On 11th September 1997, when I cast my vote in favour of recalling the Scottish Parliament, I said to myself ‘this is the most important vote you’ll ever cast, unless someday there’s a vote for Scotland to be independent’. Back then, that seemed a remote dream. After the bleakness of the Thatcher and Major years, there was widespread public support in Scotland for devolution, but not for independence. The SNP hadn’t yet made the transition into a party of government, and support for independence rarely rose above 30%.

Of course, the dream was less remote than I thought. Only 17 years later, Scotland went to the polls for another referendum - this one a vote for independence. Initially, the task looked impossible, with the polls still at under 30%, but the gap narrowed steadily as the vote approached, and one or two polls even suggested Yes might be ahead. This was enormously exciting, but on 18th September 2014, I was conflicted. I didn’t know quite what to do with myself.

The problem was that in 2003, I left Scotland, for career reasons, and despite my best intentions, I never made it back. I ended up settling in North Wales. So this time, I didn’t get a vote. (I actually stopped officially counting as Scottish when I crossed the border, but that’s a story for another day and another blog).

Now, I know why I didn’t get a vote. I accept that it had to be that way. But that didn’t make it any easier. Lacking an outlet for my feelings, I put up a long post on Facebook, urging Scots to have faith, to believe in their country and its potential, to ignore the doomsayers, and to vote Yes.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be, or at least not then. But one response that I got to the post made me think. It was from an old friend in Edinburgh. I’ve never asked him how he voted - it might have gone either way. But he said ‘I’ve always said that this is an emotional decision, rather than a rational one.’

I often think about that response nowadays. Opponents of independence, whether it’s politicians, journalists or random people on Twitter, love to say that Scotland is an economic disaster, Apparently, Scotland has a huge deficit, it is dependent on Westminster’s benevolence to survive, there is no credible costed plan for independence, nobody knows what currency an independent Scotland would use, and a plethora of similar arguments. They all come down to the same concept: ‘Too wee, too poor, too stupid’.

Now, I think most of these arguments are, if not total twaddle, at the very least deeply flawed. The so-called ‘deficit’ is worked out by allocating Scotland a tithe of UK government spending ‘on Scotland’s behalf’ with no breakdown, or indication of whether an independent nation would make the same spending choices. Scotland clearly has natural resources that would be the envy of many other nations, and every chance of being a success story. But that’s beside the point.

Has any other country ever been told that they aren’t allowed to want self-determination, unless they first present a watertight economic case to support it? Why isn’t simply wanting your own independence justification enough? Why is Scotland always the exception?

My old friend was quite right. The desire for independence is, primarily, an emotional one. It’s not generally something you arrive at via calm deliberation, but something you feel in your bones. The right of a people to self-determination is on page one of the UN charter for good reason. The 55 countries that gained independence from the British Empire all celebrate the fact every year. Some of those countries are amongst the poorest in the world, but they didn’t let that stop them, because independence is a natural and normal thing to want for its own sake.

I saw on Twitter today that Estonia became independent in 1991, when its GDP was $2000 per capita. The Estonians didn’t know what the future would hold for them economically. They just knew they wanted to make their own decisions, elect their own governments, and chart their own path, and that these things were worth short-term economic difficulty to get. (Apparently, Estonia’s GDP is $31,209 today, with a fraction of the resources Scotland has - I can’t verify these figures, but I don’t doubt their accuracy either).

Of course, I recognise that not everyone is emotional about independence. Some people do need to be persuaded of its merits, and the economic debate is a part of that. Indeed, these are the people at whom all of the ‘too wee, too poor, too stupid’ arguments are aimed. Those of us who truly want independence won’t be dissuaded, but those who might be wavering must, at all costs, be convinced that it would make them poorer.

However, I can’t tolerate the notion, as suggested by Unionists, that independence is a strange, possibly even a deviant, thing to want. This is manifest nonsense. The entire rest of the world regards it as entirely normal - in fact, many people outside the UK find it baffling that any country would actually vote against it. Scotland was fooled in 2014. Those doing the fooling know how hard it would be to pull the same trick off again - which is why they are so desperate to avoid having to try.