"The UK rescued the Scottish banks. Scotland will have to take on half this debt." That's an extremely common fallacy. The banks were bailed out not by the cou

"The UK rescued the Scottish banks. Scotland will have to take on half this debt." That's an extremely common fallacy. The banks were bailed out not by the countries they were based in but by the proportion of their wealth that belonged to citizens of each countries (roughly, it is slightly more complicated than that). Only a small proportion of the "Scottish Banks" wealth was actually that of Scottish citizens. The majority of it was English wealth along with a few other countries, therefore England would have had to bail out a sizeable chunk to avoid the economic ramifications of these "Scottish Banks" collapsing.