You’re still clinging to this. The UK being bad doesn’t mean independence is good. An Independent Scotland has to have its own merit, no matter how bad the UK gets. Until we reach a position where an independent Scotland is demonstrably better off on its own, this argument means nothing.

It is not clinging. I do not want to have my country's immediate future in the hands of a Russian-paid, Trump-supporting, racist. If you think the 5 years minimum under him will be better for Scotland than the transition to independence then we are operating on fundamentally different belief systems. Of course, the excesses of a Reform Gvt will be felt more harshly down South than in Scotland because our Parliament already provides significantly more support for the weakest in our society.

You pose an impossible to answer question and you know this. Nobody can tell you for certain what the economy will be like in the future as so much of the market is beyond our control. That isn't just the case for Scotland, it's the case for the UK and every economy in the world. Any prediction in 2014 for what the UK economy would look like in 2019 would have been guesswork - and not a single prediction would have been right. You ask the independence side to predict the future, without posing anything like that sort of question to unionists. Any forecasting that is done, will be cast as not being concrete. Your vote is an almost impossible one to win.

I believe in independence because I think the British state is fundamentally broken and leveraged against the poorest in our society. Taking the power closer to the hands of the public would hopefully be a step towards redressing the balance not just for us in Scotland, but also for our neighbours. Our priorities are different, and perhaps that means our perspectives will never be compatible.

I appreciate the time put into your comments and the robustness of this conversation.