For a bleak moment last week, I understood what it was to be cross-examined on live television and not immediately possess the answer to the question. From the safety of a press room in Glasgow's glorious Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a few minutes earlier I had finished watching Alistair Darling and Alex Salmond slug it out in the second of their head-to-head debates. Now I was appearing on the BBC news channel to discuss what had just unfolded and chuntering on about Darling failing to have made a positive case for remaining in the union. "I could cite 10 good reasons for remaining in the union," I heard myself saying. "OK, name a few," replied Gavin Esler, the interviewer. What, now? Fuck…

Listening to Darling over the course of three and a half hours in two live debates with Scotland's first minister was a profoundly dispiriting and depressing experience. I waited in vain to hear the former UK chancellor convey something cheery and optimistic about the arrangement that made him the most important man in Britain for a few years.

But there was nothing, not even a bat-squeak of warmth about the union. By the end of his car-crash performance at Kelvingrove, I wasn't even sure if he actually liked England. All the while, he had the demeanour of an undertaker telling a family that Uncle Tam has been lost somewhere between Shotts and Coatbridge.

There was nothing about the shared culture and history of these two great countries, nor anything of how we were there for each other in the times of our greatest perils and trials. He couldn't even say that England is a brilliant country that provides hundreds of thousands of jobs every year to Scots and offers them homes to settle where they can rear all those children of the union. "Why would you want to turn your back on England, Mr Salmond? It hasn't done you and your loved ones any harm and, very palpably, been a force for good in your lives. Is that a Ralph Slater special you are wearing by any chance?"

Instead, Darling delivered his case to the bleak tattoo of a single drum: we can't, we can't, we can't; the risks, the risks, the risks; it's cold, it's cold, it's cold. It was like listening to a seven-year-old who doesn't want to go to school in the morning. By the end, I had an urge to run outside and check that that there were cars on the road and lights on the pavements.

The problem for the nationalists, still basking in the warm glow of watching their champion make a timely recovery, is Darling's in reverse. In their eagerness to convey positive messages about their cause, they would have us believe that absolutely nothing can go wrong in an independent Scotland. Immediately, Scotland will become a socially just and environmentally clean Xanadu where we will all be living in yurts and shopping from Homebase, having retired at 50 with our big, fat pensions.

Our tourism sector will be augmented by boatloads of Tibetan monks and UCLA social studies post-graduates seeking enlightenment and wondering just how we do it. Salmond occasionally does this too. There are no doubts or clouds on the horizon and that worries Scots, because there must always be doubts and clouds or else it simply isn't Scotland.

It is also disingenuous and often downright dishonest to claim that in Scotland, the poor and the vulnerable will be better off simply because we aren't being run by Westminster. Long-term poverty and unemployment have been at unacceptably high levels for far, far longer than the span of this coalition government. Multi-deprivation, knife crime and heart disease still scar the features of our urban landscapes 15 years after devolved government gave us control of these areas.

Foodbanks may have proliferated during the course of David Cameron's administration, but the factors that cause people to fall on their mercy have been around for far longer and it has been within our gift to solve.

It is simply wrong to say that the austerity drive and the welfare cuts of the Westminster government have created these injustices and inequalities. The people who live in those neighbourhoods and communities most affected by the cuts were born into an eternal austerity drive. How many of the rest of us would be willing to conduct more austere existences to help the people who live there?

This is the Scotland that chooses to walk by on the other side while evil deeds occur daily at the Bellgrove hotel on Glasgow's Gallowgate and go unchallenged (and yes, I will be returning to that one in due course, Glasgow city council).

That isn't David Cameron's fault and nor are the reasons why our husbands, fathers, sons and nephews go there to die. Bad things happen there because smart, enlightened and socially progressive Scotland doesn't think these men and many thousands of others like them are worth the candle. In a year from now, the Bellgrove hotel will still be making its owners rich whether we become independent or not. It represents the sum of all of Scotland's iniquities and nothing in our recent devolved history suggests that we will be serious about closing it down in an independent Scotland.

So don't go insulting our intelligence, you Yes cheerleaders and fluffers, by saying that social inequality will diminish and that lions will start lying down with lambs. We both know that this won't happen soon just because the national collective and women for indy and hippies for freedom are holding happy-clappy events in Tomintoul village hall.

I'd feel a lot more comfortable in the 18 days between now and our referendum day if they said something like this. Look, it's not all Westminster's fault that pain and suffering happen in our poorest communities. We can't give you any firm guarantees that there won't still require to be austerity measures. All we are saying is that independence may give us the opportunity to reach our poor and our vulnerable a little more quickly and more effectively.

How many of them, though, actually want that or merely like the designer label of "independence" in itself?