From a fiscal point of view, Scottish independence would be a non-event.

This topic seems to generate a lot of passion on both sides, the Daily Mail article has so far attracted over 1,700 comments, which is unusually high even by the Mail's standards.

As to the finances, it boils down to three main items which more or less net off to nothing:

1. The Scots would draw a new boundary for the Continental shelf, basically a straight line heading due East from the English/Scottish border, see map here and collect North Sea oil revenues from their patch. According to that same link, Scotland's ninety per cent share of North Sea oil revenues would be about £10 billion a year. On the BBC yesterday, they quoted a lower figure of £6.5 billion.

2. UK government spending is skewed towards the three non-English nations and poorer areas in England. According to Wiki's write up of the Barnett Formula (as poor old Lord Joel Barnett has been saying for decades, it's not a bloody formula!), average spending per capita per year in Scotland is about £1,200 higher than the average for the rest of the UK. So the UK as a whole subsidises Scotland to the tune of £6.2 billion.

3. Alex Salmond conceded yesterday that Scotland would assume a share of existing UK government debt, proportional to population or GDP. GDP per capita is about the same so we can split it proportional to population and Scotland's share would be 5.2 million/62 million = 8.4% and if UK government debt in 2015 is £1,400 billion or thereabouts, then Scotlan's share would be £118 billion. Let's guess the average interest rate on UK government debt at 3%. As a small/new country, Scotland would end up paying a bit more than that, say 3.2% and the interest rate on the residual UK's debt would fall ever so slightly.

The net position is thus as follows:

1. Scotland gains £10 billion a year;
2. Scotland loses £6.2 billion a year;
3. Scotland loses £3.8 billion a year interest (assuming debt is rolled over in perpetuity).

Scotland's gains = rest of UK's losses and vice versa.

To my untrained eye, that looks like a nil overall position. Of course, oil revenues can go up or down quite markedly; there are different ways of calculating per-capita overspend in Scotland; and interest rates can go up or down (and we don't know what the Scottish premium would be). So each team of negotiators has to do its own forecasts and then bring them into balance by increasing or reducing Scotland's share of UK national debt accordingly. Provided that each party expects to at least break even on the final agreed deal, then the deal is worth doing, end of.

There are of course lots of other bits and pieces that have to be looked at; whether UK nuclear submarines will stay in Faslane and whether the UK Navy will still pay for ships to built in Scotland; who is responsible for paying the old age and public sector pensions for people who have worked and lived both in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, but we can apply the same principles. It is not an intractable problem.