That's interesting stuff, I think that if the aea was lucky, that it could be in a position to do well. The problems would be twofold in my opinion, the first will be that in many of these locations, those with the old skills are, well, old, in the first year or so when the transition to full sustainability is going on, lots of the old skill would be at risk of being lost as the old-timers will suffer more from the privations than others.
This could be excellent from a gaming point of view as a group of PCs need to sneak into hostile territory to get the insulin that will keep an old timer alive long enough to pass their skills on.
The second major problem would be refugees. Now the islands would be relatively safe from this, but if enough mainland communities get swamped by refugees, survival will be precarious.
Still, as long as you get the back story right, you could be in buisness. The fact that the nuclear exchange that would cause the most refugees would be in winter and the Scottish terrain and climate would reduce how far ill-fed, poorly equipped refugees might be able to get on foot might well save the communities you are talking about.
It might be interesting to draw some zones of destruction out, anywhere within a radius of one hundred miles of a major city or group of big industrial towns would be devestated, the next fifty miles would suffer say a seventy-five per cent chance of having communities go under, with a break point of if eighty per cent of towns and villages go under the region collapses. Then the next fifty miles could have a fifty per cent chance of survival with the rest of the region having a seventy-five per cent chance of staying funcional as a community.
The ranges and percentages could be fiddled with, but if you wanted to use the region as a gaming environment, it would give you a quick way of establishing what was left. If you're just using it as background colour, you can do exactly what you like with it.
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