In common with literally all my foreign friends who, like me, have chosen to make Scotland their home, I am mystified that there is any question of rejecting the chance to become an independent country.
I do understand that change can be frightening but, on every level, the prospects for a modern, self-governing Scotland are clearly better than remaining as comedy bit-players in an exhausted system designed to serve the needs of another country's hereditary elite?
The United Kingdom was not chosen by the Scottish people in 1707, it was a stroke of royal power politics. Today, the UK is still pre-occupied with protecting the privilege and private wealth accumulated by the top 1% during the age of empire and is, therefore, laughably unfit to steer our entire population towards the opportunities of the future.
Can my Scottish friends not sense that something is wrong when the No campaign keep hammering the same obvious psychological buttons, do they not see this for the slick marketing campaign it is when Alistair Darling and the entire UK media straight-facedly suggest that oil is a curse, because of price volatility, rather than the blessing every other country considers it to be?
Is it not insulting when they suggest that, alone among all the peoples of the world, only the Scottish are incapable of democratically determining what is best for them and acting in their own best interests?
Even if Scotland did not have extraordinary natural resources that most countries would, quite literally, kill for, a rich diversity of resources that, per head of population, very few countries in the world can rival (http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bwh9F9LCcAAKBSV.jpg), there is something much more important, and this is what I, an Irishman who has lived in Scotland for 12yrs, and ALL my foreign friends here - Canadians, Australians, English, German, Americans, Thais and French etc - can see so clearly:
A people who gain the chance to govern themselves, who become the masters of their own destiny, they grow. They cast aside of the feeling of being second-best, they lose the bitterness, the chip on their shoulder. Whatever the challenges a small nation might face, nothing is as important as the feeling of pride and self-worth that come with being a first-class citizen in your own country.
This isn't just some abstract, wishy-washy point about feeling good; the future we are heading into is one in which self-confidence, the ability to believe in ourselves and our abilities, will be a fundamental driver of business, trade and innovation. It is vital that Scottish children take on the world with the same natural self-confidence as children from Oxford or London, that they be the ones taking chances and setting up companies, not the ones deciding that, on balance, it is probably best to play it safe and aim for a dull but secure job.
Forgive me, but I must be frank: the Scottish character has been affected by three centuries of playing second fiddle to England, there is more than a smidgen of self-hate and self-destructiveness in the Scottish temperament, and the self-harm that George Monbiot writes about (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/scots-i...) is likely to manifest itself spectacularly on polling day. That is why the No campaign will keep remorselessly pounding away at those deeply embedded fears and self-doubts right up until election day, because fear is how you hold people down.
They will keep pretending that it is about Alex Salmond, while conveniently ignoring real issues, such as the fact it was Scotland's oil which made Sterling a petrocurrency, propping up its value during the Thatcher years and allowing London to become a world centre of finance, all while lying about how much oil they were extracting. None of this is secret, it is all there in government papers released under the thirty-year rule:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-black-...
... and this is how the last gasp of empire looks: keep jock in harness by somehow persuading him that he needs the English rather than the other way round. This is the system, it has been perfected over centuries, it is insatiable and, no matter what they or their local sock puppets say, it does not have your best interests at heart.
I think the No campaign will win. Despite the recent dramatic gains by the Yes side, I believe the No campaign, with the entire weight of the London press and the BBC behind them, are tapping into rich and reliable reserves of self-doubt in the Scottish psyche. This saddens me greatly, as I believe the eventual realisation of what has been thrown away will only further poison the Scottish soul.
Despite having been sold to the electorate as a bulwark against change, the United Kingdom will change beyond recognition in the coming years. English politics will continue to be driven rightwards by the UKIP agenda, regardless of what the Scottish people want, and we may well find ourselves out of the European Union anyway, courtesy of The Daily Mail.
Certainly, the age of austerity and privatization will continue to drive down the "Barnett formula" money you are supposedly receiving in return for your oil propping up the London Exchequer, but more devastating will be the growing sense that, yet again, the Scottish have blown it, losing the one chance you had to disentangle and discover who you really are.