CAMERON Crawford’s letter on December 4 argues that independence becomes serious only when a clear majority of voters are persuaded that the benefits outweigh the costs. That position sounds practical. It is also historically back-to-front.

If you look at how nations have actually broken from larger states, very few began with a tidy cost-benefit calculation. They moved because the rule itself had become illegitimate. Because decisions were being made elsewhere. Because law, money and power were no longer seen as properly theirs. The question was not “will we be better off next year?” but “why are we governed like this at all?”

That isn’t abstract. We’ve already seen it happen in practice.

Ireland is constantly cited as proof that persuasion alone is the engine of freedom. The record

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