OK so I was wrong about Salmond but there he was at the SNP conference grinning from ear to ear. He'll be back and busy behind the scenes to promote his preferred candidate and himself.
Nationalism is such a strong call and has been since time began. Starts well and gradually fails.
All in favour of cultural nationalism, song/dance etc. but political ? Not really, looking at past Nationalists.
Leaving aside my arguments elsewhere about the money system, I've long thought that regionalism / federalism / "devo max" should be the way to go, somewhat along German lines.
Germany always had a strongly regionalised emphasis, and of course was not unified until 1871. The Prussians did their best to centralise things, and that didn't really end well.
After WW2, the Allies deliberately re-imposed a strongly de-centralised, multi-layered system of federal government in the west (and I think the Russians imposed a similar system - although along Communist lines of course) in the east. The reason being to stop the centre becoming too powerful, and recent history repeating itself.
It worked very well for Western Germany, and I always wondered why, if it was good enough for us to impose on the Germans, why didn't we try it ourselves? The tendency in the UK has been for centralisation to increase, and that's one of the reasons why Scotland has grown more and more unhappy (and why Wales
ought to be unhappy, but perhaps they have more patience).
Unfortunately, I don't think the major parties have the vision to put anything like this into practice, and if they tried, they'd probably cöck it up. If it succeeded though, and if in addition we were sensible enough to reform our money system to be debt-free, then the "experiment" of Scotland going-it alone, moneywise, would be unnecessary: Scotland would benefit from a new central debt-free currency, along with all the regions. Failing that, experiments with local / regional currencies could be tried. And local banks - c.f. Richard Werner:
http://www.the-free-lunch.com/videos/video05.html
http://www.futuresolent.org.uk/our-programme/hampshire-community-bank/