He's obviously talking about the short term, not in some possibly long-term future where everything is sorted out.

Blowing off the guys legitimate worries for his business as scaremongering pretty much sums up the entire Yes campaign so far. It's not an argument like, "it's true that the split will be messy painful and could cause recession on both sides, but in the long term it'll be worth it". It's an argument like "everything will be peaches and cream immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a scaremongering bully".

You're mixing up currency and currency union. Salmond has been deliberately obfuscating this so the confusion is not surprising, but they are different things.

Post independence Scotland could continue to use the pieces of metal and paper we tend to think of as "the pound". It could still express prices in pounds. The UK cannot stop this nor would it care to do so, even if it could. Scotland can keep the currency.

Currency union is an entirely different matter. Currency union is about decision making and who pays for what in future should things go tits up again. This is not a physical object or landmass that can be split up. It's called a "union" because it involves people working together. This is categorically not on offer because Scotland has shown no preference for economic policies compatible with the rest of the UK, really it's shown the exact opposite. So English people working together with Scottish people to create unified economic policies on this wouldn't really be possible, the disagreements are too deep and English people outnumber Scottish quite significantly. Thus it'd only make sense if Scotland agreed to give up most of the independence it had just won. Otherwise it'd be Greece all over again. Profligate teenager wouldn't even begin to describe it.

There is one situation in which CU could actually make sense - if Scotland strongly and consistently voted for the same economic policies as the UK had, and could be trusted to do so for the forseeable future. However this isn't a Scotland that anyone has been seeing during the independence campaign, so it's hard to imagine things changing anytime soon.

With respect to the debt, I think in the event of independence all the opinion polls suggest the UK will take a firm line. No currency union and they split the debt equally too. It's not up for debate. This is actually a fair position - split the debts and financially each goes their own way - but I doubt Scotland will go for it, and the amount of pain that could result for both sides is quite astronomical. This is why such a large proportion of people don't think independence is worth it.

How Scotland voted is a matter of historical record - and they have consistently voted for policies so bad that no mainstream political party in any western country supports them any more. The same arguments crop up today, indeed "let's break away from the neoliberal consensus" is one of THE main arguments being made for independence.

When basically every political leader in every country has walked away from such policies because they didn't work, and bringing them back is a keystone of the whole campaign, what else are people supposed to think? Thatcher was decades ago, she is actually dead. People who still blame all their problems on her are as close to "incurable" as seems possible to describe.

BTW whatever happens it looks like at least half of Scotland is going to disagree with it. So even if the vote is for independence, they're hardly "unwilling subjects", especially as they want to keep large parts of the union.

I think this is one of the most absurd set of arguments I've ever seen.

You know that when Scotland was offered union and accepted it, it was bankrupt. It got wealthy as part of the union. So perhaps Scotland should pay large sums of money to the UK when it leaves for the privilege of being saved from poverty all those centuries ago?

That position makes about as much sense as yours.

It's the opposite of that, right? The UK still exists, so the UK owes those pensions.

To whom? Foreigners who don't have the right to vote any more? OK, then I guess the English will just seize the funds and put them back into a general pot to help offset the shared debt that wasn't taken on board by those same foreigners.

I really hope nobody in Scotland is stupid enough to try the arguments you just put forward for real. That would be a fail of truly epic proportions.

Can you justify that statement at all? Currency union has been categorically ruled out and the UK population (outside of Scotland) strongly supports that move according to opinion polls.

The best thing for everyone would be to facilitate a peaceful and mutually beneficial transition.

Of course.

That means cooperating with the Bank of Scotland to keep the Pound if they want to and doing nothing to make EU membership difficult.

That would mean agreeing to underwrite and subsidise someone else's heavily socialist spending policies in perpetuity. The English taxpayer already suffers from paying tax that is then shipped to Scotland and used to give Scottish and rest-of-EU students free education, but not English students. There is no way in hell they will agree to crippling tax rises to fund a country that just told them to shove it. And this was made clear to Scotland throughout the campaign.

Once that happens, Salmond will argue that being told to fund his own policies is "English bullying" just like he's done throughout the campaign, and this terrible bullying is a reason to refuse to take on any debt. This will immediately alienate all English voters even moreso than Salmond already has done.

The UK will then have multiple ways to respond, because it's in a much stronger negotiating position; it's a much larger economy and already has all the infrastructure a country needs, whereas Scotland doesn't. As a trivial example, Scotland would be dependent on London to administer welfare until it's managed to commission and build its own IT systems. Does it want a smooth transition there? OK, time to go to the markets and borrow the funds to pay the UK for those services. There are many other examples like that.

Slicing up assets also means slicing up debts. Or would you be OK with all Scottish pensions being vaporised overnight because the UK still exists, so the UK will have the pensions?

I don't see what the beef over immigration is -- it actually works both ways. There are about 1 million Britons living in Spain right now under the same rules.

I've never met anyone in the UK who has a problem with immigration from west European countries that are culturally similar to themselves. Most of the problems crop up with poorly integrated Islamic integration where you get entire neighbourhoods in some cities that look basically like Pakistan: people wearing veils, not speaking English, etc.

The other issue is economic, the UK didn't use transitional controls when Poland entered the EU to delay immigration, so it got a really really large number of Polish immigrants because they had few other places to go. The evidence suggests the UK benefited from this economically but given the sheer speed and scale of the migration it's not hard to see why people got antsy.

The same did not happen when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU so I'm hoping immigration will blow over in the coming years if the economy continues to recover. But we'll see. It's not a UK specific problem, there's anti-immigration sentiment in populations all over Europe.

Also an English guy, I don't think you understand that you've not exactly treated Scotland very well and that's one of the reasons it wants to leave.

Scotland has been treated very well indeed. When it joined the Union its people were piss poor and its "government" was bankrupt. It's now a wealthy first world country, with lots of MPs in its Parliament, large amounts of money spent on its people and it's contributed multiple Prime Ministers and senior government figures.

Despite all that, a large number of Scottish people have repeatedly attempted to trash their own country and England too by blindly supporting policies that are - to put not too fine a point on it - communist. This is a part of the world where as late as 1989 an MP was trying to get elected by recalling "Red Clydeside". This is a part of the world where hatred of Thatcher is practically a national pasttime, although her crimes amounted to ending communist policies like massive state ownership of industry and trade union control. Scotland failed to adapt to deindustrialisation and failed so hard that decades after the rest of the country has moved on, lots of people there are still nursing a massive grudge.

Scotland's current state isn't because it was badly treated by England. Arguably the south of England saved Scotland in the 1980's. Leaving behind Soviet-style economic policies wasn't a choice, it was an inevitability, as the USSR would prove when it collapsed around the time Thatcher was booted out.

Now we see in the Yes campaign socialism rear its ugly head once again. The most common reason I've seen for voting for independence is that the nasty mean English vote Tory and Scots are fairer, kinder and more hard working than that. Even Salmond, the man who runs a political party that has basically mainstream economic policies, doesn't hesitate to take a giant dump on the English by implying that an independent Scotland would be a utopia of milk and honey once the hated Tories are overthrown. When asked what kind of spending cuts would happen post independence Sturgeon simply said "there wouldn't be any".

The reality is that Yes is campaigning on a framework of economic illiteracy. If they win independence, there are really only two possible outcomes - one is that the rest of Scotland manages to counterbalane the hard left somehow and Holyrood runs governments that look much like those in Westminster from an economic perspective. The other possibility is that disaster strikes and people who want to roll Scotland back to the chaos of the 1970's actually start winning elections, in which case Scotland will probably end up looking like Ireland did for much of the 20th century (dirt poor with large amounts of emigration).

Do you think that when the Irish Republicans were fighting (and dying) for their independence from the UK that they ever once thought, "But what will the economic implications of our independence be? What will our credit rating become??"

Probably not, but it's hardly a surprise that people who were practically Marxist guerillas didn't fully think through what they were doing.

Post independence Ireland's economy went down the shitter for a loooooong time and lots of people were very miserable. Emigration was rampant and Ireland became a place supported by remittances, like a third world country. It wasn't until they modernised their economy that things started to improve.

Scotland MUST vote for its independence. If things don't work out, they can always rejoin with England (England would bend over backwards to welcome Scotland back if it ever came to that).

This is like saying someone MUST divorce their spouse because they can always just get back together. I think you'll find this campaign has huge potential to wreck relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK. In the short run it won't just make Scotland poorer, it'll hurt everyone. Not to mention that the most common justification for independence can be summed up as "the English are nasty and unfair and everything wrong with Scotland is their fault".

With respect to trade, unfortunately the independence negotiations could be very complicated and nasty if they vote yes, as Salmond has promised the moon including things he knows he can't get. When he's told - again - he won't be able to get the things he wants, he'll once again blame the English and start trying to make the breakup as nasty as he can to try and save face. A trade war or widespread unofficial boycotts are not exactly unthinkable.

Heck, I wasn't planning on going on vacation to Scotland any time soon but I wouldn't have been against the idea. But after watching all of this?? Why would I go somewhere where apparently 50% of the population are quasi-Marxists who think all English people suck?

I don't see why Scotland would be rejected, especially since the UK has been a pain in the arse ever since it joined the EU. As a matter of fact, many countries in the EU would welcome Scotland just to piss off the Brits.

New countries can be vetoed by another other. Most people talk about Spain in this context, but the UK could do it too if Salmond were to play hard ball (and the evidence suggests he would).

You are not making any sense - again, the currency you use is totally independent from EU membership itself.

No, adopting the Euro is a requirement for new entrants. Countries that were previously part of the EU and did not adopt were grandfathered in and don't have to change, but for new entrants it's not optional.

As a fellow European (Belgium, not UK) it's funny to see the arguments being used by the "better together" campaign. They are all typically the same arguments used by the rest of Europe for increased European integration, which the same UK people are typically opposed to.

Don't paint all Brits with the same brush. Yes, some people in the UK are not keen on the current arrangements with Europe, largely because of the massive influx of immigrants in recent years (an issue Scotland has experienced to nowhere near the same extent). But the economic arguments for being in are strong and the EU in/out referendum debate has hardly begun.

I suspect the way things might go is like this - if there's a yes vote, the complications of cleaving the UK in two will soak up all spare Parliamentary time and political capacity for the next few years and push out an EU in/out referendum by some time. By this point the English will have realised that Scotland is desperately trying to get back in and being a part of the EU is a significant bargaining tool with the new iScotland. Seeing the effects of not being in the EU first hand will change a lot of minds, especially once the serious debates start going.

That said, local government isn't inherently a bad thing. It's just that the arguments for it in Scotland have been pretty weak. They're not overwhelmingly strong with respect to Brussels either, but with the EU it's more the general trend that worries people. Europe is trending towards centralisation and shows no signs of slowing down. The UK has been trending towards devolution for some time. So the two aren't exactly comparable.

they can still secure loans from the continent ... it is unlikely that anyone in Europe will spite UK this way

I rather think they would. Banks are not known for national alliances trumping profits, assuming lenders care one way or another (they don't).

Scotland will find it very hard to raise the funding it needs in the markets if it goes independent, but that'll be because Salmond seems to think walking away from their share of the UK debt is a viable option at all. I expect that if they did that, they could tell lenders that was a one off and they fully intend to repay debts accumulated by the new country, and I expect that lenders would buy it (after all HMG will still pay off the old Scottish debt).

But if they are actually stupid enough to do that they'll have made an enemy of an economy much larger than theirs, their largest export market, a country they're heavily dependent on for the basic infrastructure of running a government and a country that could veto their entry into Europe. Scotland really does NOT want a nasty, vicious divorce from the UK, but Salmond doesn't appear to be thinking that far ahead.

Additionally, raising funds would be tough because a significant part of the yes campaign appears to be predicated on the belief that post-independence Scotland will veer hard to the left. In the 1970's the north of the UK was practically communist and it appears many there still hanker for those times. A half-country that just pissed off its most important partner and is determined to re-run the Soviet experiment is not gonna be a good credit risk no matter what national allegiances one may have.

Google's C-levels say things like "privacy is dead" and "if you have something to hide you shouldn't be doing it".

Sigh. This has to go down as one of the most commonly manipulated misquotes in history.

Schmidt was saying something along the lines of "privacy is dead" in response to a question about the PATRIOT Act. He was telling it like it is, giving as much of a warning of what was going on as he could without actually doing a Snowden. He wasn't expressing happyness about that state of affairs, just pointing out that US laws give the US government enormous powers over people's personal information. And his last comment (actually "maybe" you shouldn't be doing it) was an observation of the fact that these things are not black and white: there's a small contingent of people who genuinely need nobody at all to know what they're doing for noble political reasons. And then there are all the people who aren't Snowden and are just trying to hack someone else's nude photos.

Switzerland survives because its main export is untraceable (sort-of) banking. Ireland is still close to being financially untenable. Not exactly worthy models to emulate. No one is served by a race to the bottom.

Um, no. That is dead wrong.

The entire financial sector including pensions and insurance is less than 10% of Swiss GDP. By the way you cannot "export" banking. For things you can export, there is a table of Swiss exports here or in diagram form. Regardless the USA has been incredibly aggressive against the Swiss banking sector in recent years, completely ignoring borders and national sovereignty in order to enforce the absurd US citizenship based taxation policies. They've arrested Swiss bankers and threatened many, many more even though they broke no laws in the country where they live and are based. The result is that Swiss banking secrecy (or privacy if you're of a libertarian bent) is basically dead, especially for Americans.

Regardless, the Swiss economy is still doing fantastically well.

Meanwhile, Ireland was doing just great up until their stupid politicians panicked and guaranteed the debt of one of the major banks, without really thinking through just how huge that debt was. Ireland was brought low by the banks but didn't build their economy on them.

So both your stereotypes about other countries with lower tax rates are not supported by reality.