I love the material that those for and against are producing and it will only get better. But the message is loud and clear, there are a lot of serious questions that have, as yet, been unanswered by Wee Eck.

There was a debate on the issue in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, but the answers remain unresolved and for fairly obvious reasons. The leader of the 'YES' campaign Blair Jenkins, not a politician or he wouldn't have made this mistake, indicated that following a successful Referendum there would be a 18 months of negotiation with Westminster with full independence occurring in the 2016 Scottish elections.

First up, the 18 months negotiation is not in his gift. When parties are negotiating the length of these negotiations are based on mutual agreement so you can't set a time limit.

Secondly, in 2016 the successor Government may not be SNP, so why should Westminster conclude negotiations by 2016 when they might get a much better deal from the successor Government?

Thirdly, why should Westminster enter any negotiations before 2016 when there will be a new Government in 2016 and simply let Europe carry the negotiations up till 2016?

Fourthly, Westminster could legitimately commence a Referendum on European membership for the Rest of the UK and suspend negotiations with the Scottish Government until the outcome of that Referendum was known.

In every case an independent Scotland is at the mercy of circumstances beyond its control - not a good sign.

Wid ye furgive me if Ah'm wrang but is it no jist a few yers ago that humpty dumpty wis oan aboot Scotland being jist as prosperous as Iceland and Southern Ireland.

Don't hear him bummin too much aboot that noo

In point of fact there were a number of statistics bandied about which made comparisons with other countries. First up, you cannot compare very large countries with very small countries (by population that is). It would be like comparing a rowing boat with an ocean liner, they don't do the same things other than float on water.

This can reach a ludicrous extent. Take recent press reports that China's GDP will soon surpass that of the US - so what? China has a population 4 times larger than the US so its GDP should be larger, but isn't. The real question is how does China's per capita income, even when it surpasses the US, compare with it. Answer: there is no comparison the US is vastly wealthier than China and will remain so for a very long time.

Now let's take a comparison closer to home. Scotland has a population of around 5.3 million. A reasonable comparison would therefore be with countries of similar population. So let's look at 2, Norway (a pure social democracy) and Ireland (a market based capital democracy). Where does Scotland fall? Well, actually somewhere in the middle and it's not hard to see why. Scotland is quite a bit more socially democratic than Ireland and a bit less than Norway. Does this affect GDP? Yes it does. Does this affect per capita income? Individually, it can, but as a general rule not much that you'd notice.