Prominent Scottish historian Tom Devine has backed independence in a boost to the Yes campaign a month from the referendum.
The academic, considered a leading authority on modern Scottish history, told an interview published yesterday with the Observer newspaper that he had originally planned to vote No.
"This has been quite a long journey for me and I've only come to a yes conclusion over the last fortnight," Devine said.
Devine, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth earlier this year in recognition of his services to the study of Scottish history, said he intially favoured an independence alternative known as "devolution max".
Currently, Holyrood can set education, health, environmental and justice policy, but the proposed "devolution max" alternative to independence would see all Scottish taxes collected by the Scottish parliament.
Devine said he had since come to the conclusion that "only through sovereignty can we develop a truly amicable and equal relationship with our great southern neighbour."
The historian said that while the union had been useful in the past, Scotland and England had now taken different Without a strong monarchy and a hostile force that "would have once induced internal collective solidarity" such as fascism, there is now "very little left in the union except sentiment, history and family", Devine said.
"The Scottish parliament has demonstrated competent government and it represents a Scottish people who are wedded to a social democratic agenda and the kind of political values which sustained and were embedded in the welfare state of the late 1940s and 1950s.
"It is the Scots who have succeeded most in preserving the British idea of fairness and compassion in terms of state support and intervention. Ironically, it is England, since the 1980s, which has embarked on a separate journey."
A professor at the University of Edinburgh who has won several major prizes for his work, Devine said that a "silent transformation of the Scottish economy" also supported the case for independence.
