motorbikez said:
Without England's money Scotland would already be on the scrap heap.
Scotland gets only marginally more money from the UK than it contributes to the UK.
With so much economic activity based in the south of the UK, a lot of it would move north to Scotland if it splits from England to remain in the EU.
Apart from cozying up to the EU, the first thing Scotland would do if it were to secede would be to get a free trade agreement with the UK (England) because England wants and needs a lot of Scottish stuff and Scotland wants and needs a lot of English stuff. That provides a backdoor to Europe for the English and likewise for the Europeans into England, except it'll all be going via Scotland so Scotland gets to be the middleman and clip the ticket as people and trade pass through.
Or to put it another way, one of my businesses is looking to start exporting. Up until last week, we'd been assuming that we'd be dealing with London or somewhere in the south east. As of now, we're looking at Edinburgh.
If Scotland stays in the UK, there's not much difference either way. If Scotland leaves, has free trade with the UK and doesn't join the EU, we'd lose access to Europe but keep the UK market, which would be only slightly more annoying than dealing with England directly. If Scotland leaves, has free trade with the UK and does join the EU in it's own right, we get access to everywhere.
(The only scenario that would be seriously bad would be if Scotland left the UK without a bi-lateral trade agreement and didn't join the EU, but they're not going to because there's no benefit in doing it.)
The south east of England just became a whole lot less attractive as a place to trade. Scotland just became a whole lot more attractive.
If I'm thinking that, there's a lot of other people thinking the same thing too and it would only take a small shift to boost Scotland's economy past the UK average and make them better off by themselves.