Ah, one of the time-honored traditions of democracy: When your side wins, "the people have spoken." When your side loses, "the people are stupid."
Seriously though, does anyone really think if Scotland had become independent there would have been any substantial change for the better? An independent Scotland would have joined the EU and NATO, so it wouldn't really be independent, and they likely would continue to have an open border with England to the south. Moreover, they either would have joined the Euro and been controlled monetarily from Brussels and Berlin, or they would have kept the Pound and continued to be controlled monetarily from London. Sure, some tax money would get moved around a bit, oil revenues would go to place X instead of Y, and some titles would change, but that's pretty much it. An independent Scotland would have remained a modern, secular, apostate democracy. The SNP (which is nothing more than the Labour Party wrapped up with Scottish Nationalism) would have controlled the government for the foreseeable future, and taken things ever-more leftwards.