Whenever I hear about people wanting to break away like that I'm always reminded "There's strength in numbers". As the world economy starts to flatten out, we're all learning that it comes down to a population game. I wonder if we'll see a point where two countries vote to merge together to create a stronger economy.

See: the European Union. Shared currency, very little restriction to travel and trade, made it possible to compete economically with the UK.

Yeah but I think many of the states in the European Union are coming to realize that shared currency is fatal if they can't control economic legislation.

To that degree I meant a real merging of two countries, currencies, legislation, politics, everything.

Yes, the EU has those advantages, but it's bloated, unwieldy, mainly tries to serve the interests of Germany (biggest economy) and is ill-structured to deal with the type of problems currently affiliating the 'peripherals' (or 'PIGS': Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain). The features of a common monetary policy are great when times are good, but allows the problems of one nation to spread like a virus when times are bad. So it's a double-edged sword.

I find that statement a bit weird. Germany are on the hook for something like 120 billion in this bailout. That's €1500 for every man, woman and child in the country.

And that's after essentially funding the EU for the past 20 years. Though things have levelled a bit of late, they used to have net contributions about 3x higher than the next one (the UK).

But which is actually worse off right now? If the currency markets are anything to go by, the GBP has sunk from 1.5 to 1.2 Euros, and that's after the beating the Euro has taken in recent months.

Both the future independent Scotland and the United Kingdom of England and Wales would presumably be constituent nations of the European Union.

"Independence in Europe" has been a policy of the SNP for a long time. Interestingly enough the relevant page on their site still has:

"The SNP believes that Independence in Europe is the logical next step for Scotland to take on its road to becoming a normal, democratic, European nation, just like Denmark, Ireland or Luxembourg."

http://www.snp.org/node/242

Note that I'm not anti-EU at all - quite the opposite.

One downside of entangled influence: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianoce...

From what I heard here in Scotland the general impression was that his conviction was probably unsound and that he would probably have been released on appeal anyway - almost certainly exposing a lot of poor investigation and legal work during the original case.

To save embarrassment there was probably a deal done where he dropped his appeal and he got returned home:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/almegrahi-pre...

Why's that positive? It means we will never get rid of the moaning buggers!