Wings Over Scotland – the pro-independence blog run by Stuart Campbell – recently produced a book on the arguments, as they see it, for a Yes vote in the referendum. At almost 70 pages long, this “Wee Blue Book” is probably a bit too long to go through in detail, but I thought it would be worth assessing some of the key points to give an idea of how convincing the case is. In particular, the book lays out five key points at the start which form the main thrust of the argument, so let’s take each in turn.

1. Scotland is a country, and like any other country it deserves to get the governments it votes for. As part of the UK, that happens well under half of the time. We don’t affect the outcome of UK elections, so the rest of the UK doesn’t need our help – so why keep subjecting ourselves to governments we rejected at the ballot box?

Anecdotally, I would imagine this is what independence supporters perceive as being the biggest argument for a Yes vote. However, as I’ve written before the democratic argument for independence is based on a number of fairly contestable assumptions. First, it makes the assumption that the government produced at Scottish Parliament elections reflects on average a much higher percentage of Scottish voters than the government produced in Westminster elections. Since the first Scottish Parliament election in 1999 this simply isn’t the case. The government to emerge from Scottish Parliament elections has been more likely to have a higher proportion of Scottish voters support it, but this 1) isn’t the case in every election and 2) is only by a handful of percentage points in any case. This can be shown quite clearly in the Chart below comparing the vote share for governments in UK elections with those for the governing parties in Scottish elections (I’ve even used the constituency vote for this comparison which is higher than the regional vote):

Sites like Wings Over Scotland want us to believe that the red line in the chart above is representative of a situation which is fundamentally undemocratic, while the blue line is some noble, pure conception of democracy. That clearly isn’t tenable when you actually look at the figures. The lines are different by a relatively small margin and under the 2007-11 Scottish government the blue line was the lowest of any example in the chart.

More importantly, however, this entire argument rests on a rather odd conception of democracy. We all know that being part of a larger whole means you have to exist in a larger community of citizens whose vote can potentially affect your lives. That isn’t some unique problem faced by Scotland, it’s basic politics. The question is what kind of state it makes sense to live in, not whether we should incrementally chop territories up into smaller units so each chunk “gets the government it voted for”. The nature of shared decision-making is that you balance the benefits of pooling together with the fact you also have to listen to the people you’re co-operating with. That’s how a nation state works, it’s how the European Union works, and there’s nothing remotely undemocratic about it as a principle.

2. Scotland will be wealthier as an independent country than it will inside the UK. Even before you discuss possible savings from policy changes (like more sensible defence spending), Scotland subsidises the UK by billions of pounds every year, according to Westminster’s own figures. The longer we stay in the UK, the poorer we’ll get… if Scotland was actually being subsidised by the rest of the UK, don’t you think the No camp would be shouting that fact from the rooftops every minute of every day?

Of all the arguments for independence put forward in the book, the idea that Scotland will be wealthier is probably the flimsiest of those on offer. As I’ve written in another article, claims about Scotland subsidising the rest of the UK are 1) not strictly true and 2) largely irrelevant in any case. On the “who subsidises who” argument there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of Yes campaigners to ignore the 2012-13 GERS figures produced by the Scottish government which (somewhat inconveniently) showed that Scotland received 9.3% of the UK’s spending while only generating 9.1% of the UK’s taxation revenue – and that’s with a geographic share of oil. If pushed they generally just cite the fact that it’s only “one year” and quote the last five years’ figures as an alternative.

But arguing over whether we should be quoting the last year’s figures or the last five years’ figures is completely besides the point because the truth is that you can’t predict the health of an independent Scotland’s economy using precisely two variables and without knowing basic structural factors like our borrowing arrangements. The one issue alone of the amount of interest we’d pay on the bond markets can be enough to change an economic boom into borderline bankruptcy (as Eurozone states showed during the Eurozone crisis) yet we’re expected to believe that we can say with certainty Scotland will be wealthier simply by pointing at net taxation revenues and receipts of public spending. We don’t even have a solid answer to the currency we’ll be using, far less anything else.

Even if we could perform a calculation on this basis, it’s impossible – regardless of what happened in the past – to say with any certainty what our taxation revenues will be next year, far less for the next decade. That’s why they can wildly swing from 9.9% of UK taxation revenues in 2011-12 to 9.1% of UK taxation revenues in 2012-13. So this isn’t an economic argument – no economist of any standing would make a claim to certainty about any estimate produced under these conditions – it’s an assertion based on some decidedly ropey analysis. The truth – which neither campaign will tell you – is that we simply don’t know how an independent Scotland would do economically, but we’re unlikely to see huge gains or losses either way. Ultimately the choice facing Scotland is one that should be made on the basic principles of the issues at stake, not by trying to blindly guess what future taxation revenues will be (something nobody can do, no matter how well informed they might be).

3. Scotland’s future is bright. Oil will last for decades yet, and we sit on the brink of a renewables bounty that could make the entire historic output of the North Sea pale into insignificance. But the UK can’t be trusted to manage it…

Arguments of this nature are essentially an appeal to the idea that “Westminster politicians can’t be trusted” with our future, but that Scottish politicians, presumably, can be trusted. As someone who doesn’t have a great deal of faith in any set of politicians – Scottish or otherwise – I’ve never had much time for arguments of this nature. It’s very difficult to analyse that argument from an objective perspective – if you have a chip on your shoulder about London and the South East you might be inclined to agree, if you have a chip on your shoulder about Alex Salmond you’d probably perceive his influence to be even worse.

The reason is that it really comes from a distinct brand of identity politics. Identity politics is almost always preoccupied with the idea that a certain group (in this case Scottish citizens) are consistently overlooked or discriminated against in decision-making. There will always be examples that can be cited to prove that case and it’s generally perpetuated by confirmation bias: any decision that goes Scotland’s way is ignored, any decision that goes against Scotland’s interest gets added to the evidence in favour. Of course what we don’t appreciate is that every other group playing at identity politics is performing precisely the same trick. That’s why, for instance, you can go to any football ground in the country and find someone who thinks the entire establishment is against them (when it can’t be against everyone all of the time).

The other aspect to this sort of argument is the idea that simply uncovering some unfavourable treatment in the past is proof that it will continue to happen forever – as if the policies of say, Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and James Callaghan can all be put in one basket simply because they were all at one time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. That’s a decidedly odd argument at the best of times, but it’s the sort of conclusion you reach when you adopt populist “us and them” approaches to serious political issues. Needless to say, I don’t find this very convincing as a reason to support Yes.

4. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Threats that Scotland will be ejected (even temporarily) from the EU are hollow, impossible to ever put into practice. The same applies to border controls. Nobody can stop us from using the pound. No country poses a military threat to Scotland, and the only reason terrorists might attack us is because we’re part of the UK. We’ll still get to watch the BBC.

I think at this point, with under five weeks to go, we should all be well-versed in the accusations of scaremongering both sides of the campaign have routinely come out with. Some of the responses here (the implication that simply “using the pound” is somehow the equivalent to a full currency union simply because the currency would still have the Queen’s head on it) have been debunked on countless occasions, but the real point in this argument is to have a dig at Better Together for the supposed negativity in their arguments.

The truth, of course, is that “negative arguments” are the sort of things politicians obsess over, but they have very little impact on the pros and cons of independence. The No side have indeed painted some fairly grim scenarios if we become independent, just as the Yes side have caught up by making the somewhat baseless claim that a No vote would lead to the privatisation of Scotland’s NHS and even the abolition of the Scottish Parliament. None of this is particularly credible, but the idea that the tone of an argument is more important than its accuracy is the kind of nonsensical interpretation only a seasoned politician could come up with.

If someone were to stand at the top of a cliff and ask whether they should jump off which would be the most convincing argument: 1) You’ll die when you hit the ground or 2) The view from the cliff edge is really pretty. I don’t think I need to answer that question, but suffice to say the only thing that matters is whether an argument is correct, not whether it’s delivered with a smiley face or a frown.

5. People are sensible. At the moment, the No campaign has a vested interest in making things sound like they’d be as difficult as possible for an independent Scotland. But the day after a Yes vote, the opposite instantly becomes true – it’s then in everyone’s interest to sort everything out as quickly and cleanly as possible.

Unlike the other four points, this is a semi-reasonable observation at first glance, but the implication is that we shouldn’t acknowledge all of the very real problems associated with issues such as Westminster agreeing to a currency union (not least the political water that’s passed under that bridge at this point) or the EU getting unanimous agreement from all 28 states on Scotland’s membership (far less on favourable terms for Scotland). Yet while the No side might have a stake in making things seem more difficult than they’d need to be, that doesn’t mean there aren’t real problems with what’s being proposed in the first place.

On the EU issue, for instance, we’d be entering a negotiation in which any one state could veto our membership (for any reason) yet we’re essentially operating from the standpoint that entering that negotiation would allow us to get better terms than what we currently have through the UK (namely all of our existing opt outs, a bitterly disputed rebate on the budget, plus more favourable fishing quotas). Now of course there would be an agreement of some kind, but it’s the substance of that agreement which matters and on that count the outlook is at best somewhat difficult.

Of course this argument can be flipped around in any case and made in almost identical terms about the Yes campaign: i.e. at the moment the Yes side has a vested interest in making things sound like they’d be as easy as possible for an independent Scotland. About all we can conclude here is that both sides exaggerate their arguments (twas ever thus…)

So why should we vote No?

Those are the five reasons given to back a Yes vote – and it will surprise nobody to say that reading this book hasn’t altered my opinion to oppose independence – but what are the actual reasons to support a No vote? After all, while poking holes in Wings Over Scotland’s arguments is relatively straightforward, that doesn’t actually lead us to a reason to reject independence.

For me, it simply comes down to appropriate venues for decision-making. I’m a strong supporter of devolution because I believe that in certain areas it makes a great deal of sense to have directly elected Scottish politicians making uniquely “Scottish” decisions for local communities. However I also believe that there are certain areas where it makes sense to have UK decision-making. We already tacitly acknowledge that to be true by arguing for shared monetary policy through a currency union, but the same can be said of shared regulation of the economy (particularly in areas like services where the EU hasn’t developed a single market) or shared labour standards. These are areas where being “independent” doesn’t provide any advantage because having the same rules to govern Scotland and rUK’s market is the best way to prevent trade barriers from developing.

Indeed the arguments for these shared forms of decision-making (which also extend to other areas like infrastructure, energy and the environment, to name three) are so convincing that we’ll de facto continue to set policies at the UK level in any case. There’s no real benefit in Scotland having different economic regulations in the service sector, for instance, when we still participate in the same market as the rest of the UK. Yet if we are going to have shared rules then why shouldn’t we have a directly elected parliament with local representatives from Scotland’s communities involved in that process? Why do we gain from giving up our MPs while still being effectively tied to a form of UK decision-making?

I support a system in which we have direct local representation at every level of government that influences our lives: locally elected councillors to deal with the small-scale decisions in our communities, directly elected MSPs for those areas where it makes sense to have decisions made at a Scottish level, and directly elected MPs to represent the interests of Scottish citizens in UK level decision-making (which is still going to affect us whether we’re independent or not). I really don’t see anything remotely controversial about that and the Wee Blue Book’s exaggerated democratic arguments, unverifiable claims about Scotland becoming wealthier and political point scoring certainly haven’t done much to sway my opinion.