Euan McColm: Yes or No — the Scots are divided like never before

After two years of failing to turn a self-described positive campaign into anything like a poll lead, Salmond has decided to go negative. So not only should Scots shudder at the memory of the Thatcher years, they should beware the Westminster Coalition’s plans for the health service.

Salmond snapped and snarled through well-rehearsed lines that the use of private contractors in the NHS in England and Wales would end up destroying the service in Scotland. There are several ways in which this argument is flawed. Perhaps the most important is that private services must still be paid for by the UK Government and, therefore, there is no consequential drop in the money made available to the — fully devolved — Scottish NHS. But Salmond has his teeth in this bone and shows no sign of letting go.

The First Minister is keen to talk about the NHS because it means he doesn’t have to speak about the currency of a post-independence Scotland, an issue on which he still struggles to provide straightforward answers to important undecideds.

Darling used uncertainty over the pound to great effect in the last debate so it was hardly surprising that he returned to the subject when it was his turn to cross-examine the SNP leader.

Since it is a fact that all unionist parties at Westminster have ruled out a currency union — which would see the pound shared and the Bank of England confirmed as lender of last resort for an independent Scotland — what, Darling wanted to know, was Salmond’s “plan B” for currency?

The First Minister has consistently answered this question in the past by declaring that his unionist opponents are bluffing and that, once Scotland has voted to exit the UK, they will change their tune for the good of everyone, north and south of the border.

This line, “these people are liars, I think we can do business with them”, has so far failed to get Salmond free on this question. Last night he tried a new tactic to bring still sceptical Scots behind him. What he was seeking with a Yes vote, barked the First Minister, was a mandate for a currency union with the rest of the UK. Though how, precisely, the leader of one country might consider himself to have won a mandate to make economic and political decisions for another is entirely unclear.

When Darling said — as he often has — that, yes, of course an independent Scotland could use the pound, Salmond seized on this as the most important “revelation” of the night — a confession that, no, “they” couldn’t take “our” pound.

The SNP leader had to win last night’s debate, though the margin in the snap poll was perhaps surprising, given flashes of the old, angry Salmond who his advisers have spent a lot of time and effort concealing in recent years. The referendum may be little more than three weeks away but from tomorrow more than 700,000 Scots will start to receive their postal ballot papers. Defeat in Kelvingrove would have been an eve-of-poll disaster.

As polling day looms, the political temperature in Scotland will continue to rise. The referendum may have engaged Scots like no political campaign before but it has become an increasingly fractious debate. All this positive engagement has exposed some particularly deep divisions.

Strategists in the Yes camp believe their best weapon remains the NHS, while the No camp wants to drive the debate back to the issue of currency. So the twin battlegrounds are laid out.

Salmond carries with him the dream of an 80-year-old political movement which sees the referendum as the opportunity of a generation. He will have no compunction about making his battle with Darling as personal as he deems necessary.

As the debate drew to a close last night, Salmond said he’d gladly have Alistair Darling on the team sent to negotiate with Westminster the terms of Scottish independence. But despite that nod to coming together after the dust has settled, the reality is that a close result either way will leave a country facing one of two new directions — either independence or the greater devolution promised by the No camp — while divided as never before.

Euan McColm is a Scottish political commentator