Like many of my peers, I'm sick to the back teeth of the Referendum, and can't wait until it's over. The campaign has been draining to say the least, particularly for anyone who values integrity, transparency and democracy.
The "No" campaign, led by Alistair Darling, has been rudderless, weak, and woefully naïve, but thankfully high on integrity.
The "Yes" campaign has been strong in virtually every area other than truth and class.
Both sides' core responsibility during this period, should have been to outline, in great detail, how an Independent Scotland would impact people in Scotland.
What I would have expected to see, would be the kind of detail that you get following a budget, complete with fancy wee graphics showing various scenarios for different types of voter.
This kind of analysis usually outlines a budget's impact on pensioners, families with a mortgage or indeed single taxpayers or benefit claimants.
By now, you should know, if you work in a certain sector, and earn X amount and pay Y amount on your mortgage, X amount tax, and Y amount on your pension, just what your net position will be, post separation. To the shame of both sides, that is still unclear.
The "Yes" campaign, led by Alex Salmond and assisted by Stephen Noon and Blair Jenkins amongst others, has moved the whole debate in recent weeks away from the impacts of separation to topics that resonate with the Scottish people, but should be irrelevant to the core Referendum decision. These topics include "Trident", "Poverty" and the NHS.
Trident
While having Trident on your doorstep is not top of the list of anyone's desires, it is a necessary evil in this world to have such a deterrent. The decision to host Trident at Faslane is twofold. It is the safest location in the UK due to the depth of its water, and its risk to the public is far less at Faslane than it would be at Plymouth.
"There are about 166,000 people living within five kilometres of the Devonport base, compared with about 5,200 within that distance of Faslane."
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/mod-nuclear-submarines-scotland-plymouth
Poverty
Moving the topic on to poverty, and rhyming off figures of child poverty in Scotland was a deft move by Salmond, in the second of the head-to-head TV debates, because it had never been discussed by either side. It caught Darling unawares, and therefore meant the static Darling - without a briefing on the topic - would struggle.
The shame is Darling then missed a golden opportunity to ask exactly how Independence could bring anyone out of poverty as there are no policies in the White Paper that will achieve this, or to note that the figure will increase significantly if jobs are lost in the financial and defence sectors, as expected.
I haven't even started on the expected increase in the price of everyday groceries, energy, or the most important one for millions of working families – their mortgage. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that failure to pay your mortgage in a tumbling housing market will most probably leave you homeless. Of course, if you are a millionaire like Jim McColl, Brian Souter, or the Weir family, or at the other end of the financial spectrum, this doesn't affect you. That means you can strive for your ideological dream, while throwing hard working fellow Scots under the bus. Nice.
The NHS
The NHS attack preyed on peoples' deepest fears and remains the most fundamentally dishonest and disgusting aspect of the "Yes" Campaign
The "Yes" campaign would rather you read propaganda in nationalist websites than actual professional broadsheet analysis, which is why they delivered over 2 million leaflets this weekend pointing you to Pro "Yes" websites to "inform" you on your choices, which appear to be either "Yes", or "Yes".
SNP MSPs have been promoting a little book of propaganda from the extremist Wings of Scotland blog, which has been afforded undeserved credibility because of its positive "Yes" propaganda, despite it being riddled with inaccuracies. Thankfully, most of the assertions have been blown apart on the excellent chokkablog, and also the Telegraph newspaper.
http://chokkablog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-wee-blue-book-of-lies.html
Only just this morning it has emerged that confidential papers were passed to the BBC and The Herald by a senior NHS whistleblower, who said they had become frustrated by the argument of the "Yes" campaign, showing there would be a £450M gap in the NHS in Scotland under Independence.
Any broadcaster or newspaper who has the audacity to challenge anything from the "Yes" campaign, is subjected to bullying and intimidation that is an insult to democracy, as Jackie Bird and Nick Robinson will no doubt testify to.
All those on the end of "Yes's" ire are accused of being part of "project fear", which is a mythical conspiracy dreamed up to build and manipulate an intensely dangerous siege mentality, while also serving to silence and shut down debate. If there is a "project", then it should be christened Project Shut-Down, and at its helm is Alex Salmond.
The hundreds of protesters who turned up at the BBC yesterday shone a very unflattering light on the "Yes" campaign, as crowds of "Yessers" surrounded and intimidated journalists at Pacific Quay. This rent-a-mob, who are mobilised by the "Radical Independence" wing of the "Yes" campaign, are an affront to decency and democracy, and it's no coincidence that there were Hamas flags on show, as the Republican rent-a-mob have been here before. Quite what relevance these flags have to the Scottish Independence debate is anyone's guess.
It should be noted that all of this happened shortly after Celtic FC's resident IRA-sympathising extremist fan group the Green Brigade turned up at Celtic Park with "Yes" flags and banners, and just weeks after the IRA bar "The Rock", on the Falls Road in Belfast, showed its support for the separatists.
The behaviour and conduct of the scum element of the "Yes" campaign bears all the hallmarks of the type of Republican activism more common in Belfast.
Whether Scotland remains in the Union, or isolates itself, it should still be a democracy, where journalists and commentators are free to challenge any assertion from any politician or political campaigner, without being subjected to Project Shut-Down.
The fact is that the BBC have been more than fair in their Referendum coverage, with the Glen Campbell moderated live TV debate on the BBC and the debates hosted by James Cook leaning towards "Yes", while the broadcaster itself is at risk of being torn apart, with job losses certain at Pacific Quay in the event of a "Yes" vote. In the circumstances, I would have expected the BBC to have been far more critical of the wafer thin case for separation.
While an interesting element of this campaign has been that both the "Yes" and "No" campaign sport the endorsement of football fans from both sides of the Old Firm divide, it is most certainly worth noting to Rangers fans contemplating a "Yes" vote, is that there is a strong republican element to the "Yes" campaign, that employs their culture of intimidation learned over decades in Ulster.
This should not be the shape of things to come. Vote "No".