Much as it may surprise my Telegraph colleagues, I am not sentimentally a Unionist. I grew up both in Scotland and in England, and I’d quite like them to stay together. But once you boiled out all the short-term stuff about keeping the pound and ditching Trident, the referendum was basically about two competing visions of democracy. One vision favoured small nations whose people could never be dictated to from too far above their heads because their government was elected by a smaller number of people. The other favoured big nations whose politicians might be further from their people but whose size and power let them “punch above their weight” in global institutions like the UN, Nato, and the EU. On balance, I prefer option one. Independence would not be a tragedy.