I said I'd give up blogging, but in the face of the Scottish referendum this Thursday I can only plead St Augustine - Not Yet.
Sentimentally speaking I hope the Scots don't go. But let's leave that on one side because I don't have a vote and anyway sentiment is hardly a basis for making a decision like this.
What would I do if I were Scots? I'd vote No. That's because I think Scotland would be worse off. Worse off both economically and in terms of international clout.
Why worse off? Because iScotland won't have its own currency (something I've been pointing out on here for three years), which means it'll face higher government borrowing costs. Its financial services industry will drift away south, and so will the many UK government jobs currently situated there (National Savings for example). Oil revenues will decline, and anyway iScotland won't get them all - at the moment they belong to all parts of the UK and the rUK government won't have any incentive - political or economic - to give them away. English banks will be reluctant to lend to people in another country where there are currency uncertainties, and so mortgage rates will be higher.
Scotland is disproportionately dependent on government jobs and services, so severance from the rest of the UK will leave that burden falling on Scottish taxpayers. And the burden will increase, because Scotland will lag economically and has a population demographic which is ageing disproportionately, raising the proportion of its national income that Scots must devote to pensions. Moreover Scotland has an unhealthier population than the rest of the UK, so the cost of running the NHS will be disproportionately greater. At the moment all these costs are borne by all the UK. Post Aye, Scotland will have to bear them itself.
It is a no-brainer. Scotland's national income will go down at exactly the same time that the money it needs to sustain jobs and services will go up. Taxes will have to rise or services be cut; or both. The effect of this will be to drive business and investment south.
To be clear, there is one way in which Scotland might make this all work. It is by having its own currency and central bank, running a low-tax small-government economy undercutting rUK from just over the border. And this is actually what Alex Salmond wants - not for nothing were the SNP known at one time as the Tartan Tories - but it isn't what Scots as a whole want, and it isn't the prospectus which is being laid out. Which brings me to the way the campaign has been run.
I don't blame the No party for being negative and lacklustre. They were a long way ahead in the polls for a very long time and to them their case must have seemed overwhelming (as it does to me). It's very hard to make a case which depends on the sheer stupidity of the Yes campaign to seem anything other than negative. Against any other politician than Mr Salmond it would have been good enough, but Salmond is just as much a tactical master as he is a strategic duffer.
How has he managed to make Yes draw level in the polls? By appealing to the very substantial element of the Scottish electorate which wants to live in the sunlit uplands of Scandinavian-style high-tax welfarist Social Democratic nirvana. Salmond doesn't want this himself, and knows it isn't possible; the money is just not there, and things will actually get worse rather than better after Independence.
But he also knows that an awful lot of mugs with no grasp of economics don't know that, and by selling them the Impossible Dream he has hiked the Yes vote from 20 points behind to within snatching distance of victory.
I personally blame Labour for a good deal of this. The overwhelmingly clear lesson after the Credit Crunch was that the bankers had been looking for more and more inventive ways of lending us money. The Crunch happened because it turned out that we couldn't pay it back. We had in fact been living beyond our means for many years. This was obvious to everyone who had made a habit of reading the financial pages, which excluded almost everyone on the Centre Left (with the notable exception of Frank Field).
The Left blamed the bankers, failing to see that the bankers were just helping us all borrow, and that if the bankers had behaved responsibly we'd have just had to stop borrowing and face reality even sooner. The Left railed against austerity without seeing that although services have been cut, government spending is still rising and that, awkwardly for them, the UK is still having to borrow about £2 billion every week just to break even. And that's when the economy is growing at 3% per year.
What's this got to do with Scotland, and why is Labour partly responsible?
The leadership of the Labour party has connived in a critique of the Coalition which is misleading and does its supporters no favours. It has maintained the illusion that there is a magic button which David Cameron could press which would restore the UK miraculously back a decade to the "good" times when Gordon Brown was Chancellor, when money flowed and there was a Diversity Co-Ordinator on every street corner. There isn't any such panacea of course, but people who hate the Tories need no excuse to bury their heads in the sand.
If Ed Miliband were a responsible leader he would have pointed out to his supporters that there is no magic button, that we are not as rich as we thought we were and that we can in the end only have the public services we can afford. He hasn't. So a lot of people still believe it could be glad confident morning again if only the mean old Tories could be booted out.
It just so happens that people who take this view are very thick on the ground in West Scotland's industrial heartlands, and it is this wholesale mobilisation of the Scottish working class (largely Catholic) vote which has brought the Union to the brink.
The argument favoured by the Left for solving Britain's fiscal black hole (that is, amongst those who can bring themselves to admit there is one) is to Tax the Rich. Whatever its other weaknesses, this argument doesn't work in Scotland because most of the rich live in, er, England. Please forgive me for finding that quite funny.
And so we find ourselves four days away from Independence. For someone like me who loves Scotland and has had an emotional engagement with the country for fifty years that is a sad situation. But the people I feel really sorry for are those who think their problems of joblessness, deprivation and ill health will be solved by a poorly-thought through attempt to create a socialist version of Brigadoon.
Things Can Only Get Better, is the Nationalist refrain. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they might get worse instead.
