Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

The late, great Michael Marra, the Bard of Dundee, once wrote a heartrending and witty song called "Beefheart and Bones" about a couple divvying up their CD collection after a breakup. It sums up how I've come to feel about Scottish independence after a long time of swithering (a Scots word meaning "swinging from one position to another".) For a long time, I couldn't make up my mind. In the "Aye, naw, mibbe" discussion, I was a definite "mibbe". But neither side seems able definitively to answer my questions about what will happen after the referendum. Will we keep the pound? Will we get devo max? Will we drive Trident from our waters? Will we keep the Windsors?

Given that, the only basis I could find for making a choice is to look at the track record of what the Scottish parliament has done differently from Westminster since we've had some power restored to us. And, overwhelmingly, I prefer what we've done north of the border – free prescriptions, no student tuition fees, social care for elderly people. So, with a degree of trepidation, I'm going to nail my colours to the mast of aspiration and vote "Yes".

When you realise you're in a relationship in which the two of you want different things, where your hopes and dreams are taking you in different directions, you don't hesitate because you're not sure what you're going to get in the divorce settlement; you make the decision and then you sort things out afterwards. We shouldn't be held back because of the fear that seems to be the major plank of the Better Together campaign. And if we don't get the Beefheart CD, we can always go out and buy a new copy.

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

The most interesting thing about the independence referendum is how the yes campaign has gone from being perceived on the left as anti-British, to part of the vanguard of a broader populist movement to restore democracy across these islands. In the larger context, this is isn't surprising; the Conservatives have long given up even pretending to represent anybody other than society's elites and their cohorts, who have taken the country to the cleaners for the last 35 years. (Anybody who doubts this should look at the continuing flow of wealth from the many to the few.) Labour has also presided over this ongoing obscenity, while occasionally hinting that they can perhaps wring some begrudged concessions from those elites. This seldom, if ever, happens; the UK is simply not set up that way.

With its morally bankrupt party system, zero-esteemed career politicians, and plethora of coverups and conspiracies reaching into the heart of a seedy, decadent, self-serving establishment in business, politics, the media and the judiciary, the UK is now perceived as a failed state by many of its citizens. It has entrenched the entitlement of power and privilege above that of the aspiration to any true democracy.

But now people are thinking about the public school elites, aristocracy, City of London investment bankers, corporate lobbyists, and the imperialist warmongers, apologists and conspirators in the media, not as instruments of good government and a healthy democracy, but as dangerous impediments to it. All those will be eliminated, or their influence largely diminished, in Scotlandfollowing a yes vote and the establishment of a constitution that confers genuine rights on citizens. If Scotland moves in that direction, I wouldn't expect England to hang around in developing a true grassroots democratic movement.

The yes campaign has empowered people to take control of their own destiny, and offered hope that they, their families and communities can have a genuine future. The principle is a simple one: it involves national resources going into education, health and housing, instead of being siphoned off into the offshore accounts of the super-rich or squandered on sordid overseas conflicts, instigated by the inadequate for the profit of their paymasters. (This is what they mean by "influence on the world stage".) The yes campaign deserves to succeed in September with a positive vote. Either way, the genie is now out of the bottle, and the issue, and the newly empowered citizens it has created, certainly will not be going away.

On a personal note, I've lived most of the last decade in Ireland and America, two countries that were once ruled from London. I've yet to meet a single person in either who is in a hurry to go back to that arrangement. Once Scotland and England have freedom from the corrupt, imperialist and elitist setup, I can guarantee that their people will feel exactly the same way.

James Meek

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

The "Great" in "Great Britain" is so often taken for a boastful adjective that we forget it's a comparator. It doesn't mean "Excellent Britain". It means "great" as in "great crested newt" or "great auk" or "Greater London". We forget that "Great Britain" is simply the geographical name for the largest island of the hundreds in the British archipelago. It's our Honshu; our Java. Perhaps "Greater Britain" would be a clearer name, or "Big Island".

You can, and perhaps will, mark out a conceptual east-west line dividing the island in two, and decree that on either side of the line people will pay different taxes, deal with immigration in different ways, permit or not permit nuclear weapons. What you cannot do is physically make one island into two, or move the island elsewhere.

I can imagine a number of unhappy consequences of Scotland voting for independence in September. I can also imagine good ones. The assumption that political fragmentation means more nationalistic, inward-looking, self-aggrandising cultures in the separated nations, particularly England, might be wrong. What if the death of Britannia heightened awareness of the non-political culture that spans the entire archipelago – the islandic world?

It would be different were Scotland to be speaking a different language. But modern Scots hasn't been systemised in a way that makes it practical to learn to speak for everyday use, or to prepare Scots to accept hearing it spoken with a non-Scottish accent, and Ireland's experience suggests even universal Gaelic teaching doesn't make Gaelic a first language.

Adjacency, entwined histories, entwined families, a common language, vernaculars of everything from diet to architecture to sailing to hillwalking to drinking – there is much in common in islandic culture, like Scandanavian, that will transcend islandic borders.

Last year I was invited to the book festival in Dún Laoghaire, near Dublin. I was on stage with AL Kennedy; two writers, brought up in Dundee, now living in London, speaking in Ireland. It was an islandic experience, and I found myself intoxicated by the pleasure of small differences. Dún Laoghaire was not quite like anywhere I had been before. But the way it seemed different from Brighton or Ayr was exactly the same as the way in which Brighton and Ayr seem different from each other. That's not something you change with a vote.

Richard Holloway

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

The referendum debate reminds me of those arguments for and against the existence of God that were such a feature of the cultural scene about 10 years ago. The cases offered in support of either side were rationalisations of convictions reached on other, usually subconscious, grounds, which is why they tended to fortify beliefs already held rather than make new converts; and they left agnostics undecided. The same thing seems to be going on here, with the agnostics the group likely to swing the vote, depending on which side they find less satisfactory on the day. I am an agnostic who has decided to vote yes, and what I want to do here is describe some of the factors that prompted me to that decision.

I agree with the priest in TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral who said he saw "nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government". Economics strikes me as no more conclusive a science than theology, which is why I have been more irritated than enlightened by the use each side has made of the dismal science in the debate; but while the arguments of the yes side may not have persuaded me, the arguments of the no side have propelled me in the opposite direction. Rather than making a positive case for the union, the Better Together campaign has wasted its energy on attacking the idea that Scotland could go it alone, a tactic guaranteed to anger those of us for whom the question was never whether we could but whether we should.

And there has been little recognition on the unionist side that the British political system is broken. The major factor in my own mistrust is outrage at the wars we have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan for no valid moral purpose. I am ready to forgive politicians for getting economics wrong, but never for taking us into costly and unnecessary wars. Over-centralised Britain concentrates power in ways that are hard to challenge. I support the Catholic principle of subsidiarity: power should be decentralised to the maximum degree; and that's what the soft form of independence on offer will help us to achieve.

But even if it's a no vote on 18 September, the yes campaign has already won by forcing the unionists to offer Scotland significant new powers. If they had shown that generosity at the beginning of the campaign, history might have turned out to be different.

Allan Massie

There's a general impression that Scottish writers and artists are mostly in favour of independence. A good many certainly are. Some, like Alasdair Grayand James Robertson, have been so for a long time. Other younger ones have perhaps been inspired by Gray's advice that we should imagine we are living in the first days of a better country. Artists for Independence are undoubtedly voicing their opinion more loudly, and campaigning more vigorously, than those intending to vote No.

It's also quite widely believed that the prospect first of devolution then of independence stimulated an artistic renaissance. There's little evidence of this, if only because the condition of the arts in Scotland has been no more – and no less – healthy and flourishing over the last three or four decades than over the preceding half‑century.

It's possible that the achievement of independence might prove stimulating. Many believe it would. But it might not. We might mirror Ireland's experience, where the exuberant creativity of the years of struggle for independence died away soon after the creation of the free state. Of course, an independent Scotland would not resemble De Valera's Ireland; there would be no clerical dominance, no church-inspired censorship. Nevertheless, the battle won, it might prove a duller place.

All this can only be speculation. One thing is clear, however. As far as the state's role in the arts and public provision for the arts is concerned, independence would make very little, if any, difference. The one area that would be affected is broadcasting, where breaking away from the BBC to establish a Scottish BC might conceivably offer new opportunities for writers, film-makers and musicians. In all other respects, however, things would remain much as they are today. We already have our own national institutions: our national galleries, orchestras, opera, theatre, and dance companies. What used to be the Scottish Arts Council, now known as Creative Scotland, is already independent of London and the UK state. There is very little that an independent Scottish government could do for the arts that the devolved Scottish government can't already do now. Nothing, for instance, prevents the devolved government from transferring more of its budget to the support, fostering and promotion of the arts, nothing, that is, except the absence of the will to do so.

Kathleen Jamie

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

I emailed a dozen yes-supporting friends and asked for a snap response to the question "Where are we at?" Their replies make up this "poem".

Aye! We are rolling our tongues around a 3 letter word.

We are finding our voice.

We're resisting the big-bank, multinational-dictated slippage to the Right …

Only bruising, no blood.

It's about money.

It's not about money.

It isn't all about money.

It's about fear, faith, strength.

It can't come fast enough.

We're exploring a different way of organising a country.

This won't go back in the box.

We're questioning everything.

Peacefully,

we're resisting all sorts of intimidation from the British establishment

England has been a good neighbour, but …

It's the choice between a maimed culture and a whole country.

Unionism has no new songs.

What a great time to be alive in Scotland!

We're one-thirds way round a big blind bend.

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

I fully support the yes campaign: a vote for increased democracy, a vote for the greater representation of a unique populace and a huge chance to break with the moribund, corrupt, militaristic lump that is Westminster today. The democratic dividends for Scotland have been kept well off the agenda by the big-business-led no campaign and its Nicodemite fellow travellers – a few of whom are writers. The no calculation is clear: what kind of future society we want in Scotland is NOT up for discussion; society has vanished and only cynical short-term "economics" and globalised agendas remain. The no "ideology" is numbingly small-minded, ahistorical and most of all, it is cowardly.

After the 1979 fiasco of the home rule referendum, many Scots like myself (I am half-English), felt cheated and disenfranchised. The vote was yes (by about 70,000); the infamous 40% rule was democratically questionable, as it converted abstainers and electoral roll anomalies into no votes. Then came Thatcher, Blair and the Cameronian; decades of rightwing monetarist rule from London.

What then are the implications for Scottish literature today? I am not self-important enough to believe it is part of many voters' deliberations, but a yes vote would free us as Scottish writers from a hidden war that rages inside our minds; it would grant us the light wings of a new responsibility. A No vote will have sinister and depressing implications. Our literature has been and is still bound up with concepts of independence, cultural assertiveness, language and that quaint old term: freedom.

Think on this: if there was a no vote, has there ever been another European country where a "progressive" – and to use two pompous words – "intelligentsia", has united in a liberation movement, yet the majority has finally voted against the aspirations of this movement? A no vote will create a profound and strange schism between the voters of Scotland and its literature; a new convulsion. It will be the death knell for the whole Scottish literature "project" – a crushing denial of an identity that writers have been meticulously accumulating, trying to maintain and refine. With a no vote, a savage division will suddenly exist between the values of most of our writing – past and present – and the majority of our people.

Strong cultures endure, and if the vote is very close, some might find room for optimism. I won't. Scotland will have become a mere global brand, its reality officially cancelled by its own people, and only approved by Westminster when sufficiently convenient, as a nuclear military base etc. Ultimately, Scotland will have voted Tory.

There is an 18th-century Scottish poem, by this guy, I can't seem to quite recall; it's all fading away. Something about "bought and sold … for … gold"? On our conscience it will rest.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

Naturally, I favour independence, not just for Scots, but for all citizens, which is why I reject the SNP's phoney independence referendum in September. For me, real independence would mean liberation, finally, from a feudal system in which more than half of Scotland is owned by fewer than 500 people and where, last year, the government paid out £663,695,661 in agricultural, forestry and food-processing subsidies, much of it to rich individuals and corporations. The injustice of this system is clear, yet, according to former Scottish Land Reform Review Group member Jim Hunter: "We're now six years into an SNP government that has so far done absolutely nothing legislatively about the fact that Scotland continues to be stuck with … the most undemocratic land ownership system in the entire developed world."

I also want independence from high-level meddling in local affairs the government's aggressive support for the Viking wind turbine project (which was rejected at judicial review, only for that judgment to be overturned last week – in a single day). Scotland, it seems, is open for business, no matter what the environmental costs.

I could go on but this government's record speaks for itself. Yes, Scotland needs to become independent – but independent of the charlatans, liars and chancers who have run it for too long. The way forward, in Scotland, as elsewhere, is direct representation, genuine redistribution of land and wealth, and, first and foremost, environmental policies that foster the health and wellbeing of all living things.

Janice Galloway

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

It seems a long time ago now, but what I looked forward to in the runup to September 2014 was information. I'd be briefed, right? I'd hear a positive and strong pro-union case and a strong and positive independence case. I thought I deserved that much. What has been most genuinely shocking this far down the line is the tenor of the no campaign. The initial flurry of panda-reclamation threats, Scotland being "disallowed" the BBC's Doctor Who, the half-cock threat of enforced border controls (not required by independent Ireland) and Baron Robertson of Port Ellen's rant about "the forces of darkness rubbing their hands in glee" at the prospect of Scottish secession, seemed daft enough. But they were tasters of what the no campaign thought the electorate deserved, ie not much.

Scaremongering is not a vote-winner – it is an appeal to fear, an invitation to lack confidence, an attack on openminded voters who imagined they deserved better. Alistair Darling's impression of Private Frazer from Dad's Army consistently telling me I am doomed is not a "case" for union, it is a case against aspiration. Belittling yes voters as "bravehearts", "death-eaters" (whatever they are) and Harry Lauders, whose deepest fear is how much anything costs in only the most literal sense is not a case either. It is dismissal.

The moral climate, the educational and social climate, and greedy and messianic big-government politics concern me. How to deal with London's already independent city-state status and unconnectedness to the rest of the UK concerns me. I want my vote to mean something. But the no campaign seems not to notice that people like me (or my thoroughly English, thoroughly yes-inclined husband) exist. I hope they find out we do. If not, all of us might end up with nothing but more of the same to look forward to.

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

It's both inspiring and depressing to see how interested and excited an electorate can become when they are given the chance to consider possible futures that have (quite often) not been pre-packaged and spun by party machines. Scotland on both sides of the yes/no divide is considering paths ahead that diverge from the tottering Westminster model, and is largely embracing ideas of national identity that aren't based on racist assumptions. The more measured and nuanced middle ground of the debate is considering positive and creative approaches to democracy and the challenging economic circumstances faced by people all over Britain. With an established parliament in place we seem to have been willing to lower our expectations of behaviour and levels of public service. (Although it's increasingly hard to lower our expectations enough to keep pace with the ever-sinking reality within the House of Commons and local government.) Perhaps one lesson we could learn from the indy debate would be to maintain the demand for hope and higher standards that plans for a new status quo can produce. Harnessing the potential within the idea that elections can actually bring about change could serve everyone in the British Isles.