Should Scotland be an independent country?

a) there'll be an imminent referendum on independence, b) Scotland will vote for independence, c) Scotland will choose to join the EU, d) Scotland will meet the criteria for admission to the EU and e) the EU will admit Scotland despite the existing clusterfuck over the Irish border

This is a LOT of dependencies and some of these are real issues.

Even if you take a-c as givens (they're not, especially as Scotland is ultimately a conservative country) EU fiscal rules say that governments should run budget deficits no higher than 3% of GDP and maintain a public debt no higher than 60% of GDP.

Scotland's current budget deficit is ~22 to 28%.

It's harder to estimate public debt but Scotland has a proportional debt liability (unless otherwise negotiated with the UK, but why would Westmonster do that?) and UK public debt is currently ~85%.

The IFS says that "Scotland’s implicit budget deficit will fall as the public finance effects of the COVID-19 crisis recede, but is set to remain substantially higher than for the UK as a whole unless oil revenues rebound or there is a significant change in relative economic performance."

And if you think the EU is going to budge on this you just need to look at Italy and what's happened there (Italixit is looking more and more likely).

My father-not-in-law is a retired left - wing economist and though pro-Independence, is not pro-SNP for exactly these reasons. He reckons Scotland could join the EU but it would involve years of hard austerity and the the SNP should be honest about this, instead of lying to the Scottish people.

Worth adding that Scotland is a very unequal country (as wonderfully documented by Jonathan Meades in Off Kilter). IMO it needs high levels of public spending, as does Italy, but when you get into this stuff you realise that EU membership is not quite the rose garden that us remainers see it as.