Why independence?

The whole case fits in a sentence: decisions about Scotland are best made by the people who live here.

Everything else is detail. Important detail - pensions, currency, the border, the lot - and this site exists to work through it honestly. But before the detail, here is the argument itself, in plain words.

Scotland gets the government England votes for

Scotland is less than a tenth of the UK electorate. When Scotland and England vote the same way, Scotland's votes change nothing. When they vote differently, Scotland's votes are overruled. Either way, they don't decide.

That sounds abstract until it isn't. In 2016 Scotland voted to remain in the EU, 62 to 38, every single council area the same way - and left anyway. Whatever you think of Brexit itself, the constitutional lesson is the point: on the biggest question in a generation, what Scotland voted for made no difference.

Normal is available

Look around the neighbourhood. Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Finland: none of them notably bigger, richer in resources, or better educated than Scotland, all of them running their own affairs, all of them near the top of the world's league tables for prosperity and wellbeing. None of them would hand that back. There is no campaign in Copenhagen to be governed from somewhere else.

Independence is not an experiment. It's the ordinary condition of countries Scotland's size, and Scotland would arrive better equipped than most of them did: vast renewable energy, world-class food and drink exports, ancient universities, its own legal system already running.

It's not a vote for a party

Independence is a decision about who decides, not about who governs. Vote Yes and then vote for whoever you like, forever - including parties that don't exist yet. If you can't stand the SNP, that's an argument about one party's performance, and the surest way to end its dominance is to settle the question that keeps it at the centre of Scottish politics.

The choices stay open

EU or EFTA, in or out of NATO, which currency: these are decisions for the people of Scotland to make once the power to decide has been regained. This site deliberately picks none of them. The case for independence is the case for getting to choose.

Where the doubts are right

Independence is a big change, and big changes carry real risk. The deficit figures are awkward and we say so. Setting up a state costs money. England would remain Scotland's biggest market and keeping that trade easy would matter. Nobody serious promises that independence makes everything better.

The promise is narrower, and stronger for it: when things go wrong in an independent Scotland, the people responsible can be sacked by the people they failed. Right now, for most of what matters, they can't be.

So what's the real question?

Not whether Scotland could run its own affairs - the evidence on that is about as settled as evidence gets. The real question is the one every doubt on this site comes back to: are decisions about Scotland better made by the people who live here, or by someone else?

The rest of this site takes the doubts one at a time, with sources you can check. Start with the one that's yours.