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Good Bank Holiday news and bad Bank Holiday news. Bad news: it was so cold on Sunday that we cracked. In August, we turned on the central heating. Good news: it was a couple of hours of shivering before we realised Management had pressed the wrong button and we hadn’t turned on the heating at all. But we did have lots of hot water. Hot water bottles all round! And we can hold our heads high and say we still haven’t turned on the heating.

Meanwhile, Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love has been voted the greatest guitar riff of all time by listeners to Radio 2, which perfectly defines Radio 2 – Boringly Predictable with a capital B and a capital P. The list of the top 100 songs includes nothing you haven’t heard a million times on the station’s restricted playlists, and is weighted heavily in favour of plodding rock behemoths like Zep, Bon Jovi, Guns’n’Roses – all the usual suspects.Yawn.

Well, you asked

Our Chief Scout foolishly asked me my opinion on the Scottish independence referendum the other day. Most people know never to ask my opinion on anything (and certainly never to utter the name of the criminal Thatcher in my presence), and so a roomful of people backed nervously away…

But he asked. So.

I’m in two minds about the whole thing – appropriately, given my father is Scottish by ancestry and my mother was English. Talk about conflicted.

Obviously, the Scottish part of me screams ‘Yes, yes, yes!!’ like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. Of course Scotland should be independent because it is a different country: you need only look at any election result to see this is true. Or statistics on public health. Or willing support for policies such as free car parking at hospitals, no higher education tuition fees, free social care for the elderly.

Scotland is palpably a modern social democratic nation state with public policy based on inclusion, equality of opportunity and social conscience. Obviously, it should not be tied to an outdated and antiquated England that still believes in the bankrupt economics of the market in the face of all the evidence, that still believes its population should be charged mercilessly for everything from prescriptions to unwanted police commissioners, that still stares relentlessly inward at its own navel shunning the suspicious modern world and its foreigners, its currencies, its fairnesses.

The English part of me, the part that lives in England, says a firm ‘No’ to independence. If Scotland leaves us, the left will lose a massive part of its heart in this United Kingdom and the English will be ruled for ever by the secretive bankers, lawyers, investment fund managers, venture capitalists, corporations and tax dodgers who furtively fund the Conservative Party. Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, have been the conscience of the union, a vital restraint on the greed, bigotry and selfishness of the English right wing.

The English are similarly conflicted over Scottish independence.

Half say: “Vote yes and good riddance to you, because Scotland costs the English too much money and Scottish MPs shouldn’t have a say on English policy.”

The other half say: “Stay, for Christ’s sake stay, otherwise we’ll have Tory government inflicted on us by the southern English for the rest of our lives and then we’re really in the shit because look where that’s got us so far.”

Many think that if Scotland does vote ‘yes’, that part of England north of the Watford Gap will immediately start a campaign to secede from London and join the Scots.

Public reaction has been fascinating. The establishment – the banks, the businesses, the three main political parties – have all been vehemently in favour of a ‘no’ vote, which tells you everything.

Why are they so much in favour? Their supporters tell them the Scots cost us too much. Well, you won’t find banks, businesses and the three main political parties spending money unless they make a profit, and that’s a fact. They don’t want a ‘no’ vote for altruistic reasons, that’s a certainty.

So look for the money, as a wise man once said. And, of course, Scotland contributes more than its fair share in tax to the UK’s exchequer – according to the Office for National Statistics, in 2011-12 Scottish people paid £11,079 per person in tax, the rest of the UK £9,342.

Anyway, it would be many, many, many years of English subsidy of Scottish voters before England ever got remotely near to paying Scotland back for the natural resources it has despoiled, the forestry, the power, the oil, the industry.

Many years ago oil was discovered beneath the North Sea, between Scotland and Scandinavia. Today, the United Kingdom has ticking financial time bombs in the pension industry and a massive public deficit. Norway has a sovereign oil fund from careful investment on the profits that stands at $885billion, according to the FT in June. The same month, BBC News asked ‘Is Norway’s sovereign oil fund too big?’.

Neither side of the referendum argument has so far given us a satisfactory figure for compensation to Scotland for this theft – for theft it was, given that Scotland over more than a century has consistently voted in total opposition to England. Only devolution has freed Scotland from rule by politicians for which it never voted, and we have the bitter legacy of Thatcher’s cruel tyranny to thank for that. Since the discovery of North Sea oil, Scotland has consistently voted for parties and politicians in favour of a redistribution of that wealth for the benefit of all, yet that democratic wish was never granted.

If this United Kingdom had had a proportionally representative vote, the injustice would not be so severe, but first past the post has placed disproportionate power in the hands of a few for decades, and this has been particularly corrosive in areas with separate social identities. Like Scotland.

As ever, we have the information at hand to back up all these assertions. Let’s take a couple of examples.

Do southern English economic policies work? Well, you could ask anybody living north of the Watford Gap, obviously, and you would get a pretty robust answer, but you may perhaps prefer to look at a definition of the richest areas in Northern Europe by earnings in local authority districts.

The European Community’s Eurostats service bases its conclusions on purchasing power as defined by the percentage above or below the Community’s average wage, with a variable factored in to take account of different price levels per country. Stripping out the recently-joined Eastern European countries, the ten richest areas: 1 Inner London, 2 Luxembourg, 3 Brussels, 4 Hamburg, 5 Ile de France, 6 Groningen, 7 Stockholm, 8 Oberbayern, 9 Vienna, 10 Darmstadt. And the ten poorest: 1 West Wales, 2 Cornwall, 3 Durham and Tees Valley, 4 Lincolnshire, 5 South Yorkshire, 6 Shropshire and Staffordshire, 7 Lancashire, 8 Northern Ireland, 9 Hainaut (Belgium), 10 East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.

Yes, you have read that correctly. Nine out of the ten poorest areas in Northern Europe are in the United Kingdom. A stunning condemnation of southern English economics since Thatcher.

So economically, and emotionally, and in terms of democratic justice, the conclusion is that Scotland should vote ‘yes’.

But having said all of that, I know that Scotland will vote ‘no’. Not because of the bullying and threats of the southern English – ‘no pound! You won’t get the BBC! All the big businesses that have looked after you so well will leave!’ – but because the southern English have had to buy a ‘yes’ vote with promises of more control over income and expenditure for the Scots.

Seeing as Scotland is able, at the moment, to budget for public decency, and seeing as it will have even more scope and money with which to do so after the referendum, Scots would be daft to vote away the English. Clearly, the English need Scotland or the establishment wouldn’t be so keen on the union. Clearly, the English are prepared to pay Scotland to stay. And clearly, the Scots are not stupid. If England wants Scotland, England will have to pay.

One last statistic

Here’s another startling statistic for the far right to consider, which I came across in the New York Times on the internet: 97 of the poorest 100 counties in America are in Republican States. So much for trickle-down libertarian economics. I guess what’s trickling down on the people there isn’t money, hmmm?