Number of political donations tell more than amount given

The Ayrshire couple, who won £161 million in the EuroMillions lottery two years ago, had previously given £1 million to the SNP. Figures released this week show they have donated another £1m (£500,000 each) to the Yes Scotland campaign.

Among the other donors are the SNP, which met Yes Scotland's start-up costs through a donation in kind of £342,797, fund manager Angus Tulloch, and Sandy Adam, a construction firm executive. In total, Yes Scotland has £1.7m in its bank account.

The other contestant in this game of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Participant in the Scottish Independence Referendum" is the no camp, better known as the Better Together campaign, which also opened its books this week. Better Together has £1.1m in the pot, £500,000 of which has come from Ian Taylor, a controversial oil trader who has previously given money to the Tories and whose support for Better Together has led to SNP calls for his donations to be handed back.

While the financial support for both camps is hardly insignificant, it is well within the bounds of what might be considered reasonable. If anything, it is extremely modest. If shared among the Scottish population, it would hardly be enough to buy a sleeve of a campaign T-shirt never mind a vote.

Besides showing the opposing camps are hardly awash with money, the numbers say much about the nature of the referendum campaign so far. For a start, this campaign is on a different scale to a Westminster election. At the 2010 General Election, the Conservatives spent £16.6m, Labour £8m, and the Liberal Democrats £4.7m. Even if Scottish organisations and political parties spend up to the maximums, as recommended by The Electoral Commission during the final 16-week campaign period, they still won't come near the LibDem spend.

For which we should all give thanks. The 2010 UK election showed a party can spend as much as it likes and the country can still end up with a bag of fudge, or the Coalition Government to give it its proper name. No matter how much cash the parties splashed, voters did not change their positions in significant numbers. At least with the referendum campaign there are two clear camps and a swathe of undecideds in the middle. Minds are there for the changing. Hence the importance of having limits on how much the parties and organisations can spend.

Westminster, without meaning to do so, has played a fundamental role in keeping the Scottish referendum campaign honest and transparent. Cash for access, cash for honours, cash for questions, the MPs and Lords expenses scandal, hidden loans – each grubby revelation ensured large-scale state funding for political parties would never happen in this country, and any money which was donated would have to be declared.

Though well-meaning sorts continue to punt the idea, state funding for political parties would be about as popular as the poll tax. The public simply does not see why, especially in these austere times, it should shell out for the political games a privileged few play. It wants politics to be kept honest, certainly, but it would rather that was done, as is the case now, by requiring parties to disclose donations over £5000. Publish and be judged is a good enough guiding principle.

Except, that is, when the business of politics becomes huge and complex, as in the US. America, where the fundraising for one presidential election starts before the current one has finished, is now a prime example of the madness wrought when free market, free for all, principles are given free reign.

While America has always spent silly money compared to what goes on in the UK, the country has now lost the playbook entirely. Running for president has become a billion-dollar endeavour. The Center for Responsive Politics, an independent research group, estimates that the total spend for the Obama team in the 2012 race for the White House (candidate spending, national party spending and outside spending) was $1.1 billion, with $1.2bn spent by the Romney camp. That will surely increase in years to come courtesy of the super-PACs, the political action committees that operate separately from the campaigns and are not subject to limits on how much they can raise.

In the US, the political arms race has gone nuclear and in this war, unlike any other war in history, only the rich get to fight.

Seen in this context, the funding arrangements for the Scottish independence referendum amount to a shining example of probity and good sense. The electorate demands nothing less. Those who remember the fuss that followed the award of commemorative medals to MSPs on the first day of the Scottish Parliament know Scotland wisely keeps a beady eye on matters where politicians and money are concerned.

For all that, there is something troubling in the numbers from Better Together and Yes Scotland. It is precisely that: numbers. Of the £1.7m raised by Yes Scotland, the money from small donors amounted to £112,000. Better Together boasted that it had raised £173,385 from 9464 people, but this is still a fraction of the £1.1m overall.

What we are seeing here, as in Westminster and the US, albeit on a vastly smaller scale, is rich folk giving the largest sums. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that, as long as everything is transparent, but there is something about having an exercise in mass democracy being bankrolled by a handful of individuals that doesn't sit well.

In that mythical place, an ideal world, both camps would be funded in large part by small donations from many individuals, as in the first Obama campaign. But even in 2012 he got more from large individual contributions than small ones.

What we should be watching as the months go by, and before the official, 16-week campaign begins, is the divide between big donors and small. This will be as telling an indicator as any as to whether the Scottish public is switching on to the campaign, or tuning it out. Sometimes, putting your money where your mouth is can say so much more than words to a pollster.