GIVEN the continued lack of political appetite for a well-informed, reasoned debate about Scottish independence, John Lloyd’s new book on the topic is welcome.

By no means a dispassionate summary of the arguments — it comes out solidly against independence — it does at least give space to some of the salient points usually drowned out amid the soundbites and banalities.

Chief among these is the fact that the SNP appears set on exchanging one political, economic and monetary union within Britain for another governed from an even more remote centre, the European Union.

Lloyd carefully unpicks the flawed logic of that position while also calling into question the validity of the SNP’s claims that if Scotland does swap Britain for the EU, then it will somehow be allowed to sidestep the rigidly enforced rule that accessionary states must join the euro.

The main plank of his argument is that with oil revenues shrinking and without the annual £10 billion subsidy it receives from the British Treasury, an independent Scotland would face such a huge financial struggle that going it alone would just not be worth it.

Lloyd, a Scot who has been labour editor and a Moscow bureau chief at the Financial Times, initially makes his points in a lucid and highly engaging fashion. Whether one agrees with them or not, they are compellingly put.

But from chapter three onwards, the book begins to lose its fluency and, by the end, virtually all focus has gone.

There are too many pages on the failings of Scottish banks, a largely unnecessary excursion into the ins and outs of the country’s literature and a final chapter that fizzles out into a confused reflection on the situation in Quebec, which even by the author’s admission is not particularly analogous to that of Scotland.

What could have been a precise exposition of the arguments ranged against independence instead turns into a rather rambling look at Scotland in the round, interspersed in its later stages with too much consideration of how Scottish nationalists “hate and despise” the English, along with a rather ungallant section rubbishing the SNP’s Alex Salmond on the basis of his association with Russia Today.

At 214 pages plus, the book is hardly voluminous and it would have been much more effective at half that length, without the diversionary trips and with the arguments marshalled in a much clearer fashion.

Credit to Lloyd for writing the book but it’s a shame he couldn’t have done it more cogently.

Published by Polity, £20.