THE longest campaign in Scottish political history is almost over.

We've come a long way since the First Minister, Alex Salmond, announced after the 2011 SNP landslide that there would be a referendum on independence in September 2014. And yet, in another sense, we've hardly come any distance at all. The dominant issues remain largely the same as they were three years ago: the pound, the pound and the pound.

Whether anyone in the Better Together camp actually coined the phrase "Project Fear" hardly matters because that is what the Unionist campaign has all been about.

Unionists have insisted from day one that Scotland could not go it alone without risking its financial security and its place in the world. It would lose the pound, suffer chronic debt and risk isolation.

We were told Scotland might not be allowed to remain in the European Union and would be forced to go to the end of the queue for membership. Throughout 2012, Alex Salmond was pursued by Labour and the Conservatives in the Scottish parliament over his claim he had legal advice to the contrary. Then Jose Manuel Barroso, the outgoing EU President, stepped in and said Scotland would be a "new state" and would have to apply for membership "like any other state".

Many authorities disputed this, of course, even some Unionists like the Scottish human rights lawyer, Derek Ogg. Scotland has been subject to EU law for more than 20 years, Scots are citizens of Europe and there is no mechanism for expelling them. But in the final year of the campaign, the Europe issue rather came to pieces for Better Together, not because of anything said in Scotland or Brussels, but because of the rise of Ukip in England. As the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, sought to head off Nigel Farage he promised an in/out referendum on Europe to take place in 2017. This undermined the Unionist argument that Scots risked leaving the European Union if they remained in the UK.

Clearly, there was just as much, if not more, risk of Scotland finding itself out of Europe if it voted No. The Yes Campaign claimed the only way to ensure Scotland remains in Europe is to vote Yes.

Better Together replied that the only way to ensure Scotland keeps the pound is to stay in the Union. In February 2014, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, came to Edinburgh to deliver the most important speech in the entire campaign. He told an invited audience in Edinburgh "if Scotland walks away from the Union it walks away from the pound". There were to be no negotiations. The rUK would erect a financial Hadrian's Wall to stop Scots using the currency they had thought was their own since the Acts of Union in 1707.

The Yes campaign sought valiantly to defuse this issue in subsequent months, insisting financial experts on the Scottish government's Fiscal Commission, such as Nobel laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz, had said a currency union was the most stable arrangement to preserve trading links and avoid disruption. The Scottish Government's massive, 670-page White Paper on Independence said that Scotland had an equal right to the assets and liabilities of the Bank of England, including the currency. But banks and businesses in Scotland weren't buying it.

The insurance giant Standard Life, with its 5000 employees, said it was making contingency plans to move to London. Employers like BP, Aggreko, RBS and even supermarkets like Sainsbury's issued warnings they might have to review their investments in Scotland because of "uncertainties over the currency". Whether these threats were genuine hardly mattered, since they delivered a succession of Indy Warning headlines for the Scottish and UK press. The Yes Campaign tried to quell the firestorm by insisting the UK currency lock-out was only a negotiating tactic, a "bluff" as Professor Stiglitz called it.

They took to placing billboards across Scotland asking voters whether they wanted to be part of a "wealthy nation". Scotland is already a rich country, 14th in the OECD rankings, they said, and with oil, tourism, higher education and whisky, Scotland would be an successful independent country like Norway or Denmark who both have their own currencies.

The No campaign said, on the contrary, according to independent think tanks like the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Scotland would be landed with a £6bn deficit, even with oil revenues. An independent Scotland would be forced to raise taxes or cut public spending.

But the secret weapon of the Yes campaign was not economics but people. In the spring and summer of 2014, Yes-supporting groups across Scotland started organising coffee mornings, concerts, debates, lectures and theatrical events. There was an almost evangelical character to the campaign, as zealous nationalists sought to spread the word, not by newspaper headlines and government announcements, but by face-to-face encounters and conversions. The campaign also used social media to spread its positive message and defuse the threats of Project Fear.

In August, Yes Scotland announced that a million Scots had signed their Independence Declaration.

But it wasn't all happy clappy positivity. After author JK Rowling announced her reasons for donating £1 million to the Better Together campaign in June, she was the target of abuse on the internet from so called "cybernats". The Daily Mail reprinted sexist and offensive remarks, which some in Better Together claimed was part of a co-ordinated campaign of intimidation.

But soon it emerged that SNP women like Nicola Sturgeon were also being subjected to hate mail and even death threats from unionist trolls on the internet. Twitter feeds like BritNatAbuseBot started retweeting vile and threatening tweets being made by people in England against Scots. And by Unionists against politicians like Alex Salmond, who was described as a "fascist'. It looked as if the campaign might spin out of control.

However, internet wars subsided and the Commonwealth Games in July demonstrated better than any twitter hashtag that Scots and English people can co-exist and even compete in good humoured harmony.

There had been fears that English athletes would be booed and the national anthem downed out by jeers and catcalls. But the huge crowds refused to allow any anti-English sentiment to mar the events and Glasgow's games were defined, not by hate, but by John Barrowman's gay kiss during the opening ceremony.

After the Games, the television campaign began in earnest with the set piece debates between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling. And what was the big issue? The pound - as it had been almost from the start of the campaign. Was there a plan B? Would Scotland end up like Panama? Do poor Scots care whose head is on the money they haven't got?

Darling won the first round; Alex Salmond won the second. The voters will give their verdict in just over a week's time.