Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today, as Pink Floyd put it in 7/4 time at the beginning of side two of Dark Side of the Moon, inaccurately paraphrasing the judgment of the Apostle Paul in his first letter to Timothy of Ephesus. The original author (who probably wasn’t St Paul) actually said that the love of money was the root of all evil.

But if not itself evil, money’s certainly troublesome. Even leaving aside sins – such as greed, selfishness, theft, covetousness, envy and abuse of power – which it may encourage, it causes a lot of disagreement, even among those who share a common purpose.

The SNP are the latest to discover this inconvenient truth at their conference, when the rank and file of the party overturned the position of the leadership. Official policy is now to proceed to a separate Scottish currency “as soon as practicable” if (or once, as Nationalists naturally prefer to frame it) independence has been secured.

Whether this will actually make all that much difference is doubtful. The “six tests” of the Growth Commission, which advocated a gradual transition during which we’d use Sterling, remain in place. The position would not necessarily, therefore, be all that different from the one that Nicola Sturgeon adopted when quizzed about joining the Euro on Channel 4 recently.

She pointed out (correctly) that, while declaring an intention of signing up to the euro is a requirement of EU membership for countries that want to join, there are quite a few that clearly have no intention of doing so at any point in the near future, if at all. In other words – though she refused to say it in so many words – a future Scottish government could pretend an official policy it might not really want to implement.

Leaving aside the question of whether it’s a good idea to sign up to a political union in blatant bad faith, both Sweden and Denmark, and the half-dozen Eastern European countries outside the Eurozone, are still theoretically obliged to move towards convergence, with a direct impact on policy. And the EU’s track record of turning out really to mean things that national governments assure their citizens they won’t ever actually insist on is strong.

All the same, if Scotland wants to join the EU, it would have to make that undertaking, whether or not Brexit had happened, because it would either be seceding from a member state and have to reapply, or already have left with the rest of the UK, and have to reapply.

Imagine how much more complicated the labyrinthine process of leaving the EU would be if the UK were in the euro, and you have an indication of what a problem this is for an independent Scotland – and it is not one which is notably easier either by keeping the pound (but losing all control of it), or by a new currency (whether you chose at first to peg it to the fortunes of Sterling or not).

The trouble with retaining Sterling outside a formal currency union – which the UK Government has already ruled out, and any future UK Government would probably also refuse – is two-fold. Scotland would have little access to reserves, and our current account deficit is around -10 per cent of GDP (as opposed to the UK’s -4%). That means that investment dividends and holdings by third parties would leave Scotland in Sterling, but might return not here, but to the rUK.

That wouldn’t matter in a currency union, but it matters a lot for a Scottish Central Bank with limited Sterling reserves – especially if the rUK were to offer more competitive positions on tax, investment and so on. It seems politically unlikely, to say the least, that the first priority of any independent Scottish Government would be to become ruthless in cutting public expenditure, and encouraging a low-tax, free-trade approach to business.

From that point of view, the grassroots of the SNP are right that a new currency is preferable to “sterlingisation” (using the pound outside a currency union). In the short term, running a deficit matters less if you control the money supply. It is, in any case, consistent with the logic of independence; one reasonable definition of sovereignty is, in fact, to say that it inheres in the power to issue your own money.

The problems with a distinctive Scottish currency, however, though different, are in their own way as serious. The first problem would come from the process of detaching from Sterling; and that’s not just a matter of getting a slightly worse rate when you go on holiday.

People who had paid off their mortgage and received wages or a pension ultimately paid for in Sterling might not suffer too much. But even a small drop in the value of the new currency against Sterling could be terribly painful for those being paid in bawbees (or whatever we call it), but forking out in pounds.

If the Government pegs it to Sterling, that restricts the amount the market can allow it to float, but it has to be paid for, probably by foreign reserves that we don’t have. Alternatively, you could do what Lithuania did (when its currency shadowed the dollar) and Panama still does: adopt an aggressive free-market position, and offer competitive tax incentives. Once again, an unlikely political objective.

Were, however, the currency allowed to float – the more independent, and market-oriented position – it would, like it or not, be at the mercy of international currency markets, and the subject of speculation. There’s no getting round that, nor is there any way of getting round the fact that those traders will base their positions on their assessment of the underlying health of the Scottish economy, its competitiveness, its readiness to curtail spending, and to impose austerity to balance the books.

The trouble is not that this is intrinsically unachievable or unrealistic. On the contrary, it’s the grown-up, responsible position. But it is currently unrealistic, in the terms set out in the six tests, and unachievable, at least in the short term, while sticking to the other policies advocated by the SNP. It doesn’t matter whether the money you’ve got is in pounds, dollars or euros, after all, if you just don’t have enough of it, and persist in spending too much.