One year to indyref: 365 days, and just as many questions

The Unionists are bigger, stronger, more organised and working together far better than anyone expected. They have a commanding lead in most opinion polls and seem destined for an effortless victory. In the dressing room the Yes coach prepares his battered and demoralised players for the final confrontation. What does he, or she, say to rouse them?

Well, he could start by pointing out that it's a game of two halves. A year is an eternity in politics, and everyone recalls how, at a similar stage before the 2011 landslide the SNP were just as far behind as the Yes campaign is today. Alex Salmond has defied opinion polls before and he can certainly do it again - though it should always be remembered ?¨that this a referendum and not a parliamentary election. In 2011, ?¨Scots were not voting to set up a ?¨new country, but were passing judgment on the feebleness of the Labour opposition.

The opinion polls are certainly not looking good for the independence campaign, and the most recent Herald poll had them down to 25%. However, the number of Don't Knows appears to have increased significantly, suggesting that some Scots may yet be persuaded. Also, a recent Panelbase poll commissioned by the Yes Campaign actually put independence in the lead. As always with opinion polls, the way the question is framed often determines the result.

Anyway, this referendum will probably be decided, not by the voters who are convinced of the independence case, but by the "disenfranchised middle" as the Yes camp calls them: the majority of Scots who want neither independence nor the status quo, but want a Scottish parliament with substantial economic powers. More than half of Scots support some form of "devolution max" or federalism. Since this option is not on the ballot paper, despite Alex Salmond's offer to make space for it, some supporters of devolution max may vote for independence to get a better devolution. Recent opinion polls suggest this may not be enough to win, but it is early days.

The independence campaign has been knocked senseless by the combined forces of the Westminster government and the Scottish opposition parties. Few expected that political enemies such as the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, and Labour's Alistair Darling would be able to work so well together, but they have. This is because they have stuck to a simple message: be afraid, be very afraid. Vote Yes and you may lose your pensions, your job, your pound, your armed forces, your membership of the European Union. Scotland would be cut off from the rest of the UK, and Scots will have to show their passports to the border police and change money before they can visit relatives in England. Oil will run out, cross-border trade will decline, companies will leave, Scotland will lose its credit rating and end up like a cold Greece.

Project Fear has been much more effective than most commentators thought possible. Some of the "indy scares" have been patently ridiculous. Mobile phones would cost more after independence; Scotland would be denied entry to the European Union; Scots would be charged billions of pounds to relocate Trident, losing 26,000 jobs at Faslane in the process. George Osborne even claimed that Scots would have to see their taxes increased by 27% to pay for the SNP's proposed oil fund.

However, Project Fear's success may be more apparent than real. The Scottish media is fond of negative stories about independence, but as the SNP landslide election victories in 2007 and 2011 demonstrated, Scottish voters don't tend to vote the way the papers tell them to. Also, many of the very same warnings were made before the devolution referendum in 1997. Back then it was said that companies would leave Scotland, taxes would rocket, families would be divided, financial services might relocate - undermining pensions - and English "subsidies" would dry up.

However, unlike 1997, most of Scotland's political parties are calling for No, and even the Nationalists seem unsure of what, exactly, Scots would be voting for. All the talk of keeping the pound, the Queen, the social union, Nato, and the Bank of England has muddied the message. When the Scottish Government produces its long-awaited white paper in November, it is going to have to give Scots very good reasons why they should go to all the trouble of declaring independence only to be back in the UK - albeit a new improved version with added tax powers.

The Yes Campaign needs to nail the specific charge that Scotland cannot be truly independent if it allows the Bank of England to set interest rates and the Treasury to oversee the Scottish budget. Anxieties about border controls, passports, EU membership, and the cost of setting up the institutions of an independent state may be tedious to Yes campaigners, who tire of answering that there would be free movement, dual nationality and collective economic security in Europe. But the anxieties are real and need to be addressed, not dismissed. Independence is a very novel concept for most Scots, who have been willing partners in the United Kingdom for most of the last 300 years, as I explain in my book, Road to Referendum.

On the plus side, no serious economist any longer argues that Scotland could not be a viable independent country. There may be doubts about the true value of oil, but no-one denies it's there and worth £1.5 trillion wholesale, according to the industry body Oil and Gas UK. But a more difficult problems for the Yes Campaign is this: Scotland actually isn't doing all that badly right now, and GDP per head is not far short of that in the south-east of England. Alex Salmond is always telling us how successful he has been in attracting inward investment, boosting youth employment, and developing green energy. What is the extra ingredient that independence would add, and is it worth the cost of achieving it. Is it all about reducing corporation tax by a couple of points? Is it just about oil revenue?

Scotland is not an oppressed country. Scots do not feel in need of liberation from foreign domination, so the conventional independence message - set my people free - doesn't really apply here. What we are talking about is a reconfiguration of the United Kingdom to give Scotland more economic power to add to the considerable legislative power it already possesses. This is not independence but federalism, or perhaps confederalism. If that's what the referendum is about, then let's hear someone say it.