Scotland’s Decision – 16 Questions to to think about for the referendum on 18 September

Charlie Jeffery, Ray Perman 2014

Should Scotland be an independent country? Choosing an answer to that question, as Scotland’s electors will on 18 September 2014, is a choice of huge significance. So how will we come to a decision? Many voters know more or less by instinct. Plenty of us are convinced that being independent is right and good for our country and not being independent is wrong. Plenty of others believe the opposite: that what is right and good is staying as part of the UK.

But there are more still – probably the biggest single group – who don’t have such conviction either way and are puzzling their way through what voting Yes or No might mean for them and their families. This book is for them. We have taken sixteen questions, which seem to us to be central to the referendum debate, and asked impartial experts to look at them. We do not aim to provide definitive answers – and we certainly do not intend to tell anyone how to vote – but rather to enable readers to better judge the claims that are made by either side.