New poll has Scotland rejecting independence by four-point margin – as it happened

Next question: If Scotland stays as part of the UK will we have to pay tuition fees for higher education.

Davidson: For the last seven years the SNP has been running the education system so it has been Nicola and Alex’s decision to cut tens of thousands of places (Galloway comes in at this point to suggest a figure - closer to 100,000. She takes him up on that).

It’s already shaping up to be quite bad tempered. Galloway was loudly asking Harvie at one point: “Have you no respect?”

Sturgeon accuses the Scottish Labour of not having the guts to send anyone tonight. She says that she has the privilege of having a free education and has not right to take it away “from any of you”.

Some new Twitter reaction:

A young man says his father is an independent chartered surveyor and has been losing business already due to corporate fears over Scotland leaving the UK.

‘Why is an independent Scotland a good thing given that this is already happening?’ he asks.

Galloway answers that it’s hardly surprising - you are the only people in history potentially being about to set up independently without a currency

He adds (to jeering from some sections of the audience): ‘How could there not be uncertainty. You don’t have money. That’s the truth’

Nicola Sturgeon goes for Galloway, saying she’s “flabbergasted at Galloway, the socialist” telling young people that they should be afraid of banks saying that they may relocate.

Davidson (what an extraordinary tag team - the leader of the Scottish Tories sitting alongside the Respect Party MP) comes in to assert that the warnings surrounding RBS today should be taken seriously.

First question: How would independence affect job opportunitis for school leavers?

Sturgeon: If we got control over our economic levers we could encourage more companies to set up here in Scotland and create jobs for young people.

“You’re the reason why an independent Scotland will be a roaring success.”

Davidson: I don’t want to see barriers and red tape to companies setting up here. Many of them choose to come here because we are part of the United Kingdom.

Harvie attacks the austerity politics of London: “It’s only when Scotland controls its own politics that we can change that.

Galloway: There’s no need to erect new barriers at this point in the 21st century.

If you are hoping for jobs in the financial sector and the new emerging technologies than don’t follow the nationalists down the yellow brick road, says Galloway, wearing his usual black fedora now

Sturgeon was judged by the young questioner to have provided the best answer.

View image in fullscreen

Screening of the debate which took place in Glasgow’s SSE Hydro earlier between George Galloway, Ruth Davidson, Nicola Sturgeon, and Patrick Harvie is starting on BBC, which invited 7,500 young people to come and take part in the questioning.

There’s been much tweeting from earlier under the hashtag #bigbigdebate.

The Guardian’s Esther Addley travelled up to Scotland from London today on the same train carrying Labour MPs, councillors and advisers and was there when they disembarked in Glasgow to applause from some but also jeers of ‘rubbish, lies, excrement!’

You can now read a sketch of a colourful journey which culminated in a rally that was also not without drama. Here’s a sample:

At the corner of Buchanan Street a man declared, “welcome to our imperial overlords”, and followed the phalanx of MPs playing the Star Wars imperial death march through a speaker on his bike.

“Who’s that they’re following? Is that that stupid Ed Miliband?” asked one baffled lunchtime shopper.

It would only get livelier. Awaiting the MPs at the top of the hill, beyond the statue of Labour’s inaugural first minister, Donald Dewar, were 100 or so campaigners holding aloft placards proclaiming “no”. Opposite, inevitably, a group of yes campaigners.

Read on here.

View image in fullscreen

The BBC is under political pressure to reveal details of a highly charged internal study which found that viewers in an independent Scotland would have to pay almost double their current licence fee if they wanted to continue watching and listening to the same BBC shows.

Tara Conlan reports:

According to sources with close knowledge of the matter, a BBC paper drawn up three years ago compared the total amount Scottish viewers paid towards the licence fee with the value of the services they received from the corporation.

It is understood that the figures – which suggested raising the annual licence fee paid in Scotland to almost £300 for each household from the current £145.50 – were seen by some of the most senior BBC executives under the tenure of the then director general, Mark Thompson.

It’s not just Scotland where politics as usual is finished, according to the Guardian’s John Harris, who has penned a piece on how he has met a wide spectrum of people who are singularly disaffected by the traditional parties - from Falkirk to Clacton in Essex.

He made his latest visit last week to Scotland, where he has been working on a series of Guardian films titled Britain’s in Trouble (it’ll appear online next week), and writes:

In the broadcast media in particular, there is an implied assumption that “the Scotland moment” is something confined to that country.

But the reality across the UK suggests something much deeper and wider, and a simple enough fact: that what is happening north of the border is the most spectacular manifestation of a phenomenon taking root all over – indeed, if the splintering of politics and the rise of new forces on both left and right across Europe are anything to go by, a set of developments not defined by specific national circumstances, but profound social and economic ruptures.

The yes campaign in Scotland is being felt much further afield, not least in Catalonia, where it has energised supporters of Catalan supporters of independence from Spain.

Hundreds of thousands of Catalans took to the streets of their towns and cities today, the National Day of Catalonia, to demand the right to hold a referendum on their future, with some hoping that the sudden surge in support for Scottish independence might boost their cause.

Just how many showed up was in dispute. Police in Barcelona said that 1.8 million participated, but the Spanish Interior Ministry’s regional office in Catalonia put the number at no more than 525,000.

Among them was retired hospital director and economist Lluis Enric Florenca, 65, who was quoted by the Associated Press as saying:

If the Yes wins in Scotland, and it looks like it will be close, and Europe accepts it, they will accept Catalonia, which is bigger and in relation to Spain stronger than Scotland in relation to England. Catalonia is potentially much more powerful.

You can view pictures shared as part of a GuardianWitness assignment here.

View image in fullscreen

Amid today’s row about what a yes vote would mean for the financial sector, the Guardian’s Nils Pratley says that the real question is whether a shift of a bank’s legal address matters in terms of jobs and the long-term prosperity of that sector in Scotland.

He writes:

Operational offices may stay but, one suspects, over time, new hires would be made in the south and external lawyers and accountants would gradually be dragged towards the new legal address. A sudden exodus is not the worry, a slow leak is.