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Comment by lorddoig | Hacker News Reader

Another Scot here (and a 'no' voter). Totally agree on almost everything except the 'short-term implications'. They have the potential to be both devastating and medium- to long-term. The currency issue, for example, is decidedly less trivial than either side have said. Specifics will depend on a lot of fights between Westminster and Holyrood that we won't get to see until after we've decided.

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It feels to me (in the interests of transparency, I'm another no voter) that there needs to be a second referendum if it is a yes vote where we get to vote on exactly the settlement which is agreed.

Agreed, after watching the last debate I was stunned by the extent to which Salmond tried to handwave this.

The independence campaign has to hand-wave the issue, and can't outright declare that Scotland would almost certainly have a currency-union with the UK, because it's ultimately contingent on the UK government.

If they did, the unionists/UK government could attempt to call their bluff by having UK politicians declare that a currency-union would never happen. It's doesn't cost the unionist politicians very much credibility and it undermines the independence campaign on that key issue, whether or not a currency union is a strong likelihood in the case of independence.

The truth is the UK government would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't enter a currency union - unless they thought the Scottish economy was a real threat to the stability of the rest of the UK, or that having Salmond's cronies on the board at the Bank of England was politically unviable.

The thing is though that in a currency union there's only so far the two economies can diverge before they have to adopt different currencies to maintain stability (Greece and the Euro is a fine example of the bad end of this stick) - which kind of defeats the purpose of being independent, to an extent.

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