined to paint independence as an economic Armageddon clutching at a whole series of tattered straws.

Some try the morality angle, insisting that it would be ethically wrong for Scotland to walk away from its obligations. But that argument was blown out of the water by the research of Unionist academic and economist Prof. Brian Ashcroft, who calculated in 2013 that over the 32-year period for which figures were available, Scotland had in fact more than paid its way in the UK.

Over those three decades Ashcroft showed that Scotland in fact ran up absolutely NONE of the UK’s debt. Contributions flowing from Scotland to the Treasury more than covered the cost of the UK government’s higher per-head public expenditure north of the border, and taken as a unit Scotland was actually significantly in surplus.

(If anything, the facts uncovered by the good Professor suggest that on independence the UK should make a hefty lump-sum payment TO Scotland.)

Next comes a spurious appeal to “precedent”. In fact every country that ever left the UK (or the British Empire) and regained its independence has done so without taking on a share of the UK’s debt.

But desperate Unionists sometimes try to cite the example of Ireland. Yesterday, one particularly strident activist quoted this passage from Wikipedia in evidence:

Yet for some reason they cropped the screenshot to exclude the next paragraph:

In other words, Ireland agreed – by negotiation, not obligation – to assume some unspecified portion of the debt in principle, but never actually paid a penny, and just four years later the debt share was written off in its entirety.

Scotland, however, would be in a far stronger negotiating position than Ireland was. In 2012 the Daily Telegraph reported that:

A deal which kept Trident on the Clyde for a while until the UK found an alternative base would present some political difficulties for an SNP government, but it wouldn’t be hard to present an effective rent of £5bn a year for a small corner of a remote loch as a great deal, particularly when the safety aspect of rushed decommissioning or moving was factored in.

(Opposition to the nuclear weapons system in Scotland isn’t as strong as the left likes to pretend – most polls find more or less a 50/50 split, depending on wording. Few people actually anticipate a nuclear conflict, and the cost of Trident is a much more pressing issue than the danger of being a target in a theoretical war in which the whole of Britain would be effectively destroyed regardless of where the weapons were sited.)

In that respect, the UK parliament’s vote last night to renew Trident should of course be regarded as a major positive for the Yes movement, strengthening both the political and the economic cases for independence.

The final card played by Unionists over debt is the threat of economic blackmail, in the shape of the claim that lenders would charge an independent Scotland which had “defaulted” or “reneged” on its share sky-high rates for borrowing as a punishment.

Yet this argument is perhaps the most nonsensical of all, presenting as it does the laughable notion that international bankers apply moral judgements to their lending decisions. (And even if they did, see above – Scotland has an extremely strong moral basis for saying it owes the UK nothing.)

Lenders care whether they’ll be paid back or not, and Scotland is a wealthy nation with plenty of collateral and a demonstrably moderate government with years of experience of living within its means.

It would be likely that there’d be a small premium on borrowing, at least in the early years, but with global interest rates at record lows it’d be nothing to be terrified of, particularly if the money was being used on economic stimulus to drive growth, rather than imposing the crippling, self-defeating austerity that’s seen the UK government miss and abandon every economic target since 2010.

It would be bewildering, in an even slightly sane or balanced media, that not a single “analysis” of an independent Scotland’s financial situation has so much as passingly considered the effect of a zero debt share. Edinburgh would hold most of the trump cards in negotiations, and it’s difficult to see what the rUK could plausibly threaten it with that wouldn’t also be a massive act of self-harm.

If the consensus is that a currency union is a dead duck – and that does seem to be the case on both sides of the debate, regardless of the actual merits of the plan – then an independent Scotland just landed itself a bonus worth billions of pounds a year. The ivory trade might have been outlawed, but that’s one valuable elephant.