Scotland would perhaps lose out financially because nobody has heard of it. Oddly, even well-educated foreigners use the term England to describe the whole of the UK. I'm never quite sure how this happens, given that there are so many Scottish people living abroad and loads of people come here for their holidays. It's hard to see what would Scotland would do if they went independent. Many of those small, seemingly a bit rubbish countries of Scandanavia, and places like the Faroe Isles seem to be doing pretty well for themseleves, although levels of personal and business taxation are very high, and with ageing populations they might struggle to maintain such a generous welfare state in the future. Scotland would really strugglke with that at the moment, with such appalingly low health levels that seem impossible to increase substantially. They would have to take out huge loans based on future oil/gas revenues I think to pay for the sudden increases in spending they'd need to boost eduction and health levels. And taking the entire UK economsy into accont, being something like a trillion doallr economy or thereabouts, oil is not so huge an input, in the 70's for example, the cost of council housing alone soaked up most of the oil revenue.