Dundee was the first of Scotland’s 32 count centres to announce a win for those wanting Scottish independence and the outcome was greeted with loud cheers in the hall of the Dundee International Sports Centre.
It was just before 4am and the result was the sixth to be announced in the historic poll. Turnout was 78.8 per cent and 53,620 votes, or 57.3 per cent of those cast, were in favour of a break with the union.
"Yes! Yes! Yes!" chanted the pro-independence activists gathered in the hall. But the fact was that since the first result had come in, at just after 1.30am, from tiny Clackmannanshire, a kind of gloom had settled over the activists who had been so ebullient all through Thursday.
The Dundee win was clearcut, but it wasn't as big as campaigners in the city dubbed the Yes Capital of Scotland had been hoping for. Labour MP for Dundee West Jim McGovern told The Irish Times just after the city's result was announced, that even "the separatists" would concede that the margin wasn't good enough.
‘Aspirations dashed’
“They needed 65 per cent to 35 per cent to achieve their aspirations for separation throughout
Scotland
, and they haven’t achieved that. Their aspirations are dashed.”
Early on Thursday Scottish National Party MP for Dundee East Stewart Hosie had given an interview to this newspaper in the Yes Dundee headquarters and his sense of excitement and anticipation was palpable. After the result, speaking to journalists at the centre, he appeared exhausted, and tetchy.
Asked if he accepted that the result was not what he had been hoping for, he said it was a “resounding success” in the face of an onslaught from the entire British establishment. The Yes supporters in Dundee had been so buoyed up that their defeat in the referendum was hard to take in.
In the city centre yesterday morning, chartered surveyor John Dixon made no effort to hide his upset. “It’s like someone has died and you’ll never see them again,” he said.
“I don’t think I’ll see [an opportunity for Scottish independence] again in my lifetime. It just seems a bit ridiculous. I feel I’m not even interested in the Scottish football team, or the rugby team, any more. Because what’s the point in saying, ‘Oh rise and be a nation once again, oh flower of Scotland’? It’s just an utter joke.”
A man stormed out of a small newsagent’s on Reform Street after he mistakenly took the shopkeeper to have said he had supported the No campaign. Throwing his unpurchased newspapers back on to the shelves, he said every No was “a betrayal of Scotland”.
Up the street he agreed to talk but would not give his name. “At my age it was probably my last chance to be part of an independent country, and I am very disappointed.”
He complained bitterly that 400,000 English people resident in Scotland had been able to vote, while 800,000 Scottish people resident in England, had not been able to. "I think it was a lack of backbone," he said of the result.
In Perth, some 20 miles from Dundee, it was easier to find people who were happy with the outcome. The electorate in Perth and Kinross voted 60/40 in favour of retention of the union.
“Jubilant” was the word used by one woman asked about her feelings. She didn’t want to give her name. “If you want my honest opinion I, personally, am disappointed that we are going to get more devolved powers.”
She felt that there had already been cutbacks in health, and that more cutbacks in essential services were likely as power shifted to Edinburgh.
Asked if she did not feel an emotional tug towards the notion of independence, she said she used to when she was much younger. “I think that’s a young person’s thing.”
Happy
Events manager Elaine Bannerman was also happy with the result. “I am not really interested in Scotland being independent. I don’t really think we could sustain our economy ourselves.”
Amy Fenton, out for a walk with her mother Leslie, had voted No because she was “quite happy with Westminster” and didn’t really like the Scottish National Party leadership. Leslie didn’t want to say how she’d voted, but believed that the Yes camp had received so many votes that the London government would now have to do something about more devolution.
Miquel Gonzales, from Catalonia, who has been working as a cleaner and hotel worker in Scotland for the past two years, voted Yes. “Scotland needs to govern itself,” he said with patchy English. Scotland was more than 18 years old, and when you are more than 18 years old, he said, you leave your parents’ home. “It is hard, you have to pay your bills, but it is better to be independent.”
