It's against stuff like that that I take comfort in the fact that, somehow, in a country like mine we managed to convince 45% of the population to vote for independence. How we even did that I'll never really understand.
Probably because the UK has seriously botched it's economic policies and it made people receptive to a change.
You can reduce it to that, but I'm not sure if misguided economics alone is responsible for everything e.g. the enormous divide in this country between certain parts of England and the rest of the Union. That divide is socio-economic, political, cultural... the measures taken/are taking to deal with the economic crisis just widened the divide and made it more obvious.
I'm not saying Scotland is virtuous, or better than England or something; polling results across the board show that we're a socially conservative country (in favour of the death penalty, tighter control on immigration etc) but economically quite left wing, even Socialist. I think we're harkening back to the post-1945 Welfare State that the London elite are hell bent on eroding or something. We don't really have a "metropolitan elite" similar to or anywhere near as powerful as the London one, and "middle Scotland" is quite different from middle England in some ways. They do have similar attitudes but I think there's a marked swing towards left-wing economic policy in middle Scotland when compared with middle England. Of course nobody wants to pay higher taxes, even though they want the railways nationalised and the energy companies and so on, but that's to be expected.
The divide as far as I see it is that Scotland is a fairly run-of-the-mill, small (but not too small), socially conservative, cautious country with an elderly population in Northern Europe welded onto a huge, 60-million strong Atlantic behemoth of a country packed into half of an island with unspeakably wealthy elites doing whatever the hell they like, with all the power concentrated almost entirely in a tiny area in the South East. Somehow I don't think this arrangement can last.