Unlike some senior politicians, I felt that the 670 pages of the Scottish Government's White Paper on "Scotland's Future" should be well digested before offering a comment on their content.

In truth, there was little startling about the document; it was a detailed summary of the preferred policies of the current Scottish Government, and their aspirations for  priorities for an independent Scotland should they have a parliamentary majority after the first elections.

There was little with which anyone in Scotland would want to disagree, and this left the unionist parties in the same old place when it came to their reactions. It was all bribes and fantasies, they said, with a strange collective amnesia about their own manifestos and promises in the past. The SNP couldn't 'prove' that an independent Scotland would be like this.

Strangely, they called it a "Wish List", in the most dismissive tones possible.  I thought it was obvious it could only be a 'wish list', that what becomes possible in an independent Scotland depends on negotiations and world conditions in three years time and beyond. The 'Yes' Campaign can no more predict what is going to happen than Brown and Darling were able to predict the financial crash.

Currently, the unionists are not even trying to predict what the UK will be like in the event of a 'No' vote; apparently they are setting up a review to stare into that particular crystal ball. Some unionists refer to independence as 'the abyss', as if voting for the status quo means we will have perfect foresight.

We can't know what independence will bring, any more than we can accurately forecast the result of staying within the UK. The point of independence is to put ourselves in a  better position to influence whatever happens in our country, and to meet priorities which increasingly diverge from what is seen as in the interests of the UK as a whole.

It challenges  the current democratic deficit in as much as more people on this island will have a government who are more able to  make decisions in their interests - and this obviously applies to England as well, though I confess to struggling when it comes to examples of issues where the needs of 5 million Scots have been put ahead of 50 million in the rest of the UK. That's not a complaint - it's merely a reflection of the way the Union works - or doesn't. Farmers and fishermen have a few things to say on that at the moment.

The 'No' camp suggested that they would want to know the price of the goods they were buying before they went out to shop, decrying the suggested lack of economic certainty. It's a fair enough point - until you remember that you  can't price the goods until you agree what you want to buy.

The White Paper was shopping list for a better way of doing things in Scotland, a suggestion to the voters that there is a different way to get to our common aims. It sought to raise the debate above the party politically mundane, and the demand for copies suggests a fair number of the population appreciated that approach. It's a roadmap rather than a photograph of 2016.

As Abraham Lincoln suggested: "The best way to predict your future is to create it."

"Scotland's Future" is at least a start.