From Sunday Herald, 16/6/13

I don't know about the Scottish cringe, but I found Thursday's Edinburgh Question Time toe-curling. It was a nightmare version of the referendum campaign, complete with an omni-rant from George Galloway, the Respect MP, forming a devil's alliance with the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage - a demented glove-puppet - to claim, mendaciously, that the latter had been the victim of ugly anti-English behaviour when he last appeared in Scotland.   

I felt some sympathy for the journalist Lesley Riddoch, trying confusedly to make a moderate non-party case for voting Yes against those two unionist foghorns. The SNP Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, made the cardinal error of attacking the programme for bias. This never works because it looks like an attack on David Dimbleby, who is of course a national institution. Robertson may have had a case since he was outnumbered three to one, but in these situations you just have to suck it up because whingeing antagonises viewers.

Having worked on BBC programmes like Question Time I'm sure there was no political bias intended by the producers. It doesn't work that way. They just wanted a good old confrontation, a rammy, and because it was Scotland they knew they could get away with it. If it had been Question Time the week before, say, the Eastleigh by-election in Hampshire, rather than Donside in Aberdeen, they wouldn't have dared pack the panel with eccentrics and nationalists representing constituencies in another country.

But better get used to this, because I suspect the QT spat is what next year's referendum campaign will be like, only on a larger scale. The SNP are wrong to assume that they will get favourable treatment from the broadcasters in 2014. The 'story' of the referendum will be nationalists trying to break up Britain and setting Scot against English. We have seen nothing yet.

Pandagate. Those independence scare stories in full.

But they will never take...our pandas! I don't know where the Mirror got the story that, because they were gifts to the UK not Scotland, we would lose Sunshine and Sweetie if Scotland voted for independence. The paper cited government sources.   But apart from being straight wrong - the pandas were lent to Edinburgh Zoo, not the UK - it only drew attention to the First Minister's quip that there are more giant pandas in Scotland than there are Tory MPs.

Pandagate provided an element of light relief among the increasingly bizarre scare stories that radiated across the media since January. The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, warned that, after independence, Scotland would have to pay “billions” for the cost of relocating Trident. This wasn't quite in the same league as losing the pandas, but was equally daft. I don't recall the Ukraine being required to build bases in Russia for the nuclear weapons it returned in 1994. Scotland never asked for weapons of mass destruction in the first place. Anyway, there's a simple enough solution: Trident nuclear warheads are moved by road convoy every year from Coulport to Aldermaston near Reading. Maybe they could just make a one way trip in 2015. Scotland could pay for the diesel.

The UK government also turned its big guns onto Alex Salmond's proposals for an independent Scottish defence force of one naval base, one aircraft base and a mobile brigade. “You can't just break off bits of the army like a bar of chocolate” said Mr Hammond. Which is curious because that is exactly what the UK government has done under its defence review, which reduces Scotland's bases to, er, one naval base, one aircraft base and a mobile brigade. This is a childish dispute because, Trident aside, it would be senseless for England and Scotland not to co-operate on defence, since we occupy one small island.

But divorce is a costly business. “An independent Scotland would be saddled with a crippling national debt of at least £140bn!” cried the Daily Mail, again citing “government sources” Shock! Horror! But, wait: this figure is arrived at by giving Scotland a 10% share of the UK national debt which is estimated to rise to £1.4 trillion by 2014. So, if Scotland is in the red, England would be even redder – and Scotland at least has the oil. I'm not sure who I'd put my money on in this particular race to the poorhouse. The truth is, as far as debt is concerned we really are in it together.