I can leave my marriage any time I like, and I don't have to leave to prove it.
A poster for Alistair, darling. Obviously, the woman has red hair a la Brave, but more mature.
On the vote not being on Devo Max, if the result is NO then it's all up for grabs again. I heard something on the radio last night about Wales getting tax-raising, or tax-varying powers. People were saying that the border ran through their street, and they would be paying tax in one place and living in another (which has happened for decades in Ireland). This isn't going away with an independent Scotland.
I agree that it is a mistake to think of rUK, or England or Scotland, as if it is all the same politically and I've no doubt that Conservatives in Scotland vote as tactically to keep Labour out as Labour voters did to keep Conservatives out. Also, it's not reasonable to conclude that the majority of the UK electorate or actual voters voted for the coalition. Nobody did. It's just what we got instead of a hung parliament after the negotiations that followed the election. The Conservative and Liberal high heid yins decided to have that particular coalition, not the voters. I don't think what might be labelled the SDP wing of the Liberals is happy with it at all.
PR is perhaps an issue but the problem is structural rather than just procedural; it's about how the constituent nations are treated in relation to each other, and to what extent their separate national identities should override the principle of distribution according to need, and vice versa. To what extent should everyone in the UK have exactly the same welfare rights or should the individual nations be able to set their own priorities in determining how to spend their own budgets? Health and education are devolved matters in Scotland at the moment and the Scottish Govt must determine how to spend its budget, but then people in England sometimes complain that he Scots get free prescriptions or free tuition and they don't and that it's unfair. That's a bit like people in Texas complaining that people in California (Scotland is very like California! 
) get better welfare rights, but they have a point. Is national identity more important than UK-wide welfare rights? I don't think most people in Scotland or in the UK think that. The UK's welfare state is much maligned these days but it is the single biggest contribution that the UK has made to the improvement of the lives of everyone in the UK. Sometimes people with little interest in history don't understand how much difference it has made; sometimes they think our hugely improved standard of living is just the result of market forces. After all Americans are rich too. But they do it at the expense of having millions of very poor people in a very rich country; the disparity is much greater there, but it has been getting bigger in the UK in recent years and that in itself could cause the dissolution of the UK. I know that LessMiss finds the more-left-than-them rhetoric nauseating but the loss of pride in the welfare state in the UK is a factor both in the SNP's wish for independence and in the electorate's support for them.
I'm not agin a written constitution, although there are problems with trying to codify principles instead of allowing common sense to prevail as things develop. (See the historic right to bear arms in USA constitution, which was intended for militias when they were necessary to the defence of the country; and the possibility of usurpation, applying the rights set out in the constitution only to Greeks, whites, males or people with freckles, as the political fashion dictates.)
Re secret committees, I would imagine that almost every organisation has secret committees, and there are good procedural reasons for doing so. Politicians would get nothing done if the press was constantly spinning their every word to suit their market. However, I've certainly attended a committee meeting at the Scottish Parliament, with DH, DS and DD in tow. (I'm not involved in the parliament or in party politics or the civil service - just a member of the public.) As far as I remember, it was about prisons and it was very encouraging to see how well people from parties opposite each other in the political spectrum co-operated in committee and had sensible discussions clearly aiming for optimal solutions to genuine problems. I think Labour had the majority in the parliament, but I think the chairman was a Conservative and one of the sensible contributors was a member of the party that was led by Tommy Sheridan at the time. Perhaps we shouldn't have been there (?) but nobody tried to put us out.
I think politicians generally do a much better job than they get credit for, and are genuinely working in the service of the public, but they are subject to party discipline, career considerations and political compromise, like anyone else who works for a living. A lot of the newspaper stuff about expenses claims is just nonsense; some claims were ridiculous, but most were just MPs making up their pay, as instructed, because there was no political will to raise their salaries to sensible levels. They would mostly be much better paid elsewhere and no sensible boss would complain about them travelling long-distance to work by first class rail so that they could get some work done instead of reading a book, listening to music and enjoying the varied company of the majority in second class.